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Many large decisions have been made by idiots, badly. Blindly accepting consensus as a rational choice without a counterpoint had caused many years of suffering

Many large decisions have been made by idiots, badly. Blindly accepting consensus as a rational choice without a counterpoint had caused many years of suffering for the human race from wars to bad science to bad medicine. Whilst I agree that the blog is probably hocum, there's nothing wrong with critical thinking.

matthewmacleod 12y ago
I completely agree – but critical thinking involves something along the lines of "here are the things that I think are wrong, this is why I think they're wrong, this is how I think they could be solved." The answer "let's throw everything out" isn't that useful; likewise, dismissing the considered opinion of lots of people who have been doing this sort of thing for a while needs to be done with some rationality. An empty, bandwagon-jumping appeal like this adds little value and just helps spread more misinformation.
- badgersandjam 12y ago
  Actually the answer is to be slightly more conservative with the approach. No one has to pick up systemd now for example. Leave it a year and see where it is. The technical merits will be obvious and the technical problems will also be. Moving all the chess pieces at once, which is what is happening is not productive, professional or a sign of experience.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    That's not the case though – systemd has been enabled by default by Fedora for three and a half years or so, and has been steadily adopted since then by most other major distros. Not everybody is moving at once, so why would waiting a year make any difference?
    - badgersandjam 12y ago
      This bugzilla query against RHEL 7.0 systemd says otherwise: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=POST&bug_status=MODIFIED&bug_status=ON_DEV&bug_status=ON_QA&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=RELEASE_PENDING&classification=Red%20Hat&component=systemd&product=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux%207&query_format=advanced https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_s... A lot of the bug descriptions are quite scarily bad when you consider them in context such as "various loginctl commands not working" etc.
      - matthewmacleod 12y ago
        So what you mean is "Systemd still has serious bugs," which is nothing to do with whether or not everybody is moving at once. That's the point – if systemd has important bugs they should be fixed. Clearly, the groups responsible for the decision have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it, and have accepted that a large, fundamental change will have issues. That's fine – there are a bunch of other distress you can use that have not adopted systemd, which you can use in the meantime if you disagree.
        badgersandjam 12y ago
        The two are related. People are shipping production operating systems with systemd that is chock full of bugs. An all consuming tentacle monster like systemd is fine if you want to dogfood it but to throw at paying customers and/or supporters of your distribution is a little off key.
devcpp 12y ago
Linux developers are generally very smart people in my experience. It's consensus of many experienced and smart people that makes it significant.
- badgersandjam 12y ago
  They are individually I agree, but as a group of people it's not such a good story. It's quite dysfunctional from what I've seen.
  - general_failure 12y ago
    What does this comment even mean? What's wrong with them as a group?
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      To borrow a quote from a popular movie: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
      - general_failure 12y ago
        I think this is trying to say you are as strong as the weakest link? Maybe it's trying to say something about group think. I mean all these movie quotes are all cool sounding but are quite shallow.
        Karunamon 12y ago
        Answer: Yes. Just because some thought has to go into the interpretation does't make it shallow.
        Dylan16807 12y ago

matthewmacleod 12y ago

I completely agree – but critical thinking involves something along the lines of "here are the things that I think are wrong, this is why I think they're wrong, this is how I think they could be solved." The answer "let's throw everything out" isn't that useful; likewise, dismissing the considered opinion of lots of people who have been doing this sort of thing for a while needs to be done with some rationality. An empty, bandwagon-jumping appeal like this adds little value and just helps spread more misinformation.

badgersandjam 12y ago
Actually the answer is to be slightly more conservative with the approach. No one has to pick up systemd now for example. Leave it a year and see where it is. The technical merits will be obvious and the technical problems will also be. Moving all the chess pieces at once, which is what is happening is not productive, professional or a sign of experience.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  That's not the case though – systemd has been enabled by default by Fedora for three and a half years or so, and has been steadily adopted since then by most other major distros. Not everybody is moving at once, so why would waiting a year make any difference?
  - badgersandjam 12y ago
    This bugzilla query against RHEL 7.0 systemd says otherwise: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=POST&bug_status=MODIFIED&bug_status=ON_DEV&bug_status=ON_QA&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=RELEASE_PENDING&classification=Red%20Hat&component=systemd&product=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux%207&query_format=advanced https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_s... A lot of the bug descriptions are quite scarily bad when you consider them in context such as "various loginctl commands not working" etc.
    - matthewmacleod 12y ago
      So what you mean is "Systemd still has serious bugs," which is nothing to do with whether or not everybody is moving at once. That's the point – if systemd has important bugs they should be fixed. Clearly, the groups responsible for the decision have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it, and have accepted that a large, fundamental change will have issues. That's fine – there are a bunch of other distress you can use that have not adopted systemd, which you can use in the meantime if you disagree.
      - badgersandjam 12y ago
        The two are related. People are shipping production operating systems with systemd that is chock full of bugs. An all consuming tentacle monster like systemd is fine if you want to dogfood it but to throw at paying customers and/or supporters of your distribution is a little off key.

devcpp 12y ago

Linux developers are generally very smart people in my experience. It's consensus of many experienced and smart people that makes it significant.

badgersandjam 12y ago
They are individually I agree, but as a group of people it's not such a good story. It's quite dysfunctional from what I've seen.
- general_failure 12y ago
  What does this comment even mean? What's wrong with them as a group?
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    To borrow a quote from a popular movie: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
    - general_failure 12y ago
      I think this is trying to say you are as strong as the weakest link? Maybe it's trying to say something about group think. I mean all these movie quotes are all cool sounding but are quite shallow.
      - Karunamon 12y ago
        Answer: Yes. Just because some thought has to go into the interpretation does't make it shallow.
      - Dylan16807 12y ago