@ljs@social.kernel.org
@ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

ljs

@ljs@social.kernel.org

Linux kernel mm contributor, kernel/systems developer, writing a book about mm.

C/C++/(rust at some point!)

Book - https://linuxmemory.org/
Me - https://ljs.io/
Music - https://soundcloud.com/distal_music/

Arsenal fan, cat maniac, synth experimentalist. Brit.

Opinions are all my own and represent nobody else.

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ljs, to random
@ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

This fosstodon thing reminds me that those who go on the most about how considerate they are about others (+ how everybody else is horrible) are so often the ones doing the most harm.

It's been a spot on tell for me for quite some time now... 'the lady doth protest too much methinks'.

The cure of course is humility, honesty and being willing to embarrass yourself by openly saying 'yeah ok I was wrong'.

Deeply powerful tools, very very rarely displayed, especially by those with even the smallest semblance of power...

kentindell, to random
@kentindell@mastodon.social avatar

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    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell it's as real as full self driving or all professionals being replaced by chat bots

    kernellogger, to linux
    @kernellogger@fosstodon.org avatar

    Kent revived the recent discussion[1] on inclusion into the two days ago:

    https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230706155602.mnhsylo3pnief2of@moria.home.lan/

    /me abstains from trying to give a brief summary here, as that is most likely not really helpful given the discussion

    [1] https://fosstodon.org/@kernellogger/110614724438371207

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kernellogger sometimes people like drama for the sake of drama. Kent is no angel, and lots to criticise him about, but Willy raises a good point there. I've had people been less than nice to me who aren't on the usual list of 'bad people' which I can tell you as a hobbyist can be quite discouraging.

    What matters more is getting something that is actually useful into the mainline kernel and we just need to find a way to get past the drama.

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kernellogger yeah, I'm sure there's lots of blame to go around and things can be tricky with different subsystems, for sure.

    I mean there was drama around his trying to add functionality to mm so I saw it (and interacted with it) directly :)

    So I'm not saying the criticism of him on that thread is invalid, but rather, when he's not being all that difficult in the thread (ok not read it all so maybe missed something), put it to one side.

    I mean I was there at LSF/MM in person so I know the comments are not without cause.

    I guess fundamentally I just wish we could do without the drama. It gives the kernel a bad name and 99% of the time on the mm list I've had no issues whatsoever.

    Everybody I met in person at LSF/MM was lovely and I think people get a warped perspective sometimes.

    kentindell, to random
    @kentindell@mastodon.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell I take the point, but that article opens with a terrible load of bollocks.

    'Pretty much everyone in tech agrees'. Firstly, most people don't know jack shit, so that's not a good guide (hint: 'pretty much most americans agree climate change doesn't exist').

    Secondly, LLMs are fundamentally incapable of doing what people claim of them. They are a clever trick, but if you actually try to use them you see they 'hallucinate' very quickly.

    And this 'hallucinating' is inherent to the technique. LLMs literally are not capable of knowing what is correct or not or modelling in any way what they're saying. They're a black box clever autocomplete that can never not be interpolating wildly where data points do not exist (hint: in nearly all creative activity trivial novelty exists).

    Anybody sane who actually tries this for more than 5 minutes hits up on the damn thing being dreadfully wrong. 'Pretty much everyone in tech' is assuming that LLMs will somehow magically stop having these issues (that are totally inherent to them) one day.

    It's like using Eliza and thinking 'ok if people work on this enough it'll be perfect'. NO!

    'Pretty much everyone in tech' (yes this rankled) is susceptible to hype and nonsense.

    As to your follow ups - yes people are awful and might try to use this anyway. But for anything other than making chat bots even worse (sigh) this thing is going to arrive dead on arrival.

    On the idea it will revolutionise IT work just makes me laugh... Another hint: github copilot has been around for a while and yet 'oddly' this kind of technique hasn't had a very big impact on programming at all. 'I wonder why'.

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell honestly it fucking blows my mind that people don't seem to think it matters to check whether the thing works before writing big brained shit like this.

    Like shouldn't that be your first consideration? People forget cold fusion? Or more recently crypto, the thing that was DEFINITELY GOING TO REVOLUTIONISE THE WORD right up until it didn't so down the memory hole?

