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Being Slow to Criticise

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Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#31

Post by l0b0 »

Saying that some piece of software is "bad" (or any synonym of "bad") of course isn't helping anyone. It's demoralizing and counterproductive. I suspect a lot of the bad blood is because so much of the software world is like the faceless behemoths we all love to hate:

- The process of reporting bugs is onerous for most big projects, especially old and/or big ones, which tend to have behemoth issue tracking systems and a bajillion rules (written and unwritten) about what should be in a report, how it should be structured, where it should be reported, and so on. Bonus points for having completely inscrutable fields (domain-specific tags like "T+" or "BZTM" being popular), a manual sign-up approval process, no way to upload files, or not responding to reports for anything older than HEAD even though it's a stable package in major distros.

- The chance of success of a bug report (that is, it's fixed by the time I move to some other alternative) is effectively random. Even heavily funded projects like Firefox leave popular bug reports by the wayside for years, while lots of tiny projects fix even minor issues within days.

- As users become more sophisticated they realize that almost all software is garbage by today's standards. If it's not garbage today it'll be garbage in a year, when it no longer works with any of the surrounding software ecosystem, doesn't implement the latest version of the relevant standards, doesn't use secure crypto primitives, emphasizes [old way of working] over [new way of working], you name it. Software can only stay ahead of the curve by being tiny and actively maintained, or by being really actively maintained.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#33

Post by mewpmewp2 »

grey-area wrote: post #27
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the same thing is going on with the commentary on economy currently. Whenever I browse around Reddit for example the comments that get upvoted are the cynical ones, "markets are irrational", "feds are pumping up the stocks" etc, but they do not put any real thought into what is happening with the markets and why.

Nobel prize winners in economics think the markets are irrational in important ways, this is not a fringe view, nor is it particularly cynical. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173122/ir... I don't think starting from the EMH is correct either, I suspect nobody really knows why the US stock market doesn't reflect the deepest recession since the 1930s, though of course everyone has opinions. The mark…

How long do you think market is predicting the recession to last?

There's predictions expecting 30% unemployment since March for Q2, and also predictions expecting 50% GDP drop for Q2.

So current market should have these predictions priced in.

I think one major thing that people fail to consider is that this recession is not like other recessions - namely, it's not failing of economics, or a bubble popping, it's a temporary natural disaster and economy is deliberately shut down. So it shouldn't be compared to other recessions which were issues with how economy worked. Right now there's no evidence that economy or system is failing by itself. Of course it might, but there's no evidence.

I think current market price stems from rational strategy by investors. This is why I think markets are rational. Current recession doesn't have implications 5 years into the future. We might lose some potential developments we could've had right now, but it just gets delayed few years, so it's not a big deal.

Maybe it is hindsight to me, but to me it seems clear why stock market has the current price it is. Maybe I'm "overfitting" somehow my theory, but it seems to make sense to me and I'm not seeing a clear logic error with my theory. I've argued a lot on this topic on this forum and reddit, and I haven't seen good retorts yet, it's just that I'm not getting any responses or somebody says "I just disagree and that's it".

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#34

Post by grey-area »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #33
grey-area wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobel prize winners in economics think the markets are irrational in important ways, this is not a fringe view, nor is it particularly cynical. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173122/ir... I don't think starting from the EMH is correct either, I suspect nobody really knows why the US stock market doesn't reflect the deepest recession since the 1930s, though of course everyone has opinions. The mark…

How long do you think market is predicting the recession to last? There's predictions expecting 30% unemployment since March for Q2, and also predictions expecting 50% GDP drop for Q2. So current market should have these predictions priced in. I think one major thing that people fail to consider is that this recession is not like other recessions - namely, it's not failing of economics, or a bubble popping, it's a te…

If it lasts long enough, a temporary natural disaster becomes an economic disaster.

I think the rough market consensus at the moment is as you state it - this is a natural disaster which will be over soon. That is a possible outcome at this point, but a second wave in the US for example would have significant impacts and cause entire industries to fall into bankruptcy - wiping out shareholders and leading to significant second-order effects on other industries and supply chains, plus causing a consumer-led recession. It seems increasingly unlikely to me that this will be over as soon as you expect. Just to pick one example - that 20-30% unemployment will not go away quickly if this is not over in the next month or two for the US and those people rehired. Companies will not rehire unless they are certain it is over.

Current recession doesn't have implications 5 years into the future

Remind me in 5 years! I don't think it will impact behaviour massively in 5 years, but I do think there is a danger this recession could trigger significant other events which have impact for more than a few years - for example unrest in the middle east after 2008 led to regime change in many countries, and ongoing war in Libya. Economic depression, unrest and wars are a common occurrence after smaller crises than this one.

