hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

But this issue wasn’t found because of code analysis per se, but because of microbenchmarking.

Oh, we play dumb ad-hominem without any basis in reality?

I can play this too: Was your last school homework hard?

If the vulnerability is in the wild, what other security mechanisms do you have until it’s patched?

The only real downside on the open source side is that the fix is also public, and thus the recipe how to exploit the backdoor.

If there’s a massive CVE on a closed source system, you get a super high-level description of the issue and that’s it.

If there’s one on an open source system, you get ready-made “proof of concepts” on github that any script kiddy can exploit.

And since not every software can be updated instantly, you are left with millions of vulnerable servers/PCs and a lot of happy script kiddies.

See, for example, Log4Shell.

Yeah, that’s more due to need than due to technical difficulty.

Even in 2024 it’s still common that you have to print out documents to sign them or tickets for some event or something like that. All these (quite relevant) use cases just don’t work if you don’t have a 2D printer.

As much as I like my 3D printer, and as much as I recommend everyone to have one, is not nearly as necessary.

In regards to how difficult they are to make, consider the price.

2D printers have an advantage due to their much higher sales numbers (economy of scale) and they are subsidized by the manufacturer selling expensive ink. And still, a half-decent inkjet costs €100 or more, and a color laser easily costs €300 or more.

3D printers usually have much lower sales numbers and people usually buy 3rd party filament, so the printer needs to be expensive enough to generate money for the manufacturer. And still you can get a decent Ender 3 for as low as €150.

What’s different? Basically the whole thing.

A 3D printer (talking here about FDM because SLA really shares nothing at all with a 2D printer) is basically a tiny hot glue gun being moved on three axies by stepper motors. Of course, the temperature and extrusion controls are much more accurate than a hot glue gun, but that’s the basic principle. You got a single “printing point” that gets moved around and it only extrudes filament from that single point.

An inkjet printer has one stepper motor that moves the paper and another that moves the print head from left to right. So there too are axies moved on stepper motors. A very simple trait also shared by e.g. CD and disk drives, slot machines, camera lenses and many other things. All these things are as close to a 2D printer as a 3D printer.

The real magic of an inkjet printer is the print head. A print head doesn’t have a single nozzle but an array of many nozzles. This way, a printer cannot only print one dot at a time, but instead a few lines at a time. These nozzles are much tinier that the nozzles on a 3D printer, and they also are much more complicated to operate.

A 3D printer just uses a stepper motor to push filament into the printhead, where it melts and is then pushed out of a hole.

On an inkjet printer, you need to either rapidly boil the ink, so that a single vapor bubble appears that pushes just a tiny drop of ink on the paper, or you have a tiny piezoelectric transducer that creats a vibration that then pushes out ink.

This is orders of magnitude more difficult than a 3D printer, and much tinier. You won’t be DIYing a working 2D printer from scratch, while that isn’t all that hard for a 3D printer. With access to a decent toolshop, you can make all relevant parts of a 3D printer. The same is not true for 2D printers.

To rephrase your question: Why is it that so many people build DIY desktop PCs, but nobody is making a DIY flagship smartphone? What’s the difference?

Basically everything.

That makes the babies even smaller.

That’s a good vintage. That one is fine. But it will make your baby smaller.

If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.

I’m not a manager (used to be team lead, but managing is not for me), but I’ve worked under a few coleric managers and some that where able to communicate in a sensible way.

One of my bosses, for example (that was the job where I was team lead) had a pretty similar style of communication as Linus.

Sure, the company was his life work. But I also started there shortly after the company was founded and I too spent a lot of time and was very emotionally invested in the company and the products. And my boss was just human (and on top didn’t know a lot about the subject), so he made mistakes. And his judgement was often wrong.

But he was never able to accept that he made any mistakes. He’d offload all his mistakes onto some employee, while claiming that every idea that worked out was his, and not the idea of the employee who actually had the idea and had to convince him first. And every time something went wrong, he’d slam the door of some employee open and shouted and swore at that employee.

Turns out, that’s not a great way to encourage people working there. Most of the good people quit after one especially bad explosion of his.

Back to Linus: is it human to be angry that someone disagrees with you? Maybe.

Is it in any way helpful to anyone? Clearly not.

I am pretty sure that anyone who gets to be a maintainer on the Linux kernel is heavily invested and has sacrificed a lot to get there. Attacking them like Linus did, that really renders their life work worthless.

The maintainer did nothing with the purpose to harm the Linux kernel project. He just accepted a change that he thought would improve Linux. Disagreeing on a factual topic with your boss should never trigger an explosion like that.

I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.

But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn’t the right way, especially when done in public.

In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.

Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn’t cause anger on Linus’ side, since it’s a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying “This change validates that rule of the project” and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, “We talked about this repeatedly, if you don’t stop, we need to take consequences.”

Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.

But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that’s a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.

That said, I think it’s totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions (“We lost X amount of money” or “It took Y amount of time to correct it” or something like that).

So you are saying personal offenses and coleric bosses are required to deliver quality?

How does screaming and shouting like a little kid in a temper tantrum increase quality?

If you need to resort to personal offenses to get your point across, you are either lacking a good point, communication skills or respect.

And behaving like a toddler tends to make people really respect you, right?

You want some stern words?

You are a useless peace of dead weight in this community. Your comments suck and you have no idea how people work and how to professionally communicate. I hope you never have a job, let alone one in a management role. You should leave and never come back. Get aborted retroactively! You make the world a worse place by your mere existance!

How do you feel about that? Are you going to change your behavior because of these “stern words”? Or are you going to think “What an idiot” and ignore everything I said?

And we both are just anonymous randos on the internet and while this comment is public, not a lot of people are going to read it and it will have zero impact to either of our lives.

Now imagine I was your boss, both of us are publically known people and I post this on the company social media account together with your full name.

And people still dig this up 10 years later to laugh at it.

Please reconsider your interpersonal behaviour.

If all your engineers fuck everything up, maybe the problem is with their leadership who never learned to communicate clearly and professionally.

I hope I never meet you. You really don’t know how to human.

I think removing someone’s maintainer status does communicate disappointment in their performance quite well.

And as for anger and frustration, these things really don’t matter in this circumstance. Work is not therapy. If you need to vent anger and frustration, get a therapist. Employees are employed to do their job, not to be the emotional punching bag for a manager who can’t control their temper.

If an employee doesn’t perform to expectations repeatedly and even after you had a few constructive one-on-ones, then demote them or fire them. No need to vent your anger on them and lose your professionalism.

Tbh, the first time a boss of mine loses their temper and verbally attacks a colleague like Linus did here, they have also lost all of my respect for them. And at that moment I will start to look for another job.

I think, there is another underlying problem, and that is that many Linux users are overly defensive about their OS.

If Windows frequently bluescreens due to a driver, people also say that Windows sucks. But I’ve never seen a single instance where then a more experienced Windows user says “You are wrong, Windows is great, it’s just the manufacturer of the hardware who is at fault.”

To an average user, there is no difference between OS, drivers or even user space software.

And, tbh, if the system doesn’t run correctly (no matter which part of it) nobody really cares who is at fault. Because it’s not about putting blame on someone, but rather about the user wanting to do something and it doesn’t work.

For a bad comparison: Imagine you got a new car and directly after the warranty expired, the motor breaks down and needs to be replaced.

Would you then say “The car is ok, it’s just the supplier of the sealing rings of the piston who sucks”?

I’d rather say, “This car sucks”.