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Good talk.
I recently used systemd “in anger” for the first time on a raspi device to orchestrate several scripts and services, and I was pleasantly surprised (but also not surprised, because the FUD crowd is becoming more and more fingerprintable to me). systemd gives me lifecycle, logging, error handling, and structure, declaratively. It turns out structure and constraints are really useful, this is also why go has fast dependency resolution.
It violates unix philosohpy
That accusation was also made against neovim. The people muttering this stuff are slashdot markov chains, they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
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The declarative units are definitely a plus. No question.
I was anti-systemd when it started gaining popularity, because of the approach (basically kitchen-sinking a lot of *NIX stuff into a single project) and the way the project leader(s) respond to criticism.
I’ve used it since it was default in Debian, and the technical benefits are very measurable.
That doesnt mean the complaints against it are irrelevant though - it does break the Unix philosophy I think most people are referring to:
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
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If you believe composability (one program’s output is another program’s input) is an important part of The Unix Philosophy, then
lsviolates it all day long, always has, likely always will.lsalso violates it by providing multiple ways to sort its output, whensortis right there, already doing that job. Arguably,lsformatting its output is a violation of Do One Thing, becauseawkandprintfexist, all ready to turn neat columns into human-friendly text. My point is, The Unix Philosophy isn’t set in stone, and never has been.-
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nobody said it’s set in stone; it’s a set of principles to be applied based on practicality. like any design principle, it can be applied beyond usefulness. some remarks:
- i don’t see where ls violates composability. the -l format was specifically designed to be easy to grep.
- the sorting options are an example of practicality. they don’t require a lot of code, and would be much more clumsy to implement as a script (specifically when you don’t output the fields you’re sorting on)
- about formatting, i assume you’re referring to columniation, which to my knowledge was not in any version of ls released by Bell Labs. checking whether stdout is a terminal is indeed an ugly violation.
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i don’t see where ls violates composability. the -l format was specifically designed to be easy to grep.
People have written web pages on why parsing the output of
lsis a bad idea. Usingls -ldoesn’t solve any of these problems.As a matter of fact, the
coreutilspeople have this to say about parsing the output ofls:However ls is really a tool for direct consumption by a human, and in that case further processing is less useful. For futher processing,
find(1)is more suited.Moving on…
the sorting options are an example of practicality. they don’t require a lot of code, and would be much more clumsy to implement as a script (specifically when you don’t output the fields you’re sorting on)
This cuts closer to the point of what we’re saying, but here I also have to defend my half-baked design for a True Unix-y
lsProgram: It would always output all the data, one line per file, with filenames quoted and otherwise prepared such that they always stick to one column of one line, with things like tab characters replaced by\tand newline characters replaced by\nand so on. Therefore, the formatting and sorting programs always have all the information.But, as I said, always piping the output of my
lsinto some other script would be clumsier; it would ultimately result in some “human-friendlyls” which has multiple possible pipelines prepared for you, selectable with command-line options, so the end result looks a lot like modernls.about formatting, i assume you’re referring to columniation, which to my knowledge was not in any version of ls released by Bell Labs. checking whether stdout is a terminal is indeed an ugly violation.
I agree that
lsshouldn’t check for atty, but I’m not entirely convinced no program should.-
just because some people discourage composing ls with other programs doesn’t mean it’s not the unix way. some people value the unix philosophy and some don’t, and it’s not surprising that those who write GNU software and maintain wikis for GNU software are in the latter camp.
your proposal for a decomposed ls sounds more unixy in some ways. but there are still practical reasons not to do it, such as performance and not cluttering the standard command lexicon with ls variants (plan 9 has ls and lc; maybe adding lt, lr, lu, etc. would be too many names just for listing files). it’s a subtle point in unix philosophy to know when departing from one principle is better for the overall simplicity of the system.
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With all due respect[1], did your own comment hit your fingerprint detector? Because it should. It’s extrapolating wildly from one personal anecdote[2], and insulting a broad category of people without showing any actual examples[3]. Calling people “markov chains” is fun in the instant you write it, but contributes to the general sludge of ad hominem dehumanization. All your upvoters should be ashamed.
[1] SystemD arouses strong passions, and I don’t want this thread to devolve. I’m pointing out that you’re starting it off on the wrong foot. But I’m done here and won’t be responding to any more name-calling.
[2] Because God knows, there’s tons of badly designed software out there that has given people great experiences in the short term. Design usually matters in the long term. Using something for the first time is unlikely to tell you anything beyond that somebody peephole-optimized the UX. UX is certainly important, rare and useful in its own right. But it’s a distinct activity.
[3] I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix. Were they similarly criticizing Vim?
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[3] I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix. Were they similarly criticizing Vim?
Yes, when VIM incorporated a terminal. Which is explicitly against its design goals. From the VIM 7.4
:help design-notVIM IS... NOT *design-not* - Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. You will not be able to run a shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger. This should work the other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE. A satirical way to say this: "Unlike Emacs, Vim does not attempt to include everything but the kitchen sink, but some people say that you can clean one with it. ;-)"Neo-VIM appears to acknowledge their departure from VIM’s initial design as their
:help design-nothas been trimmed and only reads:NVIM IS... NOT design-not Nvim is not an operating system; instead it should be composed with other tools or hosted as a component. Marvim once said: "Unlike Emacs, Nvim does not include the kitchen sink... but it's good for plumbing."Now as a primarily Emacs user I see nothing wrong with not following the UNIX philosophy, but at it is clear that NeoVIM has pushed away from that direction. And because that direction was an against their initial design it is reasonable for users that liked the initial design to criticism NeoVIM because moving further away from the UNIX philosophy.
Not that VIM hadn’t already become something more than ‘just edit text’, take quickfix for example. A better example of how an editor can solve the same problem by adhering to the Unix Philosophy of composition through text processing would be Acme. Check out Acme’s alternative to quickfix https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M?t=551
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akkartik, which part of my comment did you identify with? :) FWIW, I’m fond of you personally.
I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix
Every single Hacker News thread about Neovim.
Were they similarly criticizing Vim?
Not until I reply as such–and the response is hem-and-haw.
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To be fair I don’t think the hacker news hive mind is a good judge of anything besides what is currently flavour of the week.
Just yesterday I had a comment not just downvoted but flagged and hidden-by-default, because I suggested Electron is a worse option than a web app.
HN is basically twitter on Opposite Day: far too happy to remove any idea even vaguely outside what the group considers “acceptable”.
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Indeed, I appreciate your comments as well in general. I wasn’t personally insulted, FWIW. But this is precisely the sort of thing I’m talking about, the assumption that someone pushing back must have their identity wrapped up in the subject. Does our community a disservice.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7289935
The old Unix ways are dying… … Vim is, in the spirit of Unix, a single purpose tool: it edits text.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412860
thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd
Also just search for “vim unix philosophy” you’ll invariably find tons of imaginary nonsense:
Please don’t make me search /r/vim :D
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thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd
That’s not saying that neovim is ‘anti-Unix philosophy’, it’s saying that neovim is an example of a general pattern of people rewriting and redesigning old things that work perfectly well on the basis that there must be something wrong with anything that’s old.