    Also I'm not willing to be nice about this author because he LITERALLY OPENS with that irritating 'most people in tech' thing. But of course these people always have to caveat it at some point because people are actually able to go and try this stuff and SEE THAT IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK 🤣

    So what you usually get is 'trust me bro all that will get fixed' or 'the next version sorts it all' or as in here 'well it doesn't work but I guess we'll see'. Honestly. Fuck off.

    Sound familiar? What other deep learning technique have we heard this shit about?

    Yes this pisses me off.

    Also yes, depressingly (very depressingly) there will be big brained boys who will buy into this bollocks and just try and use it.

    In the same way people take Musk at his word, turn on autopilot, shove something under the steering wheel so it thinks you have hands on then fall asleep in the back before that lovely ride into the side of a truck.

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell :)) tbh I took that one quite literally, instant coffee is the stuff of the devil.

    AND THAT WAS GOING TO REVOLUTIONISE COFFEE WASN'T IT?? 🤣

    (sorry gone a bit caps mad this morning)

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell I liked that analogy except I think it was far too optimistic. More like 3 cups seem ok, another 3 are obviously crap, the remaining 4 are covered in mould and on fire and only 1 of the 10 was actually coffee.

    The one thing here that I think will save us is memeing. And people have already been relentlessly taking the piss out of chat gpt/bing/etc. where it gets things wrong and then 'corrects' itself even wronger (because it's just going on what 'sounds' like a good answer and has no sense of right + wrong).

    As usual, humour and taking the piss is the best antidote to bollocks going.

    BTW if you want a less caps lock angry man shakes hand at cloud take on this, https://blog.piekniewski.info/2023/04/09/ai-reflections/ is an excellent analysis from an actual expert in the field on the topic.

    aral, to twitter
    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

    Even I didn’t have Twitter locking itself in its panic room after DDoSing itself on my bingo card.

    Can you imagine getting into a car made by a company run by someone this incompetent?

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell @aral @glynmoody amusing (well not really but in a dark way perhaps) that sub dude was inspired by Musk.

    A corrosive cancer no matter what he does

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kentindell @aral @glynmoody well in tech he's given the 'it's ok to fire a ton of people and run things like shit' lesson. So my industry infected too :)

    It's remarkable to think that he's killed people, at the very least by implying autopilot/FSD is already good enough and people believing him and letting the car 'self drive' right into objections and nobody seems to care.

    The more you dig into him the more you realise it's ALL a lie. All of it.

    A big factor is US justice system seem afraid of actually holding him to account. The solarcities thing was just straight up fraud and nope, just let off scot free when rest of board settled.

    His downfall will come, it's inevitable, but it might take some time...

    adamjcook, to twitter

    So, if it was not the case before, now that seems to be walled off for good...

    How can the and, say, The White House (as a two random examples) continue to remain solely on social media platforms that are inaccessible to millions of unregistered users?

    Those exclusively on the , an open platform, are being actively denied public services, official policy announcements and timely emergency alerts.

    Wondering if there is a legal argument here.

    https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23779764/twitter-blocks-unregistered-users-account-tweets

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @adamjcook @JenMsft I mean if you look at what he says, and I mean everything for the past decade at least, it's really quite difficult to find things that aren't/weren't lies.

    He's just established enough of a cult following + on-paper share value that people simply cannot believe he's just a lying scammer no it can't be etc.

    No he really does just blatantly lie and he really is just as incompetent and clueless as he seems.

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @adamjcook why do you think weird sub dude felt confident about taking his plastic toy down to crush dept? He literally cited spacex as an example etc. etc.

    The guy is just a disease. Twitter was just an exit strategy for cash from his massively overinflated tesla scam (he himself claimed that without working FSD the company's worth nothing, well FSD is a scam so... QED), then thought he could combine it with 'owning the libs' before realising he'd overpaid by a considerable amount.

    The VERY unfortunate thing is that for some reason people in the legal system seem very scared of actually holding him to account. The Delaware chancery court were a rare example and he didn't expect it... his solar cities thing was an open fraud imo.

