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Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

bbc.co.uk

451–460 of 483 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you respond to a comment about false dichotomy by invoking the false dichotomy.

Correct. My point is that you can't always be nice. It works as little as always being abrasive.

But you gave the false dichotomy that to do that, you have to be an asshole. That's purely not true.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#452

> I'm still not exactly the most empathetic person. > But I'm hoping I can at least 'fake it until I > make it'. This is great! If you ask me, "faking it" is really just as good as "actually" being a more helpful or empathetic person. What do you think "actually" being a helpful or empathetic person is like? It's basically just continually expending the effort to be helpful and empathetic. Let's say my brother calls…

The best part was the next sentence: > Part of that 'faking it' is definitely going to be a filter on my outgoing emails That's about 95% of what people asked for over the decades. You can get your point across without incendiary language and belittling comments, and merely scanning for sensitive words is enough for most cases

FWIW - I don't know if there are FOSS implementations, but beyond simple word scanning (which I agree could be pretty effective!) there are also sentiment analysis tools out there.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; it's just being shitty, and to be frank I think you know that. "This code has more warnings than we accept under our process; please remedy." You aren't telling onlookers that they will be lit on fire for the temerity to contribute, you aren't causing anyone to lose face and you aren't hurting anyone . No aspersions, no chilling effects, and a positive path forward. Done and done. Everyone wins. To do otherwise i…

> "This code has more warnings than we accept under our process; please remedy." That fails to address the possibility that their process is broken, and so achieves the possibility of inducing technical debt when these issues will inevitably arise again. Fixing process can be as important as fixing code.

Sure. OK. Where does insulting people come into that?

There have been a lot of electrons perturbed dancing around that that's what we're talking about, yes?

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#454
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What privileges do you have when interacting with people?

I understand most inside jokes from western culture.

That's not really important and I say this as a foreigner to your culture.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to point out: you just insulted a number of people’s emotional intelligence, while talking about how important it is to be nice.

Correctly identifying poor emotional intelligence as such is not necessarily nice, no. Fortunately I never-not-once said a word about "how important it is to be nice". It's important to not be a toxic asshole. There is a real and obvious difference between the assertion I made and the assertion you are attempting to say that I made.

Sorry, that kind of thinking is problematic. A person can't exactly change their EQ, so you shouldn't be so toxic about this.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#456
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that there are any garbage people. Everybody has some good in them. (This doesn't imply we shouldn't set some boundaries).

Even Hitler has killed Hitler after all.

He made pretty okay art and cared about the suffering of animals.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm white. I decided long ago that everyone needs to treat everyone fairly. Part of that is basing promotions/etc on merit, but part of that is understanding that people are different and have different strengths and weaknesses, some of which are because of the culture they come from. This applies equally to whites and people of color, rich and poor, nationalities, and more. I have yet to find a culture that didn't h…

> If I'm in a meeting and stop someone from ruling out a potential candidate because of skin color, did I harm their culture? How could you possibly know the candidate is being ruled out for skin color?

Well the most obvious way is if they are dumb enough to actually say so.

But even without that, it's possible to recognize weasel words that people are using to rule them out that have more to do with skin color, nationality, or anything other than skill and personality. And even personality can be iffy, depending on what they decide isn't acceptable.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#458
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a way to get more of those ideas to me, and people in general, and less of the "I drink white male tears".

I don't think that there are any garbage people. Everybody has some good in them. (This doesn't imply we shouldn't set some boundaries).

Even literal garbage has some good in it. It's just usually not worth the effort of extracting it.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you realize but this exact tone of discourse comes across as patronizing. Please stop playing messiah for minorities. Also, I'm not some super rich privileged person. As a matter of fact, I'm unemployed right now but privilege or no privilege, there's no reason to cripple good open source software which is already one of the most equalizing resources that has been produced by mankind.

" there's no reason to cripple good open source software" Nobody is doing that. No one. That is not happening at all. I'm sorry, but people not being assholes to each other is not going to affect the quality of software in a negative manner.

You mean there is no loss of valuable contributions when people get Brendon Eiche'd for reasons unrelated to open source project?

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'

#460
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but the idioms of the "white lie" and "polite fiction" certainly imply some connection between impoliteness and truth-telling, don't they?

So what? There are also non benevolent lies and polite truth.

We just call those "lies" and "truth", and that shows us nothing because it was never in doubt that truth and politeness are often not in conflict.

On the other hand the idioms identified point to a long-standing understanding that sometimes, they are in conflict; a corollary of which is that one who always chooses complete honesty has likely failed to be polite from time to time, and one who is unfailingly polite has, like the curate describing his egg, likely given less than the total truth.

Most of us tend towards the politeness side of the tradeoff - we might, for example, describe a potential process failure when a more honest appraisal is that carelessness was the root cause.

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