Which is indeed a general pattern.
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That’s not saying that neovim is ‘anti-Unix philosophy’
It’s an example of (unfounded) fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
rewriting and redesigning old things that work perfectly well on the basis that there must be something wrong with anything that’s old.
That’s a problem that exists, but attaching it to project X out of habit, without justification, is the pattern I’m complaining about. In Neovim’s case it’s completely unfounded and doesn’t even make sense.
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It’s not unfounded. It’s pretty obvious that many of the people advocating neovim are doing so precisely because they think ‘new’ and ‘modern’ are things that precisely measure the quality of software. They’re the same people that change which Javascript framework they’re using every 6 weeks. They’re not a stereotype, they’re actual human beings that actually hold these views.
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Thanks :) My attitude is to skip past crap drive-by comments as beneath notice (or linking). But I interpreted you to be saying FUD (about SystemD) that you ended up taking seriously? Any of those would be interesting to see if you happen to have them handy, but no worries if not.
Glad to have you back in the pro-Neovim (which is not necessarily anti-Vim) camp!
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What is FUD is this sort of comment: the classic combination of comparing systemd to the worst possible alternative instead of the best actual alternative with basically claiming everyone that disagrees with you is a ‘slashdot markov chain’ or similar idiotic crap.
On the first point, there are lots of alternatives to sysvinit that aren’t systemd. Lots and lots and lots. Some of them are crap, some are great. systemd doesn’t have a right to be compared only to what it replaced, but also all the other things that could have replaced sysvinit.
On the second point, it’s just bloody rude. But it also shows you don’t really understand what people are saying. ‘I think [xyz] violates the unix philosophy’ is not meaningless. People aren’t saying it for fun. They’re saying it because they think it’s true, and that it’s a bad thing. If you don’t have a good argument for the Unix philosophy not matter, or you think systemd doesn’t actually violate it, please go ahead and explain that. But I’ve never actually seen either of those arguments. The response to ‘it violates the Unix philosophy’ is always just ‘shut up slashdotter’. Same kind of comment you get when you say anything that goes against the proggit/hn hivemind that has now decided amongst other things that: microsoft is amazing, google is horrible, MIT-style licenses are perfect, GPL-style licenses are the devil-incarnate, statically typed languages are perfect, dynamically typed languages are evil, wayland is wonderful, x11 is terrible, etc.
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claiming everyone that disagrees with you is a ‘slashdot markov chain’ or similar idiotic crap
My claim is about the thoughtless shoveling of groundless rumors. Also I don’t think my quip was idiotic.
there are lots of alternatives to sysvinit that aren’t systemd
That’s fine, I never disparaged alternatives. I said: systemd is good and I’m annoyed that the grumblers said it wasn’t.
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Have you watched the video this thread is about? Because you really sound like the kind of dogmatist the presenter is talking about.
If you like systemd, use it and shut up about it
Also, isn’t this a double-standard, since when it comes to complaining about systemd, this attitude doesn’t seem that prevalent.
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I see this kind of vague criticism when it comes to systemd alot. What ecosystem is it really breaking? It’s all still open source, there aren’t any proprietary protocols or corporate patents that prevent people from modifying the software to not have to rely on systemd. This “threat”, thr way I see it, has turned out to be at most a “ minor inconvenience “.
I suppose you’re thinking about examples like GNOME, but on the one hand, GNOME isn’t a unix-dogmatist project, but instead they aim to create a integrated desktop experience, consciously trading this in for ideal modularity – and on the other, projects like OpenBSD have managed to strip out what required systemd and have a working desktop environment. Most other examples, of which I know, have a similar pattern.
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I think that the problem is fanboyism, echo chambers and ideologies.
I might be wrong, so please don’t consider this an accusation. But you writing this sounds like someone hearing that systemd is bad, therefore never looking at it, yet copying it. Then one tries it and finding out that baseless prejudices were in fact baseless.
After that the assumption is that everyone else must have been doing the same and one is enlightened now to see it’s actually really cool.
I think that this group behavior and blindly copying opinions is one of the worst things in IT these days, even though of course it’s not limited to this field.
A lot of people criticizing systemd actually looked at systemd, really deep, maybe even built stuff on it, or at least worked with it in production as sysadmin/devop/sre/…
Yes, I have used systemd, yes I understand why decisions we’re taken, where authors if the software were going, read specs of the various parts (journald for example), etc.
I think I have a pretty good understanding compared to at least most people that only saw it from a users perspective (considering writing unit files to be users perspective as well).
So I could write about that in my CV and be happy that I can answer a lot of questions regarding systemd, advocate its usage to create more demand and be happy.
To sum it up: I still consider systemd to be bad on multiple layers, both implementation and some ideas that I considered great but then through using it seeing that it was a wrong assumption. By the way that’s the thing I would not blame anyone for. It’s good that stuff gets tried, that’s how research works. It’s not the first and not the last project that will come out sounding good, to only find out a lot of things either doesn’t make a difference or make it worse.
I am a critic of systemd but I agree that there’s a lot of FUD as well. Especially when there’s people that blame everything, including own incompetence on systemd. Nobody should ever expect a new project to be a magic bullet. That’s just dumb and I would never blame systemd for trying a different approach or for not being perfect. However I think it has problems on many levels. While I think the implementation isn’t really good that’s something that can be fixed. However I think some parts of the concept level are either pretty bad or have turned out to be bad decisions.
I was very aware that especially in the beginning the implementation was bad. A lot got better. That’s to be expected. However next to various design decisions I consider bad I think many more were based on ideas that I think to most people in IT sound good and reasonable but in the specific scenarios that systemd is used it at least in my experience do not work out at all or only work well in very basic cases.
In other words the cases where other solutions are working maybe not optimal, but that aren’t considered a problem worth fixing because the added complexity isn’t worth it systemd really shines. However when something is more complex I think using systemd frequently turns out to be an even worse solution.
While I don’t wanna go into detail because I don’t think this is the right format for an actual analysis I think systemd in this field a lot in common with both configuration management and JavaScript frameworks. They tend to be amazing for use cases that are simple (todo applications for example), but together with various other complexities often make stuff unnecessarily complicated.
And just like with JavaScript frameworks and configuration management there’s a lot of FUD, ideologies, echochambers, following the opinion of some thought leaders, and very little building your own solid opinion.
Long story short. If you criticize something without knowing what it is about then yes that’s dumb and likely FUD. However assuming that’s the only possible reason for someone criticizing software is similarly dumb and often FUD regarding this opinion.
This by the way also works the reverse. I frequently see people liking software and echoing favorable statements for the same reasons. Not understanding what they say, just copying sentences of opinion leaders, etc.
It’s the same pattern, just the reversal, positive instead of negative.
The problem isn’t someone disliking or liking something, but that opinions and thoughts are repeated without understanding which makes it hard to have discussions and arguments that give both sides any valuable insides or learnings
Then things also get personal. People hate on Poetteing and think he is dumb and Poetteing thinks every critic is dumb. Just because that’s a lot of what you see when every statement is blindly echoed.
