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Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

lore.kernel.org

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

#611
I have a lot of ambivalence about this. On the one hand, inclusiveness and culture that leads to more diverse representation has shown to produce better results. On the other hand, too much hand holding and accommodation will swing the pendulum too far and lead to even worse results.

I’ve grown a thick skin and taken to respecting people like Linus, even if the ire is directed at me. But that’s likely a function of my privilege that I’m able to accept that and function in those conditions.

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

#612
post #395

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.)

I've always assumed that when he really goes after someone it was him blowing off steam to maintain his own mental health rather than trying to put on a show. He's been managing a pile of complexity for over two decades that would have crushed most of us long ago. If it has been even moderately for show then sure, he should work on dialing it back (just a bit... i.e. short of getting personal).

Twenty years is pleanty of time to realise the impact of behaviour. I've seen his noteable rants posted here and on Reddit for years. There no way he didn't know.

I think he has known about his behavior for a long time, and someone with influence has explained the impact.

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

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit difficult to explain, but I'll try. In the current political climate, the left and the right have been divided by the public consciousness into the following dichotomy: The left is overly sensitive and looks for things to be offended by. The right is concerned with maturity and personal responsibility and anti-political correctness, where those things are defined primarily in contrast to the left's perceiv…

>The left is overly sensitive and looks for things to be offended by. >The right is concerned with maturity and personal responsibility I think this is the perspective of the right . Specifically of that kind of right that does things "to trigger the lefties"; I'm sure you know the kind. Which is funny since those kinds of people can only be described in my head as the opposite of mature...

I acknowledge that my original statement was implicitly asserting that to some degree the public consciousness is right-leaning.

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

#616
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Euler, Al-Khawarzmi, Gauss, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, von Neumann, Fourier, Laplace, Aristotle, Ampere, Descartes, Kepler, etc. Linus does not fit in that list.

Why not?

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

#617
post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has been lynched because of a Contributor Covenant, or other similar open-source code of conduct? 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. itera…

> Who has been lynched because of a Contributor Covenant, or other similar open-source code of conduct? The scope of the Contributor Covenant was widened in an attempt to l̶y̶n̶c̶h̶ harass and ban Elia Schito for an opinion he had expressed on his personal twitter[1]. Because Elia's twitter conversation wasn't connected with the project (beyond the project being listed in his bio), a new clause needed to be added to…

If I'm reading your summation correctly, someone made edited the CoC in an attempt to indict Schito ad-hoc, and that bad faith attempt was foiled because the community was able to see the timing of the change. Doesn't your version of events strongly imply that having the CoC on file is what made it even possible to see how transparent this attack was?

Maybe you believe that the CoC is what made this attack possible, but that's a far-from-self-evident line of thinking, because such bad faith attacks and power plays have long existed in projects with no code of conducts. I'm not for now getting into the argument of how a CoC may be overall beneficial, I am simply challenging u/aaron695 on his claim that CoCs have led to "lynching" and "are evil at its worst". I'm assuming that he, like many programmers, believes terminology have meaning, and that his choice of words reflects actual quantifiable and tangible wrongs.

I'm not even particularly bothered by aaron695's implicit comparison of what CoCs' allegedly inflct compared to the violence of real-life lynchings. But I think his use of the overdramatic term is a symptom of poor thinking here. Lynchings generally imply acts of horror arising from the absence of agreed-upon norms, or actual law. People who advocate for CoCs in good-faith, ostensibly do so because they believe a CoC can instill some trust (because actual laws aren't possible nor desirable) that behavior won't be punished/ignored for nebulous/arbitrary reasons.

The two examples given so far are examples in which:

1. The attempt to use the CoC in bad faith failed, as in your example with Schito.

2. Both the CoC's impact and its correctness are debatable, if we attempt to avoid taking or refuting Vegg's side. For starters, Vegg resigned. And if he hadn't, there's no indication the Node.js overseeing committee felt empowered to take action to remove him. And yet if the CoC did provide for that action -- again, such a rules-guided process (even if ultimately stupid) is still the antithesis of what a "lynching" entails.

I'm not trying to just be pedantic here, nor am I arguing that you and aaron694 are morally bankrupt bigots for your anti-CoC positions. I am arguing, though, that you have taken this stance without justifying evidence or logical reason. For an example of the latter, look at how you bring up the problem of "everybody else using the Contributor Covenant" that now includes the "Elia clause". Think about how absolutely absurd it would be if, in that argument, you replaced "Code of Conduct" with "[some library well-known to be broken/insecure]", and then used that line of reasoning to assert that open source software is "evil at its worst" or even, "kind of evil".

edit: correction, the user who brought up Rod Vagg was not aaron695, but another commenter.

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

#618

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…

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. Can you show that what we measure is not real? If you can’t prove anything one way or the other, who cares? Why even bother with this line of thinking?

Why exactly is 1 + 1 = 2?

Yes, postmodernism is in a sense very theoretical and I would also say the word itself has been misused or used too broadly in ways, but the essense of it definitely is a step further from the previous default.

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

#619

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…

I think that the rudeness/politeness axis is orthogonal to the attention-to-quality axis. I've plenty of colleagues who are rude and pushy and produce shitty work.

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

#620
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always assumed that when he really goes after someone it was him blowing off steam to maintain his own mental health rather than trying to put on a show. He's been managing a pile of complexity for over two decades that would have crushed most of us long ago. If it has been even moderately for show then sure, he should work on dialing it back (just a bit... i.e. short of getting personal).

Twenty years is pleanty of time to realise the impact of behaviour. I've seen his noteable rants posted here and on Reddit for years. There no way he didn't know. I think he has known about his behavior for a long time, and someone with influence has explained the impact .

When you are doing something no one else has done before, it can be very challenging to figure out which pieces of what you do are essential secret sauce and which could stand to be improved.

I changed my HN handle from Mz to this one after more than 8 years and only after hitting the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard. It genuinely took me that long to conclude that my handle was a real problem in part because I was so dramatically outperforming other women in terms of being accepted here that, for the longest time, it honestly wasn't clear to me that it particularly mattered.

Changing my handle was so very well received that I'm sure I did the right thing. But, no, I honestly didn't see it as a big issue until after I hit the leaderboard. A few weeks later, I changed it.

Linus is a man with no real peers and there are few people who are anything close to a peer. It is hardly surprising to me that he lacks perspective on some details. It would be quite shocking if he didn't lack perspective about some things, given the path he has walked.

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