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

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

#601

Post by mmjaa »

vlovich123 wrote: post #582
nnq wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the top comment on this about engineering culture?! Linus is valuable precisely because he occasionally d-slaps people around, waking them up, even when what he says may be factually wrong, and reminding them the at the core the tech must be sane, f people and their feelings! Yeah, it's good to have a 1 in 1000 brilliant people being aholes because it keeps the culture balanced. We need a dose of rascality, an…

For the most part he actually does a good job staying away from personal attacks. The problem is that his approach isn't going to yield great results. For there's 2 problematic parts to this e-mail. The first is the personal attack when he calls Intel engineers morons. That 1 little unnecessary addon is uncalled for because it's quite reasonable that there's a lot of politics going on at Intel that's interfering with…

>The problem is that his approach isn't going to yield great results.

Its worked so far.

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

#602

Post by somestag »

donatj wrote: post #599
somestag wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a native English speaker in the world who reads the phrase " is garbage" and interprets that literally as "this is just a metaphor for deciding not to use something and thus throwing it out." No, there's always vitriol, and the writer knows that, which is why they say it like that--because they're feeling vitriolic. I'm sure you can imagine equally accurate ways to reject code contributions; it…

The vitriol is the most important part of the message. If they don’t feel bad about what they’ve done what reason do they have not to do it again? Without the vitriol you solve only the most immediate problem, when the true intention of calling something g garbage is to prevent many future problems. You learn nothing from being politely shoed off.

Are you arguing that it's impossible to learn without feeling bad about yourself? As in, you must feel personally ashamed and hurt, or else you're going to make the mistake again? If not, you're probably going to have to explain your position a little more, because that's how I'm reading it right now.

Note, this can't be some abstract equivalence between "feel bad" and "know you made a mistake," because if that's what you meant, then we're back to the vitriol being unnecessary.

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

#603

Post by tripu »

To me, Torvald's nasty attitude usually nullifies his (unquestionable) technical merits. There's no excuse to SHOUT, curse, and treat others as imbeciles on e-mail; even less so on fora as public and prominent as the linux kernel's mailing lists.

As much as I decry patronising calls to make tech more "inclusive" and "nice", I must admit that people like Linus are a great argument in favour of that...

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

#604

Post by donatj »

somestag wrote: post #602
donatj wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vitriol is the most important part of the message. If they don’t feel bad about what they’ve done what reason do they have not to do it again? Without the vitriol you solve only the most immediate problem, when the true intention of calling something g garbage is to prevent many future problems. You learn nothing from being politely shoed off.

Are you arguing that it's impossible to learn without feeling bad about yourself? As in, you must feel personally ashamed and hurt, or else you're going to make the mistake again? If not, you're probably going to have to explain your position a little more, because that's how I'm reading it right now. Note, this can't be some abstract equivalence between "feel bad" and "know you made a mistake," because if that's wha…

Look back on your life. Do you remember the individual lessons in school? Unlikely. Do you remember the time you got sent to the principals office or the time you got yelled at for breaking a lamp or having a party? Much more likely. Lessons bundled with strong emotions make far better memories.

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

#605

Post by rtpg »

nodja wrote: post #598
mathw wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, as the comment says, he is wrong . He may be technically correct in his assessment of the quality of the patches (I lack the necessary knowledge to even begin to assess it), but he does not go about explaining this in a sensible manner. He has never fostered a collaborative, inclusive atmosphere around the kernel. If anybody at my workplace talked to a collaborator in that way they'd be in a chat with their…

Most of Torvalds emails are not like this. In fact most of them are like you say, he explains his thoughts in a sensible manner. It's just when people play with fire that the lid comes of and makes the headlines. A sensible mail discussing the details of some obscure technicality doesn't make HN frontpage.

Even if it's just once a month... I think very few teams would be able to deal with a co-worker with such violent outbursts.

Ok he's mad. We all get mad.

I've never said someone should have been aborted, no matter how mad I get. He has, over a ... A diff.

Perhaps he has some difficulties, like some of us do. Has he ever acknowledged his attitude in any way?

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

#606

Post by hartator »

vlovich123 wrote: post #600
enriquto wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first is the personal attack when he calls Intel engineers morons. That 1 little unnecessary addon is uncalled for because it's quite reasonable that there's a lot of politics going on (...) can't be fixed properly without delaying & impacting revenue in a way that execs won't allow. If that is really the case, then calling the engineers morons is actually very much called for!