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That’s nice, but the implication of the anti-systemd chorus was that sys v init was good enough. Not all of these other “reasonable objections” that people are breathless to mention.
The timbre reminded me of people who say autotools is preferrable to cmake. People making a lot of noise about irrelevant details and ignoring the net gain.
But you writing this sounds like someone hearing that systemd is bad, therefore never looking at it, yet copying it.
No, I’m reacting to the idea that the systemd controversy took up any space in my mind at all. It’s good software. It doesn’t matter if X or Y is technically better, the popular narrative was that systemd is a negative thing, a net-loss.
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In your opinion it’s good software and you summed up the “anti-systemd camp” with “sys v init was good enough” even though people from said “anti-systemd camp” on this very thread disagreed that that was their point.
To give you an entirely different point of view, I’m surprised you don’t want to know anything about a key piece of a flagship server operating systems (taking that one distro is technically an OS) affecting the entire eco system and unrelated OS’ (BSDs etc.) that majorly affects administration and development on Linux-based systems. Especially when people have said there are clear technical reasons for disliking the major change and forced compliance with “the new way”.
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you summed up the “anti-systemd camp” with “sys v init was good enough” even though people from said “anti-systemd camp” on this very thread disagreed that that was their point.
Even in this very thread no one has actually named a preferred alternative. I suspect they don’t want to be dragged into a discussion of details :)
affecting the entire eco system and unrelated OS’ (BSDs etc.)
BSDs would be a great forum for demonstrating the alternatives to systemd.
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It violates unix philosohpy
That accusation was also made against neovim. The people muttering this stuff are slashdot markov chains, they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
i don’t follow your reasoning. why is it relevant that people also think neovim violates the unix philosophy? are you saying that neovim conforms to the unix philosophy, and therefore people who say it doesn’t must not know what they’re talking about?
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are you saying that neovim conforms to the unix philosophy, and therefore people who say it doesn’t must not know what they’re talking about?
When the implication is that Vim better aligns with the unix philosophy, yes, anyone who avers that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. “Unix philosophy” was never a goal of Vim (”:help design-not” was strongly worded to that effect until last year, but it was never true anyways) and shows a deep lack of familiarity with Vim’s features.
Some people likewise speak of a mythical “Vim way” which again means basically nothing. But that’s a different topic.
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The following will allow you to configure the SQL Server license…
Stopped reading right there. I really look forward to the time when our grandchildren will ask why were we complicating our lives by artificially crippling the software we wrote on top of forbidding others to improve it.
We’ll sit down with them and start the long story starting with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame…
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Cory always scares me.
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This was from 2012. Arguably, we’re already there. Tons of popular computers run signed bootloaders and won’t run arbitrary code. Popular OS vendors already pluck apps from their walled garden on the whims of freedom-optional sovereignties.
The civil war came and went and barely anyone took up arms. :(
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It’s not like there won’t always be some subset of developer- and hacker-friendly computers available to us. Sure, iPhones are locked down but there are plenty of cheap Android phones which can be rooted, flashed with new firmware, etc. Same for laptops, there are still plenty to choose from where the TPM can be disabled or controlled.
Further, open ARM dev boards are getting both very powerful and very cheap. Ironically, it might even be appropriate to thank China and its dirt-cheap manufacturing industry for this freedom since without it, relatively small runs of these tiny complicated computers wouldn’t even be possible.
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This is actually the danger. There will always be a need for machines for developers to use, but the risk is that these machines and the machines for everyone else (who the market seems to think don’t “need” actual control over their computers) will diverge increasingly. “Developer” machines will become more expensive, rarer, harder to find, and not something people who aren’t professional developers (e.g. kids) own.
We’re already seeing this happen to some extent. There are a large number of people who previously owned PCs but who now own only locked down smartphones and tablets (moreover, even if these devices aren’t locked down, they’re fundamentally oriented towards consumption, as I touched on here).
Losing the GPC war doesn’t mean non-locked-down machines disappearing; it simply means the percentage of people owning them will decline to a tiny percentage, and thus social irrelevance. The challenge is winning the GPC war for the general public, not just for developers. Apathy makes it feel like we’ve already lost.
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Develop for, yes, within the bounds of what Apple deems permissible. But you can’t replace iOS and port Linux or Android to it because the hardware is very locked down. (Yes, you might be able to jailbreak the phone through some bug, until Apple patches it, anyway.)
Mind you, I’m not bemoaning the fact or chastising Apple or anything. They can do what they want. My original point was just that for every locked-down device that’s really a general-purpose computer inside, there are open alternatives and likely will be as long as there is a market for them and a way to cheaply manufacture them.
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Absolutely! Even more impressive is that with Android, Google has made such a (mostly) open architecture into a mass market success.
However it’s interesting to note that on that very architecture, if you buy an average Android phone, it’s locked down with vendorware such that in order to install what you want you’ll likely have to wipe the entire ecosystem off the phone and substitute an OSS distribution.
I get that the point here is that you CAN, but again, most users don’t want the wild wild west. Because, fundamentally, they don’t care. They want devices (and computers) that work.
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Google has made such a (mostly) open architecture into a mass market success.
Uh, I used to say that until I looked at the history and the present. I think it’s more accurate that they made a proprietary platform on an open core a huge success by tying it into their existing, huge market. They’ve been making it more proprietary over time, too. So, maybe that’s giving them too much credit. I’ll still credit them with their strategy doing more good for open-source or user-controlled phones than their major competitors. I think it’s just a side effect of GPL and them being too cheap to rewrite core at this point, though.
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This is not completely true. There are some features you can’t use without an Apple developer account which costs $100/yr. One of those features is NetworkExtension.
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Over half a million people or 2 out of 100 Americans died in the Civil War. There was little innocent folks in general public could do to prevent it or minimize losses Personally, I found his “civil war” to be less scary. The public can stamp these problems out if they merely care.
That they consistently are apathetic is what scares me.
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Agreed 100%.
I have no idea what to do. The best solution I think is education. I’m a software engineer. Not the best one ever, but I try my best. I try to be a good computing citizen, using free software whenever possible. Only once did I meet a coworker who shared my values about free software and not putting so much trust in our computing devices - the other 99% of the time, my fellow devs think I’m crazy for giving a damn.
Let alone what people without technical backgrounds give a damn about this stuff. If citizens cared and demanded freedom in their software, that would position society much better to handle “software eating the world”.
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The freedoms guaranteed by free software were always deeply abstruse and inaccessible for laypeople.
Your GNOME desktop can be 100% GPL and it will still be nearly impossible for you to even try to change anything about it; even locating the source code for any given feature is hard.
That’s not to say free software isn’t important or beneficial—it’s a crucial and historical movement. But it’s sad that it takes so much expertise to alter and recompile a typical program.
GNU started with an ambition to have a user desktop system that’s extensible and hackable via Lisp or Scheme. That didn’t really happen, outside of Emacs.
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Your GNOME desktop can be 100% GPL and it will still be nearly impossible for you to even try to change anything about it; even locating the source code for any given feature is hard.
I tried to see how true that is with a random feature. I picked brightness setting in the system status area. Finding the source for this was not so hard, it took me a few minutes (turns out it is JavaScript). Of course it would have been better if there was something similar to browser developer tools somewhere.
