Chimera Linux Pushes Ahead For FreeBSD User-Space Atop Linux, Built Using LLVM

[Michael_S]

The problem with meritocracy is that *everybody* thinks they're the best, or at least they're qualified to judge who the best is. No failed automaker, processor manufacturer, popcorn company, tire company, or investment bank *ever* issued a press release, "Oops! We figured we would do fine hiring unproductive idiots, and it came back to bite us. Who knew?"

History is jammed with failures by groups who thought they were geniuses right until everything blew up in their face. Look at the 2008 financial crisis - I *guarantee* every Wall Street firm that went begging for billions from world governments called itself a world class meritocracy before the crisis hit.

The tech industry is especially bad about this, because it's usually white and Asian men deciding who are the best and brightest. By an amazing coincidence, they usually pick other white and Asian men. Meanwhile women and men of other demographics are becoming a larger and larger portion of doctors, lawyers, biologists, physicists, chemists, applied math, and astronomers. Those are all demanding fields, don't tell me it's easier to be a great physicist than it is to be a great software engineer. But somehow software engineering is the last dudebro boy's club holdout, where people with dark skin or boobs can't be leaders.

[kiffmet]

sinepgib If science would dictate how we used resources instead of the economy, we'd probably all live in a flouring variant of socialism and wouldn't have problems like hunger, human rights violations, homelessness, war and environmental concerns.

Many resources are scarce because our current economy relies on producing useless crap in excess quantities and engineering things to break soon after the end of warranty in order to pursue that "infinite growth". I honestly want to puke when I read about supermarkets throwing out perfectly good food (instead of donating it, they pour bleach over it and lock the bins) or warehouses like Amazon actually burning brand new stuff that couldn't sell or putting it into landfills.

The manhours, producing and shipping emissions, aswell as the spent resources (fertilizers, fossile fuels, certain metals) are simply wasted - no wonder that climate change is an issue!

[mdedetrich]

This combination of kernel and userland is unfortunately illegal and against the law. Linux is licensed under the GNU "General Public License", which does not allow combining it with non-freeware components such as "BSD". I hope Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy steps in and nips this in the bud before we get another ZFS-on-Linux situation.

Linux's GPL license only covers the kernel, not userland.

[Luke_Wolf]

The problem with meritocracy is that *everybody* thinks they're the best, or at least they're qualified to judge who the best is. No failed automaker, processor manufacturer, popcorn company, tire company, or investment bank *ever* issued a press release, "Oops! We figured we would do fine hiring unproductive idiots, and it came back to bite us. Who knew?"

History is jammed with failures by groups who thought they were geniuses right until everything blew up in their face. Look at the 2008 financial crisis - I *guarantee* every Wall Street firm that went begging for billions from world governments called itself a world class meritocracy before the crisis hit.

The tech industry is especially bad about this, because it's usually white and Asian men deciding who are the best and brightest. By an amazing coincidence, they usually pick other white and Asian men. Meanwhile women and men of other demographics are becoming a larger and larger portion of doctors, lawyers, biologists, physicists, chemists, applied math, and astronomers. Those are all demanding fields, don't tell me it's easier to be a great physicist than it is to be a great software engineer. But somehow software engineering is the last dudebro boy's club holdout, where people with dark skin or boobs can't be leaders.

The low IQ posters are out in force today I see. How very nice of you to make it clear that your agenda is top down control and that you are only barely worthy of our contempt and mockery, because you yourself are such an inferior person that you can't compete in a meritocracy and so must use others as your shield to cover up your weakness and worthlessness. Maybe you should try taking up another hobby? Underwater basket weaving maybe?

[justin_webb]

The low IQ posters are out in force today I see. How very nice of you to make it clear that your agenda is top down control and that you are only barely worthy of our contempt and mockery, because you yourself are such an inferior person that you can't compete in a meritocracy and so must use others as your shield to cover up your weakness and worthlessness. Maybe you should try taking up another hobby? Underwater basket weaving maybe?

Please link your GitHub account so we can see what kind of contributions a High IQ Individual With Merit has.

[sinepgib]

sinepgib If science would dictate how we used resources instead of the economy, we'd probably all live in a flouring variant of socialism and wouldn't have problems like hunger, human rights violations, homelessness, war and environmental concerns.

I kinda agree, but see below.

EDIT: I don't see how it would fix human rights violations tho.

Many resources are scarce because our current economy relies on producing useless crap in excess quantities and engineering things to break soon after the end of warranty in order to pursue that "infinite growth". I honestly want to puke when I read about supermarkets throwing out perfectly good food (instead of donating it, they pour bleach over it and lock the bins) or warehouses like Amazon actually burning brand new stuff that couldn't sell or putting it into landfills.

Science without politics is a bit, let's say, amoral. Not that it's necessarily bad, but all that prioritization of actually useful stuff is politics. And all that useless stuff is made by engineers (or rather, MBAs who hire engineers, but same difference, engineers need to make a living too) with an incentive to make money. That will still be there if you had a magic wand that kept politics out of the picture.

