501–510 of 1001 posts
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Are we seriously putting Linus in the same category as Newton
Its an analogy, not a classification. If you want to go by that logic then no one can be in the same category as Newton as he was the ultimate genius who revoutioned maths and physics singlehandedly.
Linus does not fit in that list.
The other huge news here, both for Linux and for numerous other communities trying to make similar changes: The most recent commit, right before the release, deletes Linux's "Code of Conflict" and replaces it with a real Code of Conduct, the Contributor Covenant. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-condu... Quoting the commit message:…
> Contributor Covenant The Contributor Covenant is horrific and harks back to the days of the Catholic Church(Or insert religion here) and morality and it's enforcement. It's a power trip that will end badly. Morality should come from within, a learned and practiced behaviour, personally and within communities, not prescribed. Manifesto's are purely implemented to bully people, they allow for the lynching and harm to…
edit: You assert that "morality should come from within", though I'm assuming you're OK with projects and teams not reinventing things like PEP8 or language/framework best practices.
But then you complain about manifestos "mutating". Isn't mutation a consequence -- many would describe it a desired feature, i.e. iteration -- when a community decides to develop a rule framework from within?
(and I would argue that a community adopting something like the Contributor Covenant is quite clearly a decision made by that community)
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I don't think it will, but if people are claiming it will get better then that should be treated as a falsifiable belief rather than as a truthclaim.
Sure, but every study i've ever read currently backs it. If you are aware of any that say "very smart assholes make organizations better in the long run" or even "very smart assholes don't meaningfully hurt them in the long run", i'd actually love to see it! (I hold the position i do precisely because it's backed by research, not just my own random thoughts and experiences)
Agreeableness in general is negatively correlated with career success. Have you noticed that Fortune 500 CEOs tend to be extremely disagreeable, to the point of psychopathy in some cases. At the risk of sticking my neck out, it's also one of the many reasons for the gender pay gap, woman are more agreeable than men. And you have to be somewhat disagreeable to stand up for yourself and demand a raise (or quit and seek…
What if, and this might blow your mind, we tweak things so that agreeableness is rewarded more? Society is constructed too adversarially for my tastes. More collaboration would be better.
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See, I felt like I was giving him more credit by saying that his rants were performative: at least that would have an ostensible purpose. If you're abusing other people to "blow off steam", that's kind of a no-brainer "you should go see someone about not having to do that anymore".
You're right about it (objectively) being a no-brainer. Unfortunately, it's often hard to see things objectively from a first-person perspective. It sounds like Linus is acknowledging there's a problem and hopefully he can work on whatever the issue is without shaving off too much of the edge that makes him so effective.
A certain sort of ruthlessness and lack of empathy, accompanied by having an extraordinarily driven personality, certainly seems to often make things happen (see also: Steve Jobs). The ages-old question is – is it worth it? Do ends justify the means?
I feel like Jobs was successful despite being abusive, not because of it.
Take a look at the chart in https://twitter.com/ErynnBrook/status/1038893975279550465 Many people are so afraid of ending up in the bottom right (just giving in) that they head for the top left (zero-sum competition). This underlies some of the things people fear about codes of conduct; they're afraid that they're being pushed into that bottom right corner, rather than striving for better collaboration. Be direct. Be…
The problem here is that the "Collaborating" sector is the wrong goal for the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds is uniquely qualified to be concerned about matters concerning the kernel; if his interlocutors "win" too much on their side of the "win/win", every user loses. The public embarrassment of lazy and dishonest actors, especially those who are paid to collaborate, is an effective tool for maintaining order and stan…
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That's pretty much the opposite of postmodernism actually is.
I was forced to take a unit of postmodernism as part of my studies and came away no wiser as to what postmodernism actually is. There was a bunch of dense, impenetrable academic word games that seemed to be asserting that all truth is culturally relative. I don't find gravity or physics to be culturally relative.
Postmodernism is rooted in the notion that there is no indisputable base axiom from which we can build our understanding of the world. It's unprovable assumptions all the way down. The consequences for this, if you accept it (you don't have to, but you're going to have a hell of a time proving you're right), are ENORMOUS and affect virtually every field of human understanding.
In the sciences we tend to start from the assumption that what we measure is real. As a practical matter, that's fine, but there is no sound rational basis for that assumption. It's an unprovable assumption.
All of our value systems (and by extension, our social systems) are founded on unprovable assumptions.
This is the essence of postmodernism, in so many words. There are no sound assumptions. The best we can do is say what follows from one assumption or another, but we can never say which conclusion is right because we can never say which assumption is right.
The implications of this can be particularly disturbing for rule-oriented individuals, but that doesn't make it wrong. It's irrational to claim that some assumptions are better than others without some basis (in which case, they are no longer assumptions).
Linus is stubborn, persistent, and unyielding to what he sees as bullshit. These I believe are all very valuable qualities for the head of a massive software project, and may be part of the reason as to why Linux is where it is today. However, Linus is also a bit of an asshole, turning technical criticism into personal seemingly personal attacks. I believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable, but I would guess it…
abrasive
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effective------+-------ineffective
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kind