Modifying it would probably be harder since I can’t find a file called
brightness.json my machine. I suppose they pack the JavaScript code somehow…About 10 years ago (before it switched to ELF) I used Minix3 as my main OS for about a year. It was very hackable. We did something called “tracking current” (which apparently is still possible): the source code for the whole OS was on the disk and it was easy to modify and recompile everything. I wish more systems worked like this.
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IANAL, but Massachusetts (where I live) has a Right To Repair law in place, under which manufacturers (e.g., Bosch) are legally required to make official repair manuals, materials, etc. available to consumers for a reasonable cost. If Bosch sells their e-bikes in Mass, chances are they’re on the hook for this.
EDIT: Never mind, motorized bicycles do not count as motor vehicles in MA. The Right to Repair Act does not apply here.
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I could be wrong, but I remember back when there was issue with farmers in America not being able to repair their equipment that they were getting hold of firmware updates from Europe so that they could do so - something about the European ones not having code that banned third party repair.
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vosper
1 month ago
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link
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The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
Is there any room for innovation in sound-reduction here? I’ve always imagine something like double-glazed glass panels rising up from the backs of desks, maybe all the way to the roof. With a good vacuum between the glass I thought maybe you’d cut down on some noise, especially if the sound travels through multiple of these screens. Certainly the windows in my house cut down the outside noise a bit. And you’d still let light through, which would make them less grim than gray panels.
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Good acoustic design is a must in an open floor plan. If the room echoes, conversation volume gets amplified. Decorative acoustic foam is inexpensive and can be hung on the walls and ceiling to reduce echo. Dividers can be used in a large room to give separation to conversations and absorb some sound.
Glass is not what you want, because it will echo; if you have cubicle-shaped glass dividers, you’ll end up with an amphitheater effect. Glass would also separate people physically, but would still allow for visual distractions. Ideally we want to maximize collaboration opportunity and minimize distractions.
A good break room is also important, otherwise break time will happen at desks.
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Would cubicles be better? That’s one cost efficient way to turn an office to a non-open office, I think 🤔
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Cubes combine the distracting background noise of an open plan office with having to sit by yourself :/
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Agreed - while headphones can at least block out audible distractions in an open-office plan, there’s nothing to be done for people shooting hoops and reenacting last night’s Warriors game, or people trying to circumvent my “do not disturb” notice on Slack by waving their hands in front of my monitor (both actual examples at $OLDJOB). Visual distractions, at least for me, are just as bad!
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- Finishing Subnautica.
- Having a pizza & wine with my wife somewhere outside.
- Getting used to TaskWarrior.
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Actually, the way the keyservers were designed was just lazy. Even DNS has a mechanism for automatic expiration of worthless names. There are my 2 public keys from 2006 I have lost the private keys for a long time ago that are not helping anything. If the users were supposed to upload or prolong their keys every year or so, the situation would be much better. And take them down, provided they still have access to their private keys.
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Context variables sound good, I really liked them in Racket. UTF-8 is a sane default for IO, so nice on that front too.
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This blog post: a case study in being a jerk to someone who is being a jerk, only since Linus is a “jerk” you get off scott-free. Unsurprisingly, this is written by someone who has never contributed to the Linux kernel and who was uninvolved in the discussion he’s picking apart.
The revised email at the end does lose information. Contrary to what hipsters write blog posts complaining about, 99% of Linus’s emails are cordial. The information that’s lost is the conveyance that this is more important to Linus than most subjects.
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This comment: a case study in being a jerk to someone who is being a jerk to a jerk.
In all seriousness, I don’t believe that Gary Bernhardt is being a jerk at all. There’s a line between being critical of a piece of work and calling someone brain damaged, and hopefully, we all can see the difference.
Aside: I love when people use the word “hipster” to invalidate other viewpoints. Apparently, there are two modes of being: Being Right and Being A Hipster.
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To the unserious comment, I don’t think I was being a jerk. I called him a jerk, which I guess you could argue is a jerk move under any circumstances, but if I’m being a jerk then so is Gary.
To the serious comment, I just want to note that “brain damaged” is a meme among old school hackers which isn’t as strong of a word as you think.
To the aside, I don’t use hipster as an insult or to imply wrongness, but I do use it to invalidate his point. Gary is a Ruby developer. Linus is a kernel developer. The worlds are far removed from each other.
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I’ve put tens of thousands of lines of C into production, including multiple Linux kernel drivers. In one case, those kernel drivers were critical-path code on a device used in strain testing the wings of an airplane that you might’ve flown in by now.
I’m not a stranger to the kernel; I just left that world. Behavior like Linus’ in that email was part of the reason, though far from the only reason.
With all of that said: having written a bunch of systems software shouldn’t be a prerequisite for suggesting that we avoid attacking people personally when they make programming mistakes, or what we suspect are programming mistakes.
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Exactly. I’ve also met many people that do high-performance, embedded, and/or safety-critical code in C that are more polite in these situations. Linus’ attitude is a separate issue from what’s necessary to evaluate and constructively criticize code.
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“brain damaged” is a meme among old school hackers which isn’t as strong of a word as you think.
Yikes. That “meme” is a whole other thing I don’t even care to unpack right now.
I don’t use hipster as an insult or to imply wrongness, but I do use it to invalidate his point. Gary is a Ruby developer. Linus is a kernel developer. The worlds are far removed from each other.
Gotcha. Kernal developer == real old-school hacker. Ruby developer == script kiddie hipster. Are we really still having this argument in 2018?
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Yikes. That “meme” is a whole other thing I don’t even care to unpack right now.
“Brain damaged” is a term from back in the Multics days, Linus didn’t make that one up for the occasion. If you’re unfamiliar with the “jargon file” aka hacker dictionary, you can see the history of this particular term here: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/brain-damaged.html
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Yikes. That “meme” is a whole other thing I don’t even care to unpack right now.
Listen, cultures are different and culture shock is a thing. I’m in a thread full of foreigners shocked that customs are different elsewhere. You better just take my word for it on “brain damaged” because you clearly aren’t a member of this culture and don’t know what you’re talking about.
Gotcha. Kernal developer == real old-school hacker. Ruby developer == script kiddie hipster. Are we really still having this argument in 2018?
How about you quit putting words in my mouth? Do you really need me to explain the world of difference between Ruby development and kernel hacking? In 2018? It’s not a matter of skill. Gary is great at what he does, but it has almost nothing to do with what Linus does. The people who surround Gary and the people who surround Linus are mutually exclusive groups with different cultural norms.
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You can’t use “it’s our culture” as a panacea; calling someone an idiot, moron etc. is a deliberate attempt to hurt them. I guess if what you’re saying is, “it’s our culture to intentionally hurt the feelings of people who have bad ideas,” well, then we might be at an impasse.
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The kind of toxic exclusivity and “old school hacker culture” elitism that you’re spouting in this thread is not what I expect to see on Lobsters. It makes me genuinely sad to see somebody saying these things and it also makes me apprehensive of ever being involved in the same project or community as you. Software development today is not what it was 20 –or even 5– years ago. Today it is far more about people than it is about software or technology. You may not like this, but it is the reality.
