Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#581

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:26 AM UTC

hueving wrote: post #558

idontpost wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modernism is Descartes` "I will find a single indisputable axiom and can prove everything knowable from there." His axiom? "Cogito ergo sum." 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 o…

If you subscribe to postmodernism then there is no such thing as an 'irrational' claim. All of the observations and logic another person may be using to make the claim are all equally likely to be valid/invalid and claiming otherwise is just forcing your opinions of truth on them.

Oh, there is such thing.

The fact that no axiom stands by itself does not change the fact that when you subscribe to a set of axioms, you can't deny their consequences. What is rational merely changes, and honestly, the older definition always felt kind of crazy.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#582

Post by tptacek » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #519

tptacek wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not just stubborn, persistent, and unyielding: he's performatively so. In his most notorious attacks, he's clearly playing to an audience. That could be the problem. He clearly can separate the blunt stubbornness ("we do not break userland, period") from the performative rudeness ("SHUT THE FUCK UP MAURO"). (I mean, to be clear: what the fuck do I know? I've never been in the position Linus is in.)

> He clearly can separate the blunt stubbornness ("we do not break userland, period") For what it's worth, he doesn't even avoid breaking userland. Off the top of my head, we had a problem at work a few months back where kernel 4.3 and below rounded up listen(fd, 0) to something nonzero, kernel 4.4 didn't, and a piece of commercial software was (inexplicably) using listen(fd, 0). https://ldpreload.com/blog/git-bisect…

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I defer to you on this.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#583

Post by ci5er » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:28 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #482

ci5er wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be odd-man out here, but I really didn't see any part of his mind that needed to be changed. What did you disagree with?

Do you think it's acceptable to send a public email saying someone is fucking retarded, or that they should be retroactively aborted?

Well, it's certainly not my style, but I would generally take it as an expression of intense feeling about the topic.

If it were my wife or my child or my parent saying this, it would probably reduce me to tears.

If it were a community leader, it would probably certainly make me feel really really bad. But I wouldn't be suicidal over it. Depending on the topic, and how strongly I felt about my position (I have felt strongly about memory allocation approaches on certain 68K-based machines before), I might reply in kind.

You?

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#584

Post by jmmcd » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #478

dragonsky67 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that the comparison is completely invalid. Linus, via Linux has IMHO had a fairly profound impact on the world.

Newton was much more humble. Shoulders of giants and all.

Newton wasn't so humble! He said that, but only as part of a deliberate insult to one of his rivals, who was short.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#585

Post by sjwright » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:33 AM UTC

jXCw1N0jtH3 wrote: post #429

dotancohen wrote: post #318

Newton was an asshole too. The whole "apple fell on his head" story came about because he was so mean to people. I won't say that most geniuses are inempathetic, but many are. Einstein wasn't, some say Gauss was. Beethoven was. Linus is. And we'll accept Linus's attitude for being an aversion to bullshit, just the quality that we need in a kernel maintainer. I'm glad to see that Linus finally realizes that he has a p…

Are we seriously putting Linus in the same category as Newton

No, because that would be an insult to Linus. Newton had a bunch of clever insights but he was also convinced that the christian bible was an elaborate cryptic code which could be deciphered to predict the future. Total nut job.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#586

Post by wpietri » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:34 AM UTC

hnzix wrote: post #488

LaGrange wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're looking for a science-ish expression of postmodern insight, consider the line from statistician George Box: "All models are wrong, some models are useful."

This isn't particularly shocking to anybody familiar with the history of science. Newton's model was wrong but useful, for example. All software is wrong but useful models of the world. (Well, some of it is wrong and useless, but you know what I mean.)

Postmodern analysis comes from different fundamentals, and they do enjoy wordplay. They're also much more concerned with social models of reality, especially implicit ones, and how power affects and is affected by the models in use. Sturgeon's Law applies, of course, but no more so than anywhere else.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#587

Post by int_19h » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #479

int_19h wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too we…

There are different ways to oil the machine, I'm not throwing out the baby along with the bathwater in naivete. Lots of cultures encouraged being direct, were insanely productive, and oiled the gears in a different way. The current cultural trend is just fashion, it will pass, but things will get worse before they get better.

And once again, being direct is orthogonal to being polite.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#588

Post by ci5er » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:39 AM UTC

Rapzid wrote: post #427

mcguire wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what that discussion was like. It's not as if no one ever mentioned the subject to him before.

You would think and yet.. Did none of John Lasseter's friends call him out and tell him to take the T down a notch over the past 20+ years? I've pondered over this a bit and have come to the conclusion that a lot of people simply don't have close enough friends exposed to their work behavior, or they simply accept it.. Feedback from randos isn't the most likely to instigate big personal change and reflection.

I'm a SIGGRAPH rando who implemented a clone of RenderMan in 1992 or so on Sun Workstations. (It wasn't that great of an implementation (Pat Hanrahan helped me with one bit), but because of the Sun's networking capability - it could parallelize as well as anything else at the time).

I don't every recall seeing Lasseter doing anything inappropriate.

To your point: The company was going through a hard time, and randos would have been the PERFECT feedback to him. The company would have died without their support.

But, who could be there to tell him to take it down a notch[0], when he acted like a professional all day long?

Net-net: I disagree with what you just said.

[0] I generally know who was working on that project at that time, but I don't think it advances this conversation...

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#589

Post by wpietri » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:39 AM UTC

Fordrus wrote: post #526

damnyou wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There isn’t some function we can feed a different argument here to value agreeableness more highly though. I generally agree, but that more collaboration would be good isn’t so much the question - the question is HOW these tweaks can be done.

As a start, we could stop exalting and rewarding powerful sociopaths.

And slowly, I think, we are. E.g., the MeToo movement has forced some powerful sociopaths to face at least a small amount of accountability. Rich people at least occasionally go to jail if their crimes are egregious enough.

But it could be faster.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#590

Post by brandonjm » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

Rainymood wrote: post #104

cowmoo728 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of Linus's more colorful rants: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

Honestly it's a well-crafted insult, I give him that

> should be retroactively aborted

> well-crafted insult

This is unnecessary vitriol directed at the person themselves as opposed to their code. It achieves nothing. He could get the same message across with far less words if he stuck to outlining the problem as opposed to attacking the creator of the problem.