CVS at my first job was configured to reject commits containing f-bombs after a spicy debug message sneaked into production and showed up in a children's game.
$ pulseaudio
W: main.c: D-Bus name org.pulseaudio.Server already taken. Weird shit!
Lennart, who I had spent some time with in real life a few months previous, didn't yet have the reputation for being the person he is today. I thought he'd be pretty reasonable about it. Instead he closed the bug as "won't fix" and left the comment, "Sorry, but please don't waste my time, will you?".
I was pretty shocked by his response, I lost a lot of respect for him at this moment and then wrote a long ass blog post about professionalism of developers and appropriate language for user facing error messages.. but still, Lennart tainted himself and showed the person we now know him as. (Also, if you are reading this Lennart, fuck you).
Ubuntu ended up carrying a patch simply to remove this inappropriate language, I never checked if it was eventually cleaned upstream or if other distros also removed it.
EDIT: I just checked, and it was eventually removed in 2011 [2]
[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/44...
[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-bugs/2009-...
[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/commi...
On the basis of profanity alone, your action seems far worse than their's?
I can use profanity in my communication, but I would never put foul language in an error.. same as I wouldn't in documentation or a formal letter.
Just imagine a pop-up dialogue box on Windows or OSX showing an error with "Weird Shit!" in it. Could you?
Why does it upset you so?
So tell me, why would it be "funny"? Are you, or have you ever been responsible for content end users might see?
Regardless, the Lennart tirade added into the anecdote really just convinces me that the anecdote is there purely for axe-grinding.
> Are you, or have you ever been responsible for content end users might see?
Yes. I don't do such things because of curmudgeons like yourself. But as a user I wouldn't mind at all, and think it's funny.
Those that have never interacted with him don't care, I agree (I mean, why would they?). But those that have, i'd suggest is a minority that can tolerate him.. but ho-hum, neither of have statistics on this so we'll never know.
When I met and had discussions with him in 2007 he was mild and seemed to be constructive, i'd suggest his "bullish personality" became more prevalent with time.
Ineffective assholes are nonentities. Therefore all assholes worth noticing are effective, and all ineffective people worth noticing are nice.
I believe there's a name for this effect, but what it is escapes me at the moment.
> Berkson's paradox is a false observation of a negative correlation between two desirable traits, i.e., that members of a population which have some desirable trait tend to lack a second. Berkson's paradox occurs when this observation appears true when in reality the two properties are unrelated—or even positively correlated—because members of the population where both are absent are not equally observed.
People will claim it's unprofessional, and it is. The problem is that when other's are also unprofessional you can't convince them by being professional.
If you look at who moves up the social ladder fastest and retains their power the longest, they are typically hard-headed people. The have an almost unreasonable amount of confidence in themselves, and in many ways they are delusional.
However, I would argue such a personality is better than being timid. Ultimately, past the computers and the programs we are humans, and human effects come into play. Success is not just measured by correctness; it's measured by perception.
You could instead provide a real argument, not "well what you say is used to defend abusers!"
Yes, and famously Hitler wanted economic strength for his country. I guess wanting economic strength makes you Hitler? ... wait no, definitely not.
I don't have patience for these weak types of arguments. Saying nothing at all is free and easy, I would look into that more if I were you. Seems more your pace.
Many years ago, someone replied to me saying, “you’re right, but your comment is so abrasive,” and that really stuck with me.
Humility and grace can go a long way, even in internet conversations.
It's one thing to think I'm wrong, it's another all together to warp my argument to make me appear crazy. Or pro-abuse. Or whatever. That, to me, isn't in good faith and I quickly lose the motivation to be kind. I work under the assumption the people I talk to aren't stupid, they're aware of what they're doing. I won't extend pity or give people the innocence of a child. In my eyes, that is even more offensive.
He's doing that only because it's his job: his employer has an agenda (i.e. steering Linux fast enough and disruptively enough at a low level, so that serious competitors cannot arise), and he's implementing that agenda without a care in the world.
Would I personally take such a ruthless mercenary over more community-minded folks? No.
After much checking it was realised that this was because the checksum literally was 0xBAD....
My first encounter with this was as a young developer at an electronics manufacturing company. When discussing a request from a customer to change a particular undesirable behavior of the device, I referred to this as a "bug" in an e-mail to them.
I was quickly reprimanded / corrected, with the explanation that -- while "bug" is a somewhat innocuous term to engineers, to non-engineer types it brings to mind a whole host of bad images, fears, and can lead to canceled contracts under the premise that we've delivered bad-faith product. I was initially very resistant to this idea, but I've seen the wisdom in this as I've matured as an engineer over the past 20 years since this run-in.
For a related example, it reminds me of this issue that was opened on llama.cpp by a user who was concerned that the software had been "hacked":
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/33#issuecommen...
> Hey, I was reading your Readme.md and I saw that your repo was hacked. I want to ask what this means and wanted to check if the users like me also get the impact of hacking. Or, this is not the thing I should worry about?
Of course, the repo was not hacked -- but the founder of the project mentioned that it had been "hacked together" (as a term of humility / self-deprecation) and some users got the wrong idea of what he meant by that.
So I don't think this is about censorship, so much as good public relations. "Don't spook the horses" -- not all words mean the same things to engineers as people whose perceptions of technology are shaped more by movies and headlines.
Another example is GitHub changing the default branch name from master to main due to their perception that the existence of a master implies the existence of slaves.
Reads almost like a haiku
struct Simba {
- mother: u32,
- father: u32,
+ parent: u32,
+ parent: u32,
}
"I don't think this will compile" // trust that the user knows what s/he's doing.
// trust that the user knows what s/they's doing.People got grumpy about master/slave being replaced with server/client, superior/subordinate, leader/follower, and similar terms but that actually largely benefits as well in that it makes things clearer. Anyone who has dealt with bus protocols that support the more complex "multi-leader" setups or peer-to-peer setups knows how the master/slave terminology can be confusing and potentially limiting in accurately describing the parts of the system.
And the git master/main thing also is more a matter of just making things easier to pick up. Master can be confusing there for the same reasons it's confusing in bus topologies. Main instead is obvious. It's the main/mainline branch of the project. And that also helps set the divide for main vs feature vs maintenance branches (and release tags).
So yeah some of it was done under the guise of politics but that's generally been more about getting an excuse to make the change without people dismissing it rather than the underlying reason for the change to happen.
So, putting politics aside, I don't really care as long as it isn't breaking existing stuff. My only point of contention has been the politics behind some of the pushes.
I actually agree with some of the other commentators that "blocklist" is probably a better term but it’s not easy to start using a new term instead of one I’ve been used to for decades.
Sometimes this leads to embarrassing issues. I remember one case where a Chinese guy named Hui was unable to make a blog post on his team's official public blog. Turned out that his name was on the list of banned words because of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B9#Russian
I was trying to explain to my wife where something was. In the [profane word for vagina] section. The B section.