When people say the market is irrational it is more to point out that the market valuation swings about the future expected returns quite wildly - for example if what you say is true, the market should not have crashed quite so strongly when coronavirus first spread then bounced back quickly again, but it did, because people panic. It does the same in the opposite direction based on incomplete or incorrect information about drugs/vaccines. There's a nice graph in the above book of the expected return from stocks (pretty much a straight line up and to the right, with small bumps on the way), and stock market valuations (massive swings around the expected return based on sentiment in that moment).

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#35

Post by anclp »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #4

Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important. That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT. Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languag…

FOSS seems to be adopted by most Internet companies, where Swift, C# and .NET are fringe languages.

clang and gcc produce faster code than Visual Studio and are more pleasant to use. IBM is now using clang in its terrible xlc compiler.

Mathematica uses gmp (in (gasp) C!), there's no commercial alternative to gmp or mpfr.

If you are writing apps for iOS or Windows, sure, the cited languages are better. That is quite a narrow field though and I'm not sure how FOSS could enter that field.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#36

Post by anclp »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #13
narag wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap... I understood the article was about criticizing persons and their reasons for doing something. What you say is an opinion on results, an opinion that could be correct. But you can't make a convincing criticism of behaviour based on results, except with better results.

I think the Linux kernel is crap, for what it's worth. That's not to say there isn't very smart people solving very complicated problems with it. But it is a monolith with a egomaniac in charge. This view is not solely my own.

I have never had problems with Linux, unlike Windows and OS X. 99% of weird workarounds in large FOSS projects are for OS X and Windows.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#37

Post by mewpmewp2 »

grey-area wrote: post #34
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think market is predicting the recession to last? There's predictions expecting 30% unemployment since March for Q2, and also predictions expecting 50% GDP drop for Q2. So current market should have these predictions priced in. I think one major thing that people fail to consider is that this recession is not like other recessions - namely, it's not failing of economics, or a bubble popping, it's a te…

If it lasts long enough, a temporary natural disaster becomes an economic disaster. I think the rough market consensus at the moment is as you state it - this is a natural disaster which will be over soon. That is a possible outcome at this point, but a second wave in the US for example would have significant impacts and cause entire industries to fall into bankruptcy - wiping out shareholders and leading to signific…

How do you determine whether it was panic or just uncertainty?

It could be a rational reason for markets to swing wildly because of uncertainty about future. It might take time to gather enough data to assess the risks properly, and while risks are as unknown it is rational that market will be valued lower.

Each bit of knowledge makes uncertain a little bit less uncertain.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#38

Post by superice »

Ma8ee wrote: post #29

On a related note, suppose that you already spent too much time to try to really understand the code and asked the developers for the motivations for their strange desing decisions. How do you present criticism in a constructive way then?

By showing you understand the constraints the developers were under, and acknowledging their frame of mind. Criticism is fine, giving it without understanding the context is not.

If you are able to summarize the problem in such a way that the developers say 'That is right', and they are not correcting you further on your understanding of the problem, then any criticism from your side is not as much of an attack. By framing it like 'I might be missing some context here, I think X, Y, and Z were your reasons for choosing this approach, but I think there is a factor F you haven't considered' you are having an intelligent discussion instead of just burning the developers to the ground for missing some piece of information.

You might still come to the conclusion the devs are dumb, but at the very least you have made a good impression by not barging in like you know better than the people that have probably spent a lot more time with the problem. Step one is showing that you understand the domain, and realistically, quite a few times you won't even get to the next step of asking whether they considered a factor that went unmentioned, since you've missed critical information in your assessment of the problem.

To summarize: Interview the devs about their decision processes and the domain. Show you understand, and repeat the problem back to them in your own words. If they agree with your version, then and only then ask about things you think they missed, or decisions you still can't comprehend given your information. Reduce your ego, as hard a task as that might be.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#39

Post by lmm »

Daub wrote: post #15

Holding back on criticism is one of the founding principles of the brainstorming technique... that and listening.

And research has shown that it's counterproductive. Culling bad ideas quickly makes for better results.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#40

Post by lmm »

Counterpoint: there is a practically infinite supply of possible projects to look at. Maybe we should be more eager to lay a program aside at the first major bug - there may well be five other programs that do the same thing - just as we should probably be more eager to give up on a bad book or movie these days. Maybe such an attitude would lead towards better priorities in software development - currently far too many projects prioritise advertisable features at the expense of working reliably.
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