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Way back there was a contributor Con Kolivas, that made scheduler improvements to make desktop computing nicer. But he quit because they never gave priority to

Way back there was a contributor Con Kolivas, that made scheduler improvements to make desktop computing nicer. But he quit because they never gave priority to desktop stuff. I remember back then it was not uncommon for your mouse cursor to just freeze and then come back to life. The kernel group has different priorities to end users

specialist 5y ago
That's rough. I've had similar experiences. TDLR: Needful, worthy improvements require champions. A thankless role. And few of us have the resources and tenacity to serve the champion role for the long haul. In trying to understand organizational psychology and apparent apathy, I keep thinking of Stephen Jay Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" meets the attention economy. Metaphorically, organizations (and people) are information processors. Attention is our scarcest resource. We're all doing triage, at every level. Just trying to cope with the torrent of information, discerning signal from noise. Trying to prioritize efforts. So it's almost inevitable that needful, useful, worthy things remain neglected, undone. Even in the absence of pushback. Until some kind of crisis. When the neglected thing suddenly becomes very important. Cue the fire drill. Something must be done. The champion must be watchful, ready, proactive. Seize that very brief opportunity to sneak in their needful improvement. Ahead of the all the spazs pitching their weird and wrong and ignorant reactive proposals. The only winning strategy is to just keep pushing. Patiently, diplomatically. Be that useful thing that everyone's dimly aware of. "Oh, wasn't Con Kolivas working on that mouse jitter thing? Ya, I heard it's pretty good. Ah, it's ready to go? Cool, let's do it." If your needful thing is truly worthy, be confident that eventually it'll percolate to the top of the triage stack. This game truly sucks. But I don't see how it could be any other way with our current decision making structures.
- touisteur 5y ago
  You'll need someone working almost full time on this (like Jens Axboe on io_uring). I'm wondering whether it's some emergent behaviour to make sure you'll maintain the thing on the long-term and not just dump the thing on a subsystem guy and see ya!

specialist 5y ago

That's rough. I've had similar experiences. TDLR: Needful, worthy improvements require champions. A thankless role. And few of us have the resources and tenacity to serve the champion role for the long haul. In trying to understand organizational psychology and apparent apathy, I keep thinking of Stephen Jay Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" meets the attention economy. Metaphorically, organizations (and people) are information processors. Attention is our scarcest resource. We're all doing triage, at every level. Just trying to cope with the torrent of information, discerning signal from noise. Trying to prioritize efforts. So it's almost inevitable that needful, useful, worthy things remain neglected, undone. Even in the absence of pushback. Until some kind of crisis. When the neglected thing suddenly becomes very important. Cue the fire drill. Something must be done. The champion must be watchful, ready, proactive. Seize that very brief opportunity to sneak in their needful improvement. Ahead of the all the spazs pitching their weird and wrong and ignorant reactive proposals. The only winning strategy is to just keep pushing. Patiently, diplomatically. Be that useful thing that everyone's dimly aware of. "Oh, wasn't Con Kolivas working on that mouse jitter thing? Ya, I heard it's pretty good. Ah, it's ready to go? Cool, let's do it." If your needful thing is truly worthy, be confident that eventually it'll percolate to the top of the triage stack. This game truly sucks. But I don't see how it could be any other way with our current decision making structures.

touisteur 5y ago
You'll need someone working almost full time on this (like Jens Axboe on io_uring). I'm wondering whether it's some emergent behaviour to make sure you'll maintain the thing on the long-term and not just dump the thing on a subsystem guy and see ya!