    Just a deeply depressing time to have that creature associated with anything tech/science related at all.

    kernellogger, (edited ) to linux
    @kernellogger@fosstodon.org avatar

    I think the #Linux #kernel's praised "no regression" rule it massively subverted by one aspect:

    Developers that caused a regression in a mainline release (say today's 6.4) are only obliged to fix it in mainline (e.g. for the next release, 6.5 currently).

    There is nothing that ensures the fix will be backported to affected stable (e.g. 6.4.y) kernels (ideally quickly, unless the fix is risky).

    1/ That being said: the…

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kernellogger isn't it standard practice for the developer to explicitly cc: stable@... ?

    I mean there's nothing that ensures a regression gets picked up/dealt with in first place right? It's all kind of dependent on the dev doing the right thing/people noticing as with regressions.

    I guess perhaps some subsystems are better at picking things up than others?

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kernellogger yeah this is a pity. We maybe need a new tag that gets enforced by reviewers/bots/maintainers shouted at by Linus if not adhered to like like Fix-Regression: ...

    I guess in mm we tend to generally do (fairly) well with these

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @kernellogger @broonie yeah more automation is helpful for this kind of thing.

    sima, to random
    @sima@chaos.social avatar

    once more for the peanut gallery

    nvidia choose to not support the wayland stack. or well more generally, the new linux kms+egl gpu stack, since there's a lot other cool things you can built on top of it that aren't wayland

    nvidia choose to implement crypto locked down fw in a way that blocks open drivers (even apple got this right!). and no one else can fix it, because it's actual real crypto

    nvidia choose to not fix any of this

    don't buy nvidia if you don't like this

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @sima https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia suggests you can use nvidia drivers with wayland though?

    RL_Dane, to rust
    @RL_Dane@fosstodon.org avatar

    Why is it that people's reaction to is either cult-level positive or Ted Cruz-level disgust?

    I don't think I've heard more than a single person basically say, "Yeah, Rust is ok, but I like X better because Y." ;)

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @jbowen @RL_Dane @aja don't get me wrong, I think lisp has a lot of interesting properties, but also a LOT of this stuff has been noticed by other programming languages and features like first-class/higher level functions, powerful macro systems, etc. have been ported.

    Of course you can't match the code as data/data as code levels of lisp given its structure but it also has downsides.

    But still a highly admirable language, just not the magical be-all and end-all of programming.

    The wise person realises that there is no such language.

    And as for the rust fanboyisms, and I speak as somebody who, from the outside in, admires the aims and apparent successes of the language and wants to learn (when there is time...), it just strikes me as absolutely typical new language hype. I saw it with go and even js, yes js, with node's emergence, and python and for a while ruby... just part of the life cycle :)

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja there's certainly a human thing of getting productive in something and getting enthused by it.

    Bash is one of these warty things that you kind of end up liking despite yourself I think :P

    I quite like C despite myself and even C++... but sort of more of a C guy despite its endless and obvious flaws

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja the funny thing is it overtook python as the 'cool' language for ages and python was decried as boring and overly fussy.

    Look how it is now :)

    Better to just not follow fashions. And so much is oriented to web dev as if other forms of development don't exist.

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja well everything-as-text is the unix way.

    Very flawed but also very useful for forcing interop on things even when they never meant to...

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja yes it's awful, electron is a scourge. And I understand why people do it, but it doesn't make me like it any more.

    As far as I'm concerned I'm only interested in kernel/systems development. I've worked at every level in the stack, from crappy internal .net software to web to middleware stuff to systems, to kernel and even chatting to hardware guys.

    And kernel/systems is the one for me :)

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja I always thought perl was that so god only knows what tcl is like...

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja apple do a lot for that I feel, pushing people towards native and making a LOT of tooling to do that and a pretty UI that isn't web-based.

    Other big tech companies have gone all-in on using a massively legacy document layout engine for apps and it's just sigh. Plus CSS, a good idea but in actual use the worst thing to deal with ever invented.

    Anyway happy down here in the engine room :)

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja yeah I live in emacs so that sounds nice :)

    ljs,
    @ljs@social.kernel.org avatar

    @RL_Dane @jbowen @aja I have a soft spot for nano, call me crazy :P

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