Author: zauggge

Musks Produktivitätsempfehlungen

Kein grosser Fan von Musk im Allgemeinen, aber die Empfehlungen an seine Tesla-Mitarbeiter treffen den Nagel auf den Kopf:

  • Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.
  • Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.
  • Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
  • Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.
  • Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.
  • A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.
  • In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.

Und immer wieder: Simplicity

Eine Person auf Hacker News:

For the last 12 years, I’ve worked with 40+ different software teams (helping with UI/UX design]). From small scrappy startups to fortune 500.
The teams that were great to work with and ended up having the biggest wins, were always small teams with a great cultural balance. They always strived for the simplest solutions.

You could trace this balance of engineers in all of the cases back to GREAT hiring by the CEO.

The teams that were the least productive and just burnt through VC money were the ones that had a handful of toxic engineers at their core. Finding complex and seemingly clever (over engineered) ‘solutions’ seemed to be their goal in every meeting.

A way to find out if your team belongs to the second group, measure the amount of jargon that’s being used in meetings.

Linus

From	Linus Torvalds <>
Date	Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:36:15 -0800
Subject	Re: [Regression w/ patch] Media commit causes user space to misbahave (was: Re: Linux 3.8-rc1)
share 2k
On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 6:08 AM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab
<mchehab@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the
> returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.

Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a
maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel
maintenance?

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the
kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to
understand?

To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter
CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error
return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No
such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done
on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that
ENOENT would ever be valid.

> So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression,
> but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious
> bugs and/or regressions.

Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious
garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.

I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another
error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken
by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown
yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly
and immediately myself.

WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't
break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email
was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so
obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an
insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a
few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret").

The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space,
and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just
shameful. It's not how we work.

Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken.
And fix your approach to kernel programming.

               Linus

Klassischer Torvalds-Ausbruch zu einer Zeit, als er gelegentlich noch aus der Haut fuhr.

Ich persönlich wäre schwerst angepisst, wenn mir jemand dermassen an den Karren fahren würde, Torvalds hin oder her. Umso eindrücklicher die coole Antwort:

Date	Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:21:35 -0200
From	Mauro Carvalho Chehab <>
Subject	Re: [Regression w/ patch] Media commit causes user space to misbahave (was: Re: Linux 3.8-rc1)
share 0
Linus,

Em Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:36:15 -0800
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> escreveu:

> To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter
> CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error
> return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No
> such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done
> on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that
> ENOENT would ever be valid.

Agreed: ENOENT was a bad choice, and it should be reverted.

What I'm trying to understand is why pulseaudio is complaining.
Is it because it only accepts EINVAL error code for media controls?

I'm asking it to Rafael because I'm pretty sure that other drivers
don't return EINVAL when a media control is not available. So, the bug
may already be there, and probably got noticed on 3.8-rc1 because most
notebooks come with UVC cameras installed internally.

> > So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression,
> > but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious
> > bugs and/or regressions.
> 
> Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious
> garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.

OK.

> I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another
> error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken
> by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug.

Ouch!

> And you've shown
> yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly
> and immediately myself.

OK, please apply it.

I suspect however that just applying Rafael's patch may not be enough,
as the bug may still be there affecting all other drivers.

> WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

I know and I'm doing my best rejecting patches that could potentially
break userspace in advance.

Sometimes shit happens. Sorry for that.

Cheers,
Mauro

43

Zum 43. eine Passage aus Ferdinand von Schirachs Buch “Nachmittage”, die nachhallte. Es geht um den Künstler Alberto Giacometti.

Giacometti sagt, er müsse immer arbeiten, sein Leben sei monoton, wie das eines Gefangenen. Obwohl er ein sozialer Mensch ist und viele der Künstler ihn damals in seinem Atelier besuchen, sagt er am Ende seines Lebens: “Ich war einsam. Ich beklage mich nicht. Es war sehr angenehm.”

Nachmittage

Aus dem neuen Buch “Nachmittage” von Ferdinand von Schirach:

Es gibt Geschichten, die man nur in einer solchen Bar nachts einem Fremden erzählen kann. Draussen gehen Menschen weiter in Clubs, in Karaoke-Bars und Restaurants, sie verkleiden sich und lieben sich und hassen sich und sind sich gleichgültig, aber man selbst gehört für einen kurzen Moment nicht mehr dazu und fällt aus der Zeit. Hier oben in dieser Bar, hoch über der grössten Stadt der Welt, hört man die sanfte Stimme der Sängerin, sie singt Billy Joels And So It Goes und Chat Bakers I’m Old Fashioned, und es gibt nur das Klirren der Gläser, die leisen Anweisungen der Kellner und die gedämpften Stimmen der anderen Gäste. Später gehen alle nach Hause, die Welt beginnt erneut mit all ihren Farben und ihrem Lärm und ihrer Aufgeregtheit, und man sieht sich nie wieder. Es sind nicht die Geschichten der Sieger, nicht die lauten Sätze, die man auf Golfplätzen und in Flughafenlounges hört. Es sind leise Erzählungen von verregneten Nachmittagen und von schwarzen Nächten, und die Helden haben das Spiel endgültig verloren. Aber diese Geschichten beschützen uns vor der Einsamkeit, den Verletzungen und der Kälte. Und am Ende sind sie das Einzige, was uns wirklich gehört.

Danke, Roger

Heute ging die beispiellose Karriere Roger Federers zu Ende, notabene mit einer Niederlage an der Seite seines grössten Widersachers und Freundes Rafael Nadal im Laver Cup.

An ein Spiel, das ich nicht gesehen habe (!), kann ich mich besonders gut erinnern. Manche behaupten, es sei das beste Tennismatch, das jemals gespielt wurde. Die Rede ist vom Wimbledon-Final 2008: Federer – Nadal. Ich war an jenem Wochenende in Tübingen, habe mir den ersten Satz angeschaut, bin in den Zug zurück nach Bern gestiegen, habe periphär mitbekommen, dass Federer den zweiten Satz ebenfalls verloren hat, egal, dachte ich, es ist vorbei, lieber ein Buch lesen. Als ich Stunden später in Bern ankomme, werde ich gewahr, dass das Spiel noch immer läuft, 5. Satz. Gibts nicht! Fernseher einschalten, mitfiebern. Federer kam tatsächlich nach einem 0-2 Satzrückstand zurück, Phönix aus der Asche Hilfsausdruck. Es geht die Legende, dass Mirka ihm in einer Pause nach den zwei verlorenen Startsätzen in den Katakomben ordentlich den Kopf gewaschen hat: geh raus und zeig, wer du wirklich bist! Das hat er dann auch getan, kam zurück ins Spiel… und verlor den 5. Satz trotzdem.

Wir haben immer gewusst, dass, wenn der Tag seines Karriereendes kommen wird, wir Zeit unseres Lebens nichts Vergleichbares mehr sehen werden. Angesichts der eigenen Vergänglichkeit und all des verflossenen Lebens sind wir, die ihn all die Jahre als passive Zuschauer begleitet haben, leicht bedrückt. Um diesem beklemmenden Gefühl entgegenzuwirken, hier das epische Federer-Nadel Video, in dem sie das “Match for Africa” promoten.

Danke für alles, Roger Federer. Es war eine Ehre und allergrösstes Kino, all die Jahre.