I don't mean you necessarily need gender a minorities politics in science and engineering, that part I think it's more a matter of opinion than economic reality. I do support some affirmative action, but mainly at the gates of fields (i.e., give opportunities, not decision making privileges) such as scholarships and trainee positions, rather than the whole spectrum of positions, if they have potential they'll go up on their own eventually from there (as long as you keep both positive and negative biases in bay, of course, that may be hard), and my main motivation there is just a gut feeling that it's the right thing to do, not something I consider objective. It's a point where I can simply agree to disagree. But you do need some politics to decide the targets of research and development if you want to make it sustainable over time.

The manhours, producing and shipping emissions, aswell as the spent resources (fertilizers, fossile fuels, certain metals) are simply wasted - no wonder that climate change is an issue!

Well, that comes from a particular brand of democracy, the wallet kind. If you work only by short term monetary incentives, you end up in short term priorities over sustainability. Apolitical science wouldn't fix that, because those who do research need funding and that funding comes either from the State, which in an ideal form would have better priorities but in practice is lobbied by commercial interests both from the inside and from the outside, or from privates with that kind of short term prioritization.
If you want to fix climate change you need aggressive intervention by the State. Bans on certain practices, actually painful penalty fees for picking a more contaminant pipeline having another option (enough to make the greener option more profitable than the contaminant one), or maybe even full on planned economy socialism as you suggested above. But all of that is politics. Or at least I understand that as politics. The first two can only palliate part of the consequences due to less contamination in the making of useless stuff, but those can't really fix it because they don't avoid the consumerism that causes that production. It's still a better scenario than what we have now. Those also have a side-effect of raising prices (after all, you're regulating through costs mostly), which could become problematic.

[sinepgib]

History is jammed with failures by groups who thought they were geniuses right until everything blew up in their face. Look at the 2008 financial crisis - I *guarantee* every Wall Street firm that went begging for billions from world governments called itself a world class meritocracy before the crisis hit.

I think not only they'd call themselves meritocratic, but they actually did a lot of merit for what their mission was. Capitalism is inherently meritocratic (except when monopolies inevitably emerge, of course, or when regulations apply), because competition is. But capitalism works for a basic incentive that is profit, and the consumerist branch prioritizes wild profit now over sustainable profit for ten years.
Those investors were actually pretty good at their job. They knew the thing wasn't long-term sustainable and made the right choice for near term profit, at the cost of a future financial crisis. But it was either them or someone else exploiting the situation, so the rational answer was "better be us". It may have taken us (well, I'm assuming a bunch here) by surprise because we weren't following the events, but the mechanics that lead to the crisis were quite obvious to anyone doing their homework.

That's why I think you need democracy to define priorities, because profit alone leads to this kind of issues. It leads to extreme individualism, where as long as your crew benefits anything goes.

[Michael_S]

The low IQ posters are out in force today I see. How very nice of you to make it clear that your agenda is top down control and that you are only barely worthy of our contempt and mockery, because you yourself are such an inferior person that you can't compete in a meritocracy and so must use others as your shield to cover up your weakness and worthlessness. Maybe you should try taking up another hobby? Underwater basket weaving maybe?

I see, attack the person instead of the argument. What are you, 12?

Tell me which part of my post was incorrect. I'll add to the 2008 financial crisis: the dot-com bust. I guarantee all of the tech companies that failed called themselves meritocracies. I defy you to identify any that did not.

I'm not saying that merit is bad. I'm saying that every place wants the smartest, hardest working people to be the leaders and judging merit effectively is only possible in hindsight. Google hired Vic Gundotra because they thought he was stellar, and then he made the Google Plus dumpster fire. Microsoft thought they could identify and retain candidates by merit with stack ranking (rank every employee in a division from best to worst each year and then fire the bottom 10%), and they poisoned their corporate culture and make trash products because it's easier to get a good rank by stabbing people in the back and lying and kissing managers' asses than by actually being competent.

I did not say, and I'm not saying, that the answer is to just hire and promote anyone without standards. I'm saying the measuring stick for merit has to be carefully evaluated and a wide variety of educated perspectives beats having a small group of people, however smart they are, with tunnel vision.

[Michael_S]

They knew the thing wasn't long-term sustainable and made the right choice for near term profit, at the cost of a future financial crisis.

But the really smart ones figured out when the crisis would happen and changed from betting with the market to betting against it. Everyone else thought they were smart enough to know when to make that switch, but was wrong. So you had all of Wall Street claiming to be a meritocracy and less than 1% of Wall Street as an actual meritocracy.

[q66_]

FWIW, the main point of of the meritocracy line in the presentation was to expose every single asshole that I want to stay away from the project early on, and it seems it has been pretty successful

I have enough work to do as it is, and I'm not about to get demotivated by additionally having to deal with toxic people