[Toybox] Fw: Re: Dude.

[Oliver Webb]

(Rob wants this on the list anyways, and he hasn't CC:-ed it.
 I want it on the list for multiple reasons. (I gave him permission
 to cc it in a reply email I intend to forward to the list))

"the main reason to eschew programming in closed environments
is that you can't embarrass people in public."
- Linus Torvalds
------- Forwarded Message -------
From: Rob Landley <rob at landley.net>
Date: On Thursday, May 2nd, 2024 at 13:48
Subject: Re: Dude.
To: Oliver Webb <aquahobbyist at proton.me>


> On 5/1/24 14:57, Oliver Webb wrote:
> 
> > This is not a apology email,
> 
> 
> I didn't expect one. You still don't understand why I stepped back from
> interacting with you, and as far as I can tell never will. You attributed it to
> malice instead.
> 
> > I still stand by everything I said,
> 
> 
> I honestly haven't read most of it in weeks. I was waiting for you to pause
> before tackling the backlog, and you never did. You could have forked the
> project and pursued your own vision, you could have checked out busybox instead,
> but you didn't. But even that last email you posted to the list said you were
> keep going to "post patches "into the void" forever unless I did something to
> stop it. And that was after you declared I "wasn't rational".
> 
> "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different
> results."
> - Rita Mae Brown (maybe? attribution's all over the place:
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/ )
> 
> I unsubscribed you because it wasn't fair to the list's other subscribers,
> making them read the kind of abuse your last message was full of.
> 
> This is a parasocial relationship. I've never met you. I am annoyed at you the
> same way I was annoyed at the squirrel in the attic that kept chewing through
> the air conditioning wires. If you mature into a net useful developer, even if
> it's not for this project, that's GREAT. But you are not uniquely
> irreplaceable. If you go away again 17 years into toybox development somehow I
> expect to find it within myself to carry on without you.
> 
> You never asked "am I helping". You started with that as a bedrock assumption
> and when you didn't get the response you expected you pushed harder. Just you,
> shouting into "the void", louder and louder.
> 
> > and the repeated belittlement and derision directed at not just
> > me, but the people I work with has been beyond insulting.
> 
> 
> I have no idea who "aquahobbyist"'s co-workers are.
> 
> > I'd be shocked
> 
> 
> That's on you.
> 
> > if I'm not in your spam filter at this point.
> 
> 
> shrug You never were, I just stopped devoting time to your posts because the
> signal to noise ratio was terrible (my responses were fairly consistently "no,
> because..." "no, because..." "no, because...") and you never seemed to care that
> responding to you was work for me. You kept making more work for me and assuming
> that was free.
> 
> Sigh, I should edit and post my blog entries faster. In the April 23 entry I
> referred to you as a "screaming interrupt", and that the standard way to deal
> with those is squelch it and deal with the work in large batches later. Doesn't
> mean I'm unaware of the issue, and probably need to look into the underlying
> problem at some point (why is it screaming?), but not right now.
> 
> I just checked how many emails you were "to or cc:" on in my outbox since the
> start of February, and there are 53 of them. You are, quite literally, angry I
> didn't feel I owed you more of a response than that. There's precedent for this
> sort of thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning from
> https://wondermark.com/c/1062/ isn't quite what's going on here, but there's an
> element of it from my perspective).
> 
> We disagreed on the value of your contributions. I never said they were
> worthless, but that the signal to noise ratio was not great, and "don't ask
> questions post errors" gets old. The failure mode of Cunningham's Law is after
> you cry wolf enough, you get ignored. It's been described as "exploiting human
> nature by using toxicity in your favor" (at
> https://medium.com/voix-magazine/cunninghams-law-does-it-actually-work-771e488a2f06
> ).
> 
> Yes, you prioritized your replies over others for a while (and then switched to
> "coming to a decision" without me on github when I stopped interacting on the
> mailing list, representing yourself as a decision maker on the project to others
> there, yes I saw I just didn't react).
> 
> I have other things competing with your constant demands for my attention.
> 
> I've been behind on everything since moving from texas to minneapolis in
> february, and speaking at my first in-person conference since the pandemic
> earlier this month. You may have noticed my "every 3 months" release schedule