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“old school hacker culture” elitism
Near 40, I can agree to be called old. But not elitist.
And I cannot accept to be associated with racist.Not all software developers are hackers. Not all hackers are software developers.
Is stating this “elitism”? Is it “racism”? Is it being “jerk”?
Or is just using terms properly?
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The information that’s lost is the conveyance that this is more important to Linus than most subjects.
So add “I want to stress that this issue is really important to me” at the end of the revised email.
I think that making an issue out of this particular information being lost is missing the point - that it would be possible to say the same thing as Linus did without being abusive.
Contrary to what hipsters write blog posts complaining about
You’re falling into the same trap that the post discusses. This derision isn’t necessary to make your point, and doesn’t make it any stronger - it just adds an unnecessary insult.
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(I am not defending Linus’ behaviour here, please don’t put those words in my mouth.)
I strongly take issue with American ideas of “professionalism”, and an even more so with the idea that we get to decide whether this project is “a professional setting” or not. What exactly makes this a “professional setting”? What is a “professional setting”? Why do we hold some interactions to higher standards than others?
I suspect “money changing hands” is the thing that makes this “a professional setting”, and that grinds my gears even further. Why are we supposed to hold ourselves to different standards just because some people are getting paid for doing it?
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The Linux kernel is not a professional setting. Besides, I argue that the 1% is useful, even in a professional setting - sometimes strong words are called for. I’ll be That Guy and say that people should grow a thicker skin, especially people who weren’t even the subject of the email and have never been involved in kernel development.
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If I look at who the contributors to the Linux kernel are, it would certainly appear to be a professional endeavor.
A large chunk of contributions to the kernel are made by people who are getting paid by the companies they work for to contribute. Sounds like a professional setting to me.
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Linux development is only “a professional endeavour” (which is a phrase I have strong issues with, see above) because some people decided to build their businesses in Linus’ craft room. We can like or dislike Linus’ behaviour, but we don’t get to ascribe “professionalism” or lack thereof (if there even is such a thing) to Linus’ work or behaviour, or that of any of the contributors.
Even if “professionalism” is an actual thing (it’s not; it’s just a tool used by people in power to keep others down) it’s between the people doing the paying, and the people getting the pay, and has nothing to do with any of us.
This idea that people should behave differently when there’s money involved is completely offensive to me.
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So, having a hobbyist involved means that you can be dickhead? Is that the conclusion that should be drawn from your statements?
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“I’m saying that Linus is not a dickhead”
His comments are proving otherwise given the main article shows the same information could’ve been conveyed without all the profanity, personal insults, and so on. He must be adding that fluff because he enjoys it or has self-control issues. He’s intentionally or accidentally a dick. I say that as a satirist whose a dick to people that give me headaches in real life. Although it doesn’t take one to know one, being someone whose always countering dicks and assholes with some dickish habits of his own makes what Linus is doing more evident. If no mental illness, there’s little excuse past him not giving a shit.
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Im identifying the cultural norm of being an asshole, saying it applies to him at times, and saying the project would benefit if he knocked if off. Im not forcing my norms on anyone.
Your comment is more amusing giving someone with Linus’s norns might just reply with profanity and personsl insults. Then, you might be complaining about that. ;)
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Then, you might be complaining about that. ;)
No, I’d just accept that people from different cultures behave differently.
Let’s face it, most people hate getting told they are wrong, regardless of the tone. That’s just how we are as humans.
Taking offense about the tone just seems very US-specific, as they are accustomed to receiving some special superpowers in a discussion by uttering “I’m offended”.
Some of the best feedback I received in my life wouldn’t be considered acceptable by US standards and I simply don’t care – I just appreciate the fact that someone took his time to spell out the technical problems.
Here is a recent example: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/5183#issuecomment-381449546
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Here is a recent example: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/5183#issuecomment-381449546
I’m not familiar with Rust, so maybe I’m missing crucial context, but I read this feedback as firm but unproblematic overall. Compared to Linus’ email:
- Comment admits that there are multiple points of view, gives case for their take on it.
- Focuses on the problems at hand rather than speculating on characteristics of any individuals involved, beyond acknowledging other viewpoints.
- Doesn’t include any personal insults.
- Doesn’t include any profanity that I noticed, certainly not gratuituous profanity.
It could be nicer, sure. But it seemed respectful, in the “you can do what you’re doing but consider these things:” kind of way…? The author event went out of their way to acknowledge being unconstructive.
To my reading it seemed closer to Gary’s email than Linus’.
To put it another way: if Linus wrote emails like this (only shorter, probably) then I don’t think Gary would have written a blog post about it.
(For the record: I’m not American, but I do fall on the gee-it’d-be-great-if-Linus-stopped-abusing-his-colleagues side of this debate.)
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I didn’t intend to imply that this was comparable to Linus’ mail, but that people who would be offended by Linus’ writing would also be offended by that comment.
It’s a slippery slide where every honest-to-go comment that expresses real feelings starts getting replaced by “this is an interesting idea, but did you consider …” corporate lingo, even if the code is horribly wrong.
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I didn’t intend to imply that this was comparable to Linus’ mail, but that people who would be offended by Linus’ writing would also be offended by that comment.
I understand this is your point, but I think there is no evidence for this. The people complaining about Linus’ conduct are complaining about specific things, and these things are not present in the comment you linked.
Did anyone in the Rust community (generally considered a “nicer” community than kernel development) raise concerns about this comment?
There is a difference between “not overtly nice” and “openly abusive”, even accounting for cultural context.
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Then you and I arent that different in how we look at stuff. Ive just layered on top of it a push for project owners to do what’s most effective on social side.
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These numbers suggest it is a professional endeavor:
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Linus himself is working in a professional capacity. He’s employed by the Linux Foundation to work on Linux. The fact he is employed to work on an open source project that he founded doesn’t make that situation non-professional.
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It is only a disaster if your business relies on making use of other people work, in which they own the copyright.
Not everybody can afford to create stuff and give it away for free, and there are plenty of people who want to earn money from there creative work.
Those who have made a living from steeling other peoples’ material are up in arms that their free lunch not going to be free anymore.
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Or you run any kind of site where users can input anything that another visitor can see. Not just video and file sharing sites; Lobsters users could paste copyrighted content into a comment/PM and I’d be liable for not having a system implementing some kind of copyright controls.
(To say nothing of Article 11 wanting us to start paying the news sites we link to for privilege of sending them traffic.)
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If somebody posted something here that I owned the copyright to, and I asked Lobsters admin to remove the material, then I imagine they would. If somebody kept posting this material they could be banned.
Or are you saying that the Lobsters’ site should be a place where anybody can post copyright material, without any recourse by the copyright holder?
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The new law changes this standard safe harbor behavior. Lobsters (me) is presumptively at fault for copyright infringement for not proactively checking for possibly-copyrighted material before posting. So yes, your scenario is the current, reasonable law and accurately describes why everyone is concerned about this change.
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Lots of FUD being generated by those who will lose out. Copyright holders not making much noise about the fact they will probably make some money (or rather lose less).
Some good points about what is going on.