Note this is a hypothetical since it's quite possible it's not the case, in which case even by your logic the moron label is incorrect. So in your opinion engineers are unintelligent because they listen to the demands of people who can fire them or perhaps, god forbid, they're trying to balance technical solutions against revenue? That seems perfectly rational reasoning to me but that must be because I too am a moron…

It’s not hypotycal, it’s the part of hardware that made Intel CPU vulnerable to last week attack. Linus was right.

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

#607

Post by ksec »

nodja wrote: post #598
mathw wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, as the comment says, he is wrong . He may be technically correct in his assessment of the quality of the patches (I lack the necessary knowledge to even begin to assess it), but he does not go about explaining this in a sensible manner. He has never fostered a collaborative, inclusive atmosphere around the kernel. If anybody at my workplace talked to a collaborator in that way they'd be in a chat with their…

Most of Torvalds emails are not like this. In fact most of them are like you say, he explains his thoughts in a sensible manner. It's just when people play with fire that the lid comes of and makes the headlines. A sensible mail discussing the details of some obscure technicality doesn't make HN frontpage.

I think that is important to note as well. His email normally gets the attention when he is pissed off. But the majority of them aren't.

It shows how angry he is, and how he is upset with the issues. While this could be avoided in a real world scenario, I would have bet if your manager feel something strongly about, they would have went rampant as well. And this is especially in remote working, words are hard to get feeling across without putting some "adjectives" into it.

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

#608

Post by xxxdarrenxxx »

dmichulke wrote: post #10
yborg wrote: post #5

Run through the Linus drama filter, the only thing I get from this is "Linus doesn't like the Meltdown/Spectre patches'; Linus having issues with a patch is, well, not particularly newsworthy. Is there something more significant here than a bad first go at this?

I interpreted it as: Intel isn't going to fix Specter in HW (as opposed to Meltdown) Instead, they do some crazy crazy black magic in the patches.

I say this always. Intell uses magic tricks to compensate for the fact we hit diminishing returns with processing power in general.

They now compensate with a counter magic spell. It is what it is. I have been using intel cpu for a long time, because yea, they did give me the performance I was looking for.

That said, a Car with a broken engine doesn't run, or a broken drive shaft, or burned electronics etc.

This is why I call this magic, after this fix, the cpu still can do all it tasks, alas magic spells to increase performance, but not true engineering architectural deficiencies

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

#609

Post by rtpg »

donatj wrote: post #593
russdpale wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it just means someone lacks a proper grasp of the English language! I find a thesaurus is handy.

Please use your thesaurus and enlighten me to how then I say “this code is garbage” in a nice way, while clearly communicating the full meaning of: - this code is bad - you should reassess your skills and values that lead you to believe this was good - your worldview may be flawed, look into that - don’t do this again - you should probably feel bad too, to attach emotion to strengthen your memories of this to make th…

Do you not understand the emotional cruelty of trying to say all 6 things at once to someone who (in theory) is actually trying to contribute?

Maybe someone is not trying. Maybe you're wasting your breath then. Maybe someone is trying, but has an incomplete world view. Ok great, now you've pissed them off instead of saying what's wrong.

Just say what's wrong with the code! That's what actually matters. Not that you think it's garbage.

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

#610

Post by nbsd4lyfe »

karambahh wrote: post #478
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make me worry about the day that Linus retires. I imagine the kernel has enough momentum to carry on for a while but without a leader like Linus I can see it very slowly starting to unravel and quality issues starting to sneak in, much like we're seeing with post-Jobs Apple. Thankfully it doesn't seem that time is coming any time soon.

What about *BSD ? How are they managing their kernels and other important decisions? I know next to nothing about the BSD communities, my only interaction with the BSD is discussing the taste of a pizza Theo de Raadt and I shared about 20 years ago and young me had no idea who he was. I later heard he is at the helm of OpenBSD and is used to strongly defend his opinions but it is only hearsay. I have no idea how Free…

As for NetBSD, there's hundreds of people with commit access and a small group of respected developers to resolve disputes, with some extra democracy / laws restricting it. FreeBSD is similar but I never bothered to check the details.

I think we generate less hackernews-worthy drama posts overall because when someone is repeatedly abusive, they're asked privately to stop/apologize, and if they keep at it, they risk being kicked from the project.

With hundreds of contributors and a weak hierarchy, no one person is too important to be kicked.

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