Linus finally gave in.
Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#992Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's tired. He's older. He mentioned several times how he's been developing this for decades. Maybe he is making a balance, maybe he thinks that the Kernel does not really need him so badly now, and he can take a time out.
Out of interest, what changes could happen if Linus disappears tomorrow?
It depends on how stable is the Kernel, the rate of external changes (e.g. new processors), new discovered vulns, and the capacity of the new leader.
If all of those things go in the wrong direction, Linux could lose its reputation. For example, imagine a new vuln discovered and Linux failing to fix it for more than a year, or imagine Linux becoming slower than other alternatives in new processors
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#993I'm probably going to be alone in saying so, but I always enjoyed Linus and his attitude. (to me) it made him appear honest and dedicated to (his own) goals, and I always felt like that was respectable. (mostly) whenever he was proven technically wrong about how to do something he would concede to the technically better solution, and if he didn't do so he gave reasons for his conclusion. in other words : his technica…
"in other words : his technical brilliance, in my own opinion, was a far larger boon than the problems stemming from having to deal with his knife-like personality." One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole. It may take time, etc, but eventually, it ends up a significant net negative for the organization. The s…
> One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.
All successful organizations? Really? Definitely not hyperbole.
Even here it's clear that Linus hasn't been a net negative, not even close.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Personally I take the anti-jerk sentiment with a grain of salt. People like you were probably just manhandled by one like ten years ago and still haven't let it go.
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#994So Linux is going to shit. This will be fun and sad to watch.
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#995Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. I remember when one of the kernel maintainers announced why she was going to stop contributing, one of the reasons listed was "Linus has advocated physical abuse of kernel maintainers." Looking at the email that was given as evidence though, Linus told one of the maintainers something like "You're over 6 feet tall, if the contributors won't give you their patches in time to be merged, say you'll smash them…
Saying that "Linus has advocated physical abuse" based on that statement is completely disingenuous. It's an absurd interpretation. It was obviously humor and it wasn't insulting either. There are several cases where Linus went way over the top with insults, but throwing him under the bus because of that statement is ridiculous. That's the whole problem with these CoCs, if people get to apply the most uncharitable in…
And to be perfectly anal, it was only advocating _threatening_ physical violence. (As in, _“say_ you'll smash them...”)
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#996Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. You can tear the work apart if needed but don't get personal. Ever.
I found that a good way to do this is to try and guide the person's thoughts carefully towards the point that you are trying to make. The monent of realization that this hopefully creates is a strong teaching moment. And they tend to experience this as emotional high points themselves when they manage to take up your train of thought and complete it.
I may have misunderstood or be misremembering, but isn't that what's called “the Socratic method”? Which seems to imply that this ought to be known pretty generally, even among Linux kernel developers. It's not as if it were some new-fangled weird idea out of left field...
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#997It's about fucking time. I personally stay away from software created by people who lack empathy; technical goodness !> creating a good environment and product for actual people. I don't go to restaurants run by douchebags either, no matter how good the food might be. And Git has the UX of software created by someone with no empathy. I hope Linus heals from this, and I hope the culture of the Linux community changes…
> And Git has the UX of software created by someone with no empathy. I would really like to understand what you expect a UX for a command line tool to look like. Maybe instead of throwing an error if you did something wrong, it would apologize to you first? Or perhaps it should preface all output with "dearest Sir/Madam, here is the information you requested:" ?
Good UI for command line tool = consistent syntax?
I'm only slowly getting the hang of basic git usage, so I'm probably not qualified to criticize it myself, but I've seen some Web pages (blog posts?) that seemed to make a pretty cogent argument that git isn't too great in that department. Sorry, no links to hand.
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#998Earlier 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?
> Can you show that what we measure is not real?
Do you realize how nonsensical that question is? I cannot show by measurement that I cannot show things by measurement. It's tautological.
Postmodernism doesn't assert that measurements aren't real. It asserts that we cannot know if they are. It is, in a sense, an extension of epistemological skepticism to its extreme conclusion.
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#999Earlier 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…
I think you are giving postmodernism too much credit. It's whole premise is a non problem. Looking back on it's history, it's a politically and religiously motivated ideology to push anti-enlightenment values that coated itself in esoteric language to avoid scrutiny. It's not a well thought out philosophy, because they reject the very thing that would allow that to happen, reason. Empiricism solved this issue. You wi…
I think your biases are showing.
I don't really buy the postmodernist argument, and more or less agree with Empiricism.
However, I don't think you can dismiss the postmodernist argument. I cannot prove that Empiricism is correct.
> Empiricism solved this issue. You will very quickly learn if your assumptions are wrong by testing them in reality. This is what is meant by "feels over reals" and the opposite. Your assumptions, beliefs, or axioms - no matter how fondly held - will be crushed under the infinite weight of reality.
This is simply begging the question -- whether reality is real. That's not a question you can just skip over if you're claiming to be rigorous in your analysis.
Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off
#1000Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is somewhat ironic considering Linux is written in C, which is the most stubbornly "one thing at a time" language in widespread use today.
For example?
- C-style strings are null-terminated, with no information about their length
- no equivalent of "for item in items" or "map" because no native data type has any concept of its length
- array-to-pointer decay
Modern assembly languages - for processors that have SIMD or AVX instructions - are more natively able to deal with several things at one time than C is.