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The law isn’t about that, though. The new law doesn’t say admins must take-down on request (that’s already the case under existing law) but rather that they must have an AI system that prevents any infringing uploads from happening in the first place.
The link tax is a much bigger problem, especially lobsters, but both articles are very bad.
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AI system that prevents any infringing uploads from happening in the first place.
How is that any different from what @pushcx said? As the owner/operator of lobste.rs he would have to abide by this law and produce, or buy access to some sort of copyrighted work database in order to test for it for all content that is created on lobsters.
That’s not going to make it easy for startups. That’s not going to make it easy for privately owned, independent side projects. That’s just going to hurt.
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I replied before @pushcx and yes, it seems we agree on how bad it is :)
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The OP have missed being knowledgeable in copyright law as well as laws related to personal information protection.
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femiagbabiaka
3 months ago
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link
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Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
I hope to see more of this — if workers with as much leverage as we have don’t speak up against technology we create being used for evil, we can’t call ourselves engineers.
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Exactly. It has to be a large number of people that damage their mission directly or indirectly with media pressure. Otherwise, it’s something with no impact. At least people are following their principles, though.
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It has to be a large number of people that damage their mission directly or indirectly with media pressure.
Can you trust an engineering company who ignores the opinions of its engineers?
We are talking about one of the most celebrated company of western economy, often cited as an example of excellence.
Leaving Google for ethical concerns poses a serious burden on the employment of these engineers that will probably be marked as dangerous employees for the time being.
We can assume that this is something they knew, as Google don’t hire dumb guys.
So why they quit?
My bet is that the militar use of the Google’s artificial intelligence technology is so dangerous that these engineers felt obliged to leave the organization beyond any doubt.
Otherwise, it’s something with no impact.
Well, it’s a first step.
And a courageous one.
Its impact goes beyond the worldwide image of Google, beyond the direct issues in their production line.
It is an example.
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Can you trust an engineering company who ignores the opinions of its engineers?
It doesn’t matter. What matters here is (a) the companies’ goals/incentives, (b) how successful they are at achieving them, and (c) if a tiny number of engineers quitting changes that. Note that (b) includes implicit support by the many people who use their products and services voting with their wallet. The stuff in (a) means they’re anywhere from apathetic to damaging for a lot of ethical issues around privacy and making money. Due to (b), actions to damage them have to put a huge dent in that or make them think it will. (c) doesn’t do that. So, (c) is probably irrelevant to Google. The article itself says as much:
“However, the mounting pressure from employees seems to have done little to sway Google’s decision—the company has defended its work on Maven and is thought to be one of the lead contenders for another major Pentagon cloud computing contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, better known as JEDI, that is currently up for bids.”
I gave them credit in my other comment for standing up on their principles. That’s respectable. It’s just that a “dozen” or so people quitting a company with over 70,000 employees with people waiting to fill their positions doesn’t usually change anything. They’d instead have to campaign in media or government aimed at stopping those contracts or drone operations. At least half the voting public and current President support military action overseas. The other half didn’t convince their prior President to stop drone use or strikes. There are also not large swaths of Google customers threatening to stop using Google Search, Gmail, etc if Google doesn’t turn down government contracts.
So, quitting over this is pointless if the goal is to achieve something. At best, it’s a personal decision by those individuals to not be involved in something they disagree with that’s going to happen anyway. That’s fine but practically a separate thing from ending these contracts. If anything, we’ll just get a shift in Google employees from those who might leave over the contracts to people who range from favoring them or just griping about them continuing to work there. I think most will be in latter category.
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It’s just that a “dozen” or so people quitting a company with over 70,000 employees with people waiting to fill their positions doesn’t usually change anything.
The fact is that fewer talented people will want to fill their position.
This is a pretty serious issue, if engineers are the core resource of your company.Now, I’d guess most Google engineers don’t feel as important to the company as they feel the company is important to them. This happens in many companies, and I would guess Google has turned this kind of internal narrative into an art.
The fact is that, instead, Google literally would not exists without those engineers.
These few have shown exactly that: that working in Google is not that important.
It’s a matter of time, but if Google do not take serious actions to avoid this general wake up, other engineers will follow. And the same might happen in Facebook, in Apple and in many other smaller IT companies.On the other hand, in Europe and everywhere else, people will start to ask why engineers from a company that operate in their territories, are so afraid for what the company is doing, to quit. To avoid the risk of being associated with the company future. To avoid sharing its responsibility.
Politicians will be less friendly to a company that might be doing something really evil for a foreign state.I agree that more engineers should follow their example, but I know that life is not that easy.
However people continuing to work there might organize to keep the company “on track”, and this might lead to the creation of a labor union.-
The fact is that fewer talented people will want to fill their position.
You have to prove that assumption. Google changed their Don’t Be Evil motto doing sneakier and sneakier stuff overtime. They’re a surveillance company that hires brilliant people to do interesting work for high pay and good perks. They’ve had no trouble that I’ve seen keeping new people coming in. Status quo has the evidence going against your claim: it’s a shady, rich company with in-demand jobs whose shady activities haven’t changed that for years. There’s also nearly 70,000 workers mostly in favor of it with more trying to get in.
“However people continuing to work there might organize to keep the company “on track”, and this might lead to the creation of a labor union.”
That’s a different issue entirely. Given I am in a union, I think it would be cool to see it happen. Unlike OP topic, that could happen with higher probability. Silicon Valley will do everything they can to stamp it out in mean time, though. Still a long shot.
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The fact is that fewer talented people will want to fill their position.
You have to prove that assumption.
Not an assumption, but a deduction: people avoid cognitive dissonance, if possible.
A dozen people leaving a company cause of ethics, means that such company forced them too high on cognitive dissonance, and this will make Google relatively less attractive, in comparison to the alternatives: a talented engineer want to fix problems, not fool herself to avoid the pain of contradictions.
Our brain consume around 20% of our energy, after all.
This is the same reason that make me guess others will quit Google in the future.
Because now they have a new thinkable precedent.
A new, effective solution to reduce their cognitive dissonance.
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I agree. But we also can’t rely on companies that we don’t own to incentivize us to act in a moral fashion – engineers need a governing body for that.
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What about entering both US political parties and changing the policy? If you believe that killing people is wrong, maybe make it a law?
Sometimes the only way to advance your field is to step out of it and fix the external systems. And war zones are definitely not a good environment in which to build global information network to advance everyone’s wellbeing…
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I think it’s definitely a factor. Many prominent business people would not like to be associated with payday loan companies, for example.
I think this is less about being the silver bullet for problems, and more about being one of the 20 or 30 things we need to be doing to make the world A Better Place(TM)
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We can’t even speak up for honest pay for an honest day’s work–and that’s a lot less subjective than some arbitrary definition of “evil”.
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Why not both?
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At least the “evil” one is super cloudy.
Say you are an engineer working at a company that builds control software for missiles. You are a pacifist, and so you decide to introduce a minor bug (or fail to patch a discovered bug) that causes the missile to not detonate when it lands.
- Are you good for not facilitating the loss of life?
- Are you evil for misleading your employer about the labor of yours that they’ve purchased?
