The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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@mhoye I'm skeptical that "wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition" should be a goal anyone should be supporting.
That's the mindset that got us into the shit we're in: FOSS as a way to get one's foot in the door for cushy tech industry careers, not as a way to take a problem you understand and care about and make things better for yourself and others.
It promotes the same kind of behavior in FOSS as the Google "breaking shit to get a promotion".
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Anyway: the Linux kernel could have that. Any community can have that, really. But the real work is the humility of admitting you might need it.
And a lot of people - not just proud but _justifiably_ proud, for all their accomplishments and success - can easily find themselves trapped in the kind of blind spot you can only be trapped in by the atrophy of that humility, from a mere failure to welcome and foster enough diversity and dissent.
Where you can no longer change without failing first.
@mhoye goofiest things is that the Linux kernel has the clout to get first dibs in any kind of talent recruiting contest...
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On the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, a true story: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.
The feature request was "I just want this to stop."
@mhoye yeah that's a problem of how IRC worked on those clients and servers!
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@mhoye goofiest things is that the Linux kernel has the clout to get first dibs in any kind of talent recruiting contest...
been looking at microkernels and seems like it's a better alternative and much easier to maintain than the monolithic one that Linux has.
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The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
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But again, there it's the same story. Matrix is still a _little_ convoluted as far as onboarding is concerned, but it beats the heck out of IRC's "learn a new OS and hope you don't get disconnected" cliffs-of-Dover learning curve, and the numbers again reflected that. Invest in community accessibility, and community safety and tooling ergonomics, and the line goes up.
Not a line made out of rageclicks, manipulation and misery, just the steady growth of a community worth being a part of.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
@mhoye I think the availability of robo-coding also lowers the casual contributor bar for fixing the couple problems they care about in a way sufficient for their own use, while the work to contribute upstream does not. A hostile upstream culture will just mean those changes get orphaned, or more forks or entirely new projects. That is not to say this is good, but the relative costs are shifting in a significant way.
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@sackofbones @torvalds @mhoye I'm not skilled enough in
Cto consider maintaining a fork… -
Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
There’s a smaller analog than a nation -
My grandparents had a saying? “Three generations shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves”, meaning that it’s difficult for a family to stay wealthy longer than that because the new generations rarely act to match circumstances.
We’re only in the third or fourth generation of programming. The fat years were like adaptive radiation, there’s a new resource, let’s try everything, it all works! But eventually that ends.
Maybe that was two analogs
@mhoye -
@waffles The combination of the long running and deep seated cultural expectation of working in the open, the fact that for many years IRC was the only suitable tool for that and that later alternatives were almost all proprietary or otherwise closed meant we held onto it for very good, values-forward reasons, for a lot longer than we should have.
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@denisbloodnok @waffles irc.mozilla.org was a public server, yes.
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@mhoye I just want to remind folks that ESR was already a nazi when he wrote CATB, and the entire framing was motivated and guided by his ideologies. I'm not sure we have the unadulterated historical memories to evaluate things untainted by that.
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@mhoye I have wondered for years what the point of licences for open source projects really was if it was trivial to ignore them and it only cost money to deal with it (which companies had and the authors did not).
Am I missing something?
@grmpyprogrammer
Guess having the necessary clout should've been the job of the fsf.
@mhoye -
@mhoye Something something cathedral, something something bazaar. Who's the priests now, Linus?
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@hllizi @mhoye I don't think it was pushing a specifically *nazi* agenda there, but he had very strongly held ideas about human motivation, how human beings organize their activities, and what sorts of organizing should be encouraged or discouraged.
Remember this all came around the same time of his mission to replace Free Software with Open Source and make the whole thing appealing to capitalists for the purpose of appropriating free (lowercase-f) labor.
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@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
Linux is a local optimum and the path to a different one leads through the valley of pain. Hardly anybody goes through the valley of pain unless much bigger pain awaits them where they are. And those that do mostly die there unless others join. I think that's the principle that explains most misery on this godforsaken planet.
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@hllizi @mhoye I don't think it was pushing a specifically *nazi* agenda there, but he had very strongly held ideas about human motivation, how human beings organize their activities, and what sorts of organizing should be encouraged or discouraged.
Remember this all came around the same time of his mission to replace Free Software with Open Source and make the whole thing appealing to capitalists for the purpose of appropriating free (lowercase-f) labor.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
@mhoye this is also why ignore doesn't work in any community. New people assume the behavior they see is acceptable. You must actively remove people who exhibit unacceptable behavior.
