The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye montreal mentioned
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@srtcd424 Glad you like it, but as they say, be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
@paulmckrcu oh, on a personal level I think I've been round that loop a few times. A lot of what U. G. Krishnamurti said to people who thought they wanted to replicate his path has come back to me over the years!
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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.
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.
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@mhoye Thanks.
Going off a quick read, it seems like a lot of its underlying thesis is in the direction that if you have to moderate someone in one spot, odds are they've been up to antisocial nonsense in several, and you might want to act on them without having to individually find and adjudicate them. That tracks - but am I reading it right?
@owen During my full-time involvement, it was still true that moderators had to generally keep track of disparate acts across forums, and communicate appropriately.
Early on, this was a lot of administrative work for me - most abusers get away with it by being perfectly nice to most people - but after a while I'd built up enough credibility that people came to value the safety of their colleagues in other fora very highly.
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A thing I said a lot in those first few years was: we are competing on the experience and ergonomics of being a part of this community. Every single person out there who is smart enough to turn the crank on a compiler and figure out how to send us a patch has thousands of options. The process complexity and hard-knock oldschool open source "culture" we believe is acting as a "filter" isn't selecting for brains or talent, it's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse.
@mhoye I think this is a battle we are broadly losing in civil society: from open source to the local volunteer fire department, people need to look at all the other shit going on in their life and say "this is a community I'm going to make time for". And when we look at the broader economic picture---especially in the US---I think people increasingly *have* to say "no": they don't even have a choice.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
@mhoye that means I'm zero
I learned Perl in 2025 and wrote new things in it specifically choosing Perl over Python because I found it simple. Cursed and annoying at times, but pretty simple all things considered.
I also do kernel dev on Linux, but due to their open toxicity to new contributors, keep it all to myself, including the security vuln(s) I find.
Don't get me wrong, I am 100% of the opinion Linux is on a one-way road towards self destruction, and once I have enough time I'll probably look into migrating to one of the BSDs, but that has nothing to do with age of the devs or users. -
@dalias @mhoye I can second that from the contributor side (in my younger days). It meant I ended up with less team loyalty, less systemic knowledge, and a lot of (internal) inappropriate reactions to setbacks and obstacles. It also led me to make some bad choices of projects to contribute to, not in the sense of the project being objectively bad, just not a good fit for me. None of that applied to the work I did for the right reasons.
for decades I'd always thought at least half of FOSS is just gig workers trying to build their CVs/portfolios to get paid corporate work, and seen (especially in AV/multimedia and telecoms) countless FOSS projects enshittify and commercialise as soon as they became popular and others gatekeep support/solution finding to nudge folk towards paid solutions (especially SaaS) to the point I've become cynical about the whole thing and often just stay on Windows as the cost of many proprietary solutions has plummeted (and some things like specialist automotive coding software and hardware simply don't have FOSS equivalents and likely never will..
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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.
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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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.
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@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.
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@mhoye the phrase "the people who actually matter" makes me so god damned angry.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