- If the missile lands on a poor grunt and severs their legs causing them to bleed out over minutes instead of detonating properly and just kinda instantly killing them, are you evil for prolonging suffering?
That’s just scratching the surface of morality in engineering.
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That’s fair – and I should’ve been explicit earlier. I believe that there are (at least) two moral guidelines that should be taken into account.
The first is a professional code of ethics, similar to what ACM has here. Of course even this is cloudy – for example, in my opinion 1.2 “Avoid harm to others” would necessarily preclude working for a missile manufacturer in the first place. At the very least, if one views missiles and missile software as being a necessary “evil”, safeguards should be put in to protect human life at all cost, etc. etc. The minutiae of the professional code of ethics can and should be rigorously debated, because it provides a minimally viable base for how we should conduct ourselves. So for example, the question of whether or not working in the weapons manufacturing industry truly violates rule 1.2 should be an explicit discussion that is had in a professional organization (not a workplace per se).
The second guideline is in line with your own personal moral code. This is important because it provides for people who are religious (or not) or any other number of cultural influences that have caused a person to believe what they believe today. This, of course, has to be superseded by the professional code – for example, if I personally believe that discrimination based on what TV shows you enjoy is okay, that doesn’t mean that my personal morality should define what happens in a professional setting. But in the hypothetical case you provided, even if I don’t feel that writing that software goes against a professional code of ethics, if I am a pacifist, it goes against my personal code. I know from the professional code that purposefully writing bad or buggy software is wrong, and so my only option is to find another job in which both my personal and professional codes of ethics can be upheld.
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Why discuss an unlikely hypothetical rather than the issue at hand? Why the need to logically define evil beyond any confusion? This is not even possible in the general case for anything. Can you logically define ‘fun’ such that everyone agrees? At the end of day, evil means what people talking about it think it means, and it’s better to work off of that than to halt all discussion until we achieve the impossible task of absolutely grounding natural language in logic.
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It’s precisely because evil is so ill-defined that talking about it is difficult. As @mordae points out, it’s more effective to talk about other incentives.
And again, I’m not saying “halt all discussion”–quite the opposite! I’m saying that the issue is more nuanced than “don’t be evil”.
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I certainly agree with that. I still think it’s worth going into, because at a certain point you’re likely to end up doing it anyway. For instance, if we start talking about incentives, we might end up talking about how to incentivize people towards good, or at least, some concept of “not evil”. I’m not saying it trumps incentives or that this is a more effective approach, I’m just saying we should still have the discussion.
I think a trap we as engineers often fall into is to attempt to build everything up from laws and axioms. That doesn’t quite work for morality, and the nebulous nature of it means it rarely gets discussed. The software industry in particular is very focused on “solving problems” and never asks questions like “should we solve this problem?”
I guess another scary thing about it is that we can’t really empirically verify what the right answer is, and depending on the issue we might even have multiple valid answers. But sometimes just asking the question is worthwhile, even if we don’t have an answer.
Perhaps tech companies should start hiring philosophers.
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Perhaps tech companies should start hiring philosophers.
I’d argue that a good programmer is a philosopher almost by definition.
We talk like if our field was an engineering field but most of times we don’t build things constrained by the physical world (yeah I know what latency is… I said most of times :-D).
Or we talk like if our field was just applied math, pure and intangible, but then we talk about usability or we kill someone through a self driving car.
But ultimately we work with ideas.
The choice to ignore the ethics of our work is up to us.
But we have much more instruments to think about our role in the world than any “professional philosopher” hired to think for us (in the interest of the company).
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if we start talking about incentives, we might end up talking about how to incentivize people towards good, or at least, some concept of “not evil”.
That’s how you do it. In Google’s case, a publicly-traded company, that means you have to hit them in the wallet in a way that knocks out the contract. Alternatively, convince their management to change their charter or use other legal means to block whole classes of action in the present and future that they agreed were evil. I’m not sure if that would even work in Google’s case but one can start businesses like that in nonprofit or public benefit form.
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I think friendlysock was trying to illustrate the point with some examples. The comment succeeded given the other person understood the points. There’s nothing wrong with that. You said to instead work off claims about evil in this situation based on what people are saying. In this case, what does evil mean exactly to both those employees and various stakeholders in the United States? Based on the political debates, I know there’s quite a few different views on whether these programs are evil or not. Even within the main, political parties, in Silicon Valley, and in Google itself.
The only thing sure is that about 4,000 of Google’s 70,000 people plus some other folks writing a letter don’t like what Google is doing. Of the 4,000, only a dozen or so showed it’s worth not working for Google. So, that’s under under 1% of Google’s workforce. The others are continuing to support Google’s success, including that program indirectly, while protesting that program. They may or may not leave but I think most will stay: workers gripe more than they take action in general case, esp if employer’s actions is morally a mix to them or six digits are involved. If they leave, there’s a lot of people willing to take their place with no long term effect on Google. The remainder and some new hires collectively are apathetic to this or believe it’s morally acceptable.
Many of the people staying would probably tell you they’re decent people with Google doing a lot of good for the world (arguably true) despite this evil. We saw this in NeverAgain pledge. Others would tell you this kind of thing is inevitable enough that Google not doing it would make no difference. Some of them would even say it’s better if they do it so they can do it right minimizing harm. Yet another group will claim these programs prevent a larger number of deaths than they cause or prevent real damage vs hypothetical risks detractors talk about. People ranging from those developing software to those doing drone strikes might believe they’re saving lives in their work while the dozen that quit will be doing less valuable work in tech for their own benefit.
I don’t think there’s a clear answer of evil if I’m looking at the stakeholders in this discussion. They’re all over the place with it. The acting public is in a few camps: those doing a mix of opposing and tolerating drone operations who lost the election; those mostly supporting them whose party is in control; billions of dollars worth of users and businesses who don’t care enough to switch providers; tiny, tiny, tiny slice of revenue from those that will. Put in that light, nothing they’re doing will matter past their own conscience. Hell, those thinking the tech is evil might have been better off staying in there half-assing the programming on purpose to make it look like such tech just isn’t ready to replace people yet. There’s precedents for that with many of them in defense industry except for profit rather than moral reasons.
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I am working on a small side project in Haskell. A clone of PostgREST with less ambiguity in the interface and EXPLAIN-based VIEW introspection. So far it has been a lot of fun, especially the part where I’ve embedded Aeson in my own query parser.
I rather like the idea of using a single DB schema for the public API, letting an universal application server to take care of details. PostgreSQL is a very powerful piece of technology.
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What I think would make sense is for official cartographic agencies to start maintaining their respective regions of the map and contribute towards standardization and tool development. Public maps are a business enabler and could be considered public infrastructure.
Libraries are doing something similarly stupid. They are very frequently catalogizing individually instead of sharing the records and even when they share the records, they don’t publish them as open data – meaning projects such as Wikipedia / Wikidata cannot use them.
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I thing we could manage to legislate some mandatory contribution to dependency maintainers in software public tenders in Czechia.
There is no official weighted dependency graph of free software to use as a basis, though.
