Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#451

Post by cdelsolar » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

catach wrote: post #297

tome wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you replied to the correct post since it didn't really seem to be about Linus's style. Anyway, this argument comes up again and again. Regardless of the style in his country and language or origin he is writing in English, in public, for an international audience. One expects a different sort of tone.

> in English, in public, for an international audience. One expects a different sort of tone. I agree that this is true, but two points stick out to me: 1. Generally the motive for this convention stems from organizations wanting to sanitize their image. 2. FOSS project communication is overwhelmingly pubic. If we accept that all organizations need some amount of blunt communication at some point, and if we accept th…

I'm sorry, but "overwhelmingly pubic" is one of the funnier typos I've seen.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#452

Post by TheKarateKid » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:53 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #377

josteink wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have the case of SJWs and Internet lynch mob’s being a real life threats to your project, your personal privacy and potentially your employment if you don’t show yourself to be “tolerant” enough in your communication. Calling genuine shit out as such can literally land you in a shitstorm if the person receiving message is of wrong color or sexualual orientation, etc, and decides to make that the point of the…

Linus would be just as effective if he never used another swear word. It is his technical knowledge, his position as the final committer, and his willingness to stand up for what he believes in, that gives him power. Ranting and swearing is part of who he is personally, but those are not generally required for being a good project leader.

Linus' swearing falls in line perfectly with the FOSS movement -- to not conform to corporate hierarchy and societal norms.

Like others said, his language helps drive the point home and leaves more of an impression. It also humanizes Linus as well.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#453

Post by arbitrage » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #195

I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the technical and security problems at hand. Some people are easily offended, some people easily offend, some people are direct, some people are indirect - get over it. What matters here is the quality of the code / workarounds that are being presented, by whom and what alternat…

I was really surprised at how polite Linus was being in this e-mail, for Linus. He's obviously being very cautious and contemplative, here.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#454

Post by megous » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

Filligree wrote: post #403

theptip wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> based on real data Citation? Sounds interesting.

That's hardly limited to women. It's the same reason I have no intention of ever contributing to the kernel.

Then you're needlessly limiting yourself, as you'd very unlikely run into any verbal abuse.

If anything you'd have trouble getting code in because maintainer thinks it would add more complexity than is necessary, or would make his job harder in the future, or after writing and testing the code, you'd find out you should have been doing things differently, etc. These are much more probable ways to get discouraged from contributing kernel code.

There's a high bar to getting code in, and that can be frustrating. But it also keeps the mainline attractive to users and developers, because of ever improving code quality.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#455

Post by genmon » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:00 PM UTC

StudentStuff wrote: post #44

bashcoder wrote: post #30

The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing someone of sheer stupidity. He does not do that here. Linus alleges that we are being lied to - that we don’t know the full story, nor Intel’s motives. Furthermore, we are left to wonder if Microsoft is also being fed “bullshit” patches, and if they may be less…

The root question is what else is Intel trying to cover up with these garbage patches? Are they afraid of power leakage across gates allowing an attacker to gain a higher level of privilege in certain generations of silicon, and trying to cover it up with these patches (hence some of the seemingly crazy things they do)?

Why did you pick that specific example (power leakage)? Is there a proof of concept that does something similar?

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#456

Post by niho » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #440

PopsiclePete wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with "rockstars and "benevolent dictators", the Linuses and the Elon Musks, isn't it? Everything is great until they go away for whatever reason and nobody can fill the void. Hell, there's people still doubting Tim Cook on whether he can fill Jobs' shoes. I wonder if something like FreeBSD is better suited for sustainability - from what I can tell, there's no "dictator" figure there, no critical si…

It makes me wonder if there are ways to structure an organization in a way that once it has found its purpose and voice, it becomes rigid in its trajectory. Consider an organization that would rather cease to exist or be relevant, than to allow itself all the freedoms to pivot and mutate significantly.

Actually... There is a great historical example of just that. It’s called the Catholic Church.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#457

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #435

DoreenMichele wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both my sons and their father likely all qualify for an ASD label, though none of them has been officially diagnosed. My sons are vastly more socially savvy than their father, largely due to having been raised better. I know a lot about the topic of autism and related issues. I get tired of seeing social difficulties chalked up to a label of some disability or other. It takes a couple of decades to properly raise a h…

> Accusations of being autistic as an explanation for abrasive behavior are almost never sympathetic. They are almost never an attempt to understand why someone is coming across poorly and find a way to better interact with them. They boil down to a suggestion of incompetence and a dismissal of the person's position, as well as any legitimate anger or frustration they may be feeling. Completely disagree. The OP said…

So you quoted my observation about the general case, then defended the OP in this specific case. Let me suggest we have a misunderstanding here.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#458

Post by Sniffnoy » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #195

I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the technical and security problems at hand. Some people are easily offended, some people easily offend, some people are direct, some people are indirect - get over it. What matters here is the quality of the code / workarounds that are being presented, by whom and what alternat…

> I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the technical and security problems at hand.

Nitpicking, since everyone can tell what you mean, but FWIW, the phrase you are looking for here is someting like "ad hominem" or "tone argument", not "straw man"; that's something completely different.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#459

Post by wilun » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

chowells wrote: post #324

ForHackernews wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel has no good hardware or microcode mitigation for spectre-like attacks I was under the impression that for at least one category of attack, there is no hardware mitigation possible because it's a fundamental problem with the x86-64 design. Fixing it would require building a chip that uses some other architecture. Is that not the case?

That's not exactly true. You could build an x86-64 chip without these flaws, but it would require a new internal architecture with a lot more silicon. One obvious approach would be to have two caches per core. Speculative execution would use a different cache than normal execution. If the speculative action is committed to, it swaps which cache is the normal one and which is the speculative one. Then you'd also need…

It will very probably not be double caches and nothing that kind of order for requested new silicon area. Its only an annoyance because the design are not gonna change for solid Spectre resistance (at least for its currently known versions v1 and 2) for the next chips, because their design are already complete since month if not years, and yes, that would be very significant changes. But separating the caches? Never gonna happen. Anything taking the same space as separating the caches? Never gonna happen, and actually not needed.

Yes a solid Spectre fix will obviously make designers rethink their microarch in some deep aspects. But somewhat good mitigations should be available as soon as the next chips, and off-by-default is completely utterly insane. The OS is not part of the platform (except in some special cases that can disable the mitigation for performance if they like), and the platform is supposed to be retro-compatible, maybe not perfectly but reasonably. Ok it has already been somewhat less true than before in the few recent year, but lets not encourage that behavior. So shipping new CPU that are broken by default but can be somewhat less broken as an opt-in is an attempt to mask the level of the fuck-up, or maybe to avoid the creation of a new stepping. We should not tolerate that from Intel, a stepping is expensive but they have the money to do it.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#460

Post by rabboRubble » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

bashcoder wrote: post #30

The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing someone of sheer stupidity. He does not do that here. Linus alleges that we are being lied to - that we don’t know the full story, nor Intel’s motives. Furthermore, we are left to wonder if Microsoft is also being fed “bullshit” patches, and if they may be less…

Wonder if perhaps Intel is under classified and gagged duress from the government? There has been plenty of evidence the government is not acting with citizen security foremost in its technical and telecommunications policies.