The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
-
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.
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.
-
The more competent you are, the more important humility is.
Never listen to your own press. Always put yourself in other people's places. Never internalize people's praise of you and your work. Always listen to others' experiences of your work, and of you.
Yes, you have to decide who to listen to, but still.
"Always listen to others' experiences of your work, and of you."
The very *best* yearly review I ever had was when my boss very directly told me what I was doing that he didn't want, and what he wanted me doing instead. Most reviews are generic, because bosses are uncomfortable with this sort of criticism. Which means neither of us gets better.
It's ironic that my _worst_ rating was my *best* review.
This is how we improve, both as employees and as people.
-
@gvwilson @mhoye and also how many women are at this meeting and here's one of them: "Shuah Khan said that she can identify the people who will stick around fairly quickly, and some of the new folks who have come in are excellent. For this reason, she still spends a lot of time with people sending spelling fixes. "
️ Sorry for the multiple tags, just a mind-blowing organization there...
@wronglang @gvwilson @mhoye jesus. what an absolute shitshow.
-
@mhoye the phrase "the people who actually matter" makes me so god damned angry.
-
"Always listen to others' experiences of your work, and of you."
The very *best* yearly review I ever had was when my boss very directly told me what I was doing that he didn't want, and what he wanted me doing instead. Most reviews are generic, because bosses are uncomfortable with this sort of criticism. Which means neither of us gets better.
It's ironic that my _worst_ rating was my *best* review.
This is how we improve, both as employees and as people.
Someone who can provide that degree of feedback is precious! Treasure them.
-
Someone who can provide that degree of feedback is precious! Treasure them.
@mwl It worked out well. I'm really good at hitting the target, once I'm told what it is. So I immediately pivoted, and did the things he _specifiec_ that he wanted.
He came back in a month, telling me I was doing exactly what he wanted, and that -- if I kept it up -- we'd do a mid-year to erase my bad review, which would make me eligible for a raise at year-end.
Until that point, I had no idea a bad review meant NO raises for _two_ years!
Easily my best boss ever.
-
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.
On a tangent, the Raku community is desperately trying to revisit and undo the Perl community mistakes. Code of Conduct, focus on friendliness, focus on newbies, fighting against willful code obfuscation. (Edit: and the Raku language itself is amazing.)
I wouldn't build a business on Raku in 2026. But if anyone is looking for a fun project language, I respectfully submit Raku and its community for consideration.
-
@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".
-
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...
-
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!
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
@denisbloodnok @waffles irc.mozilla.org was a public server, yes.
-
@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.