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The act of powering up a computer, waiting for it to boot, doing some work, and then waiting for it to shut down gracefully is a barbaric ritual from ancient times. In 2018, we’re all modern and hip and just want to open up the laptop lid and get to work. Unfortunately this is easier said than done and as such it really only works reliably with the right combination of supported hardware. And even then, bugs in various layers of the OS can cause it to suddenly stop working consistently after an OS update.
This is one of the things keeping me on MacOS. The laptops are expensive for what they are, but the Just Works factor is pretty high.
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This is one of the things keeping me on MacOS. The laptops are expensive for what they are, but the Just Works factor is pretty high.
Have you found that to still be the case with recent models and OS revisions? That’s also the reason I’m on macOS, but it’s gotten less true for me over the past 3-4 years. The worst is that sleep/hibernate no longer seems to work reliably, and it happens on two completely different devices, a MacBook Pro (2016 model) and a MacBook Air (2014 model). About once a month, one will fail to properly wake from sleep when opening the case. Sometimes it fails to wake entirely; sometimes it seemingly wakes but won’t turn the backlight on (in the 2nd case it sometimes flashes on briefly). Usually this ends up requiring a hard powercycle to fix. Googling suggests I’m not alone, and there’s a whole pile of cargo-cart suggestions for fixing it (NVRAM resets and such). That’s by far the worst issue, but there’s a bunch of software-side stuff seemingly getting more flaky too (especially the App Store app, which sometimes requires a reboot to convince the Updates tab to load).
In 10 years of using PowerBook and MacBook laptops 2004–14 I never had that kind of basic functionality fail to work flawlessly, and I would’ve completely agreed with you back then, which is why I kept buying them.
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I can confirm your experience - I sometimes have the issue with waking from sleep, and regularly see the OS freezing for extended periods of time (I do have a lot of applications open, but come on, it’s 2018). The quality of software has been declining over the last 4 years. Unfortunately, I still don’t see any better alternative.
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Haha, it’s true, we’re all sleepwalking through life most of the time.
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It’s the Apple Tax: “In the end, we found each Apple machine to cost more than a similarly equipped PC counterpart, with the baseline Mac Pro being the exception. Usually the delta is around $50 to $150…”
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So firstly, that’s an article from 8 years ago, that also highlights Apple machines having longer battery life, better resistance to malware, and use higher quality materials.
Secondly, the thread is about a feature that works quite reliably on Apple computers, but very poorly on generic PC’s running Linux.
So, if you want to call “better, more reliable features” a TAX, then we have to agree to label any product anywhere that is objectively better than it’s competitors, and has a higher price, “Includes CompanyName TAX”
Got a HP laptop that works faster than a piece of shit Chromebook? Must be a HP Tax.
Got a BMW that has more comfortable seats than a Camry? Must be a BMW Tax.
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Any time a person ever gave me a set of Mac specs I was able to find a cheaper Windows machine that could do the same with hardware that works well. It’s not shocking at all to me given Apple’s marketing strategy of going for high margins. They’re currently one of the most profitable companies in the world with that strategy. Whereas, most of the other vendors became something more like commodities competing so hard on things like price. Your strawman comparisons don’t change that.
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And any time a person ever said to me “I found this non-Apple machine with the same features/specs” they conveniently leave out features that they personally don’t place value on.
We can trade anecdotal stories all day, but the article you linked to, doesn’t really support your argument the way you seem to think it does.
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The thing keeping me on macOS is being able to use Control and Alt for emacs style shortcuts for editing text anywhere (like my browser’s URL bar) because all the system keyboard shortcuts use the Command key.
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This is basically the idea behind Librem laptops.
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Okay, this is looking rather cool. I am definitely going to check up on them during LinuxDays.
I hope that they keep going and will eventually offer a 1U rack-mounted router.
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feld
4 months ago
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link
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Riot: A Distributed Way of Having IRC and VOIP Client and Home Server
It’s not worth it. I gave Matrix/Riot 2 years to become usable: fix performance, fix resource usage, behave like modern tech they are claiming to replace. It was not worth the effort.
10 years of IRC logs from irssi: 500MB of disk space 2 years of moderate Matrix/Riot usage (with IRC bridges which I ran myself): 12GB Postgres database
Insane. This tech is dead on arrival in my opinion.
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At least when XMPP works, it works well; provided you aren’t getting screwed over by server/client inconsistency in support. When Matrix works, it’s slow as a dog, client and server. (Not to mention New Vector seems a bit…. fucky when it comes to competition in homeservers.)
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I’ll be honest, I looked into contributing to Dendrite (the Golang successor) but found the codebase a mess (and it uses gb, which is not the way the community as a whole has been moving for years, but that’s more of a personal preference I guess). Maybe they’ll get their act together but for now I’m going to pass.
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Thats a very odd thing to have an issue with. 12gb is fairly minor in todays terms. If you take a look at the source for a message in matrix you will see they each contain a whole lot more info than an IRC messsage such as the origin server, message type, event ID, room id and a whole lot more. Also riot supports inline media which on it’s own would take up 12GB with some moderate usage.
Matrix doesn’t aim to be a 1:1 copy of IRC, It supports a whole lot more features that users expect of modern software and that necessarily means more resource usage.
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The media is not stored in the Postgres database.
The software is slow. It should never have been written in Python, because they’re affected by the GIL. The database is poorly optimized and has lots of issues that require manual intervention like this: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1760
The best summary I can provide is this quote, “[The problem with Matrix ] has everything to do with synapse, bad signature design (canonicalized json vs http sigs) and an overall terrible agent model.”
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12GB Postgres database means poor performance unless you have good hardware. Try running it on an Rpi or a Scaleway C1. You’re not going to have a usable experience. Even a Digital Ocean $5/mo droplet won’t be usable.
Not everyone has a Dual Xeon with 64GB of RAM colocated. I do. It was even awful on that.
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I previously ran every application I made on crappy hardware to make sure it wasnt overbloated. If it worked there, probably be great on newer boxes. Seeing the $5 droplets mentioned all the time makes me think they might be a nice, new baseline. What you think since you mentioned them?
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Quassel manages to store all the same data, also in a PostgreSQL database, in much less than 12GB. If you add fulltext search, it still won’t be even close.
The problem is that Matrix as a project just has a lot of things left to fix, my current favorite is their “database” backend on Android
Matrix could be great, if they actually drop HTTP Longpolling, actually finish a native socket implementation, actually finish their Rust server implementation, replace their serialization format with a more efficient one, and so on, and so on.
In a few years Matrix may become great – for today, it isn’t there yet.
Disclaimer: I’m personally involved with IRC, and develop Quasseldroid, a client for the Quassel bouncer.
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Thanks for your feedback. I am yet to use it extensively so I cannot comment on the performance issues as of now.
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Or maybe configure loading properly, including failing on unexpected loads early.
Sounds like a good solution if you are looking to optimize your queries. Honestly, we aren’t.
A simple example is a Rest Framework model API. We want to use this API for getting different data fields every time. There is no smartness in the ORM to decide whether to pre-fetch or not. Unless I take time to optimize each of the cases manually (or mindlessly always do JOINs which I don’t need), I can’t make it return me the data in an efficient way.
why aren’t you looking to optimize your queries?