> from the FAQ went 8 1/2 months between 0.8.10 and 0.8.11. I have been trying for
> over 4 months to close all my open windows so I can reboot my laptop and put the
> 16 gig memory back in: haven't managed it yet.
> 
> I have a backlog of todo patches in my main toybox directory:
> 
> $ ls -l *.patch | wc
> 145 1305 10732
> 
> The oldest 8 of which are from 2019. I've glanced at them all, but and applied
> the easy ones already. Those are the ones that had significant design work
> involved. The oldest is "0001-README-switch-to-markdown.patch" which I set up a
> test environment for at the time
> (https://landley.net/notes-2019.html#17-10-2019) but it's bit-rotted because
> github's css is a moving target and "rewrite the documentation with presentation
> markup" requires aesthetic judgement and mkroot/README didn't even exist yet and
> in any case resolving:
> 
> landley at driftwood:~/toybox/toybox$ ls -l www/faq
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 landley landley 110714 Apr 3 2017 www/busyfaq-anno.txt
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 landley landley 45198 Nov 13 2019 www/busyfaq.html
> -rwxrwxr-x 1 landley landley 5664 Mar 4 2017 www/faq2.html
> -rwxrwxr-x 1 landley landley 9105 Mar 4 2017 www/faq-gpl.html
> -rw-r--r-- 1 landley landley 52790 Mar 31 02:43 www/faq.html
> -rw-r--r-- 1 landley landley 13814 Apr 9 2020 www/faq-nommu.todo
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 landley landley 8794 Nov 10 2022 www/tofaq.txt
> 
> Is a higher personal priority for me. Plus code.html is out of date, and
> roadmap.html needs redoing, and I keep MEANING to do all those videos...
> 
> I do not have a shortage of work. I was behind on everything and not going fast
> enough before_you. (Heck, the oldest open github issue in toybox is from 2018.
> If I didn't think there was anything to address there, I could close it. There's
> 234 closed ones and only 78 open.) Github issues and pull requests come in all
> the time, stuff comes in on the mailing list, you are not the only person
> privately emailing me, when I tackle todo items they tend to spin off MORE todo
> items...
> 
> I was starting every single day spending multiple hours replying to your emails
> to try to politely explain crisis du jour (or why your failure to understand the
> existing utf8 code was not technically a crisis), and getting very little else
> done. (I have already spent more than an hour replying to this email, and I'm
> not done yet.) Interacting with you at that frequency was not helping the
> project. So I focused on other things for a bit.
> 
> "There was a day when I looked up and realized that I had become someone who
> professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering
> fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more." - Neil Gaiman
> (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwRUyZMKwI about 9 minutes)
> 
> > But yes Rob, I sent another subscribe request.
> 
> 
> I didn't add you to the block list. The same way
> 
> I've been doing minimal
> 
> > system bootstrapping (The main reason I didn't wanna be banned was
> > because I've been trying to run gcc under mkroot and a response to
> > http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2024-April/030334.html
> > would've been helpful.
> 
> 
> Hadn't seen it. It got, quite literally, lost in the noise.
> 
> (If all of your messages are important, none of them are important. Responding
> to me falling behind by increasing your rate of output was... certainly a decision.)
> 
> > Shrug guess I'm gonna have to wait for
> > someone else to ask) and the technical rants you go on are nice to
> > read so I still want to be updated with info (Don't worry Rob, I'm
> > probably not gonna send you patches anymore with what you've done).
> 
> 
> I'm impressed by the implied scold. "Think about what you've done". I haven't
> got that level of passive aggressive phrasing skill. (My grandmother did. That's
> probably why I respond to it negatively.)
> 
> I never asked you to send me patches.
> 
> "When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are
> almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how
> to fix it, they are almost always wrong."
> - Neil Gaiman. (Specifically
> https://www.tumblr.com/neil-gaiman/22573969110/for-all-the-people-who-ask-me-for-writing
> )
> 
> I only apply half the patches I'm sent even from the Google guys (who Elliott
> has all personally vetted because they literally work for him in a payroll
> sense). Heck, sometimes I don't apply elliott's patches. Usually I fix things
> in a slightly different way, after evaluating the underlying issue the patch
> represents.
> 
> The result of the work I was putting in interacting with you wasn't improving
> the project, it was educating you personally. Often when I do a long writeup it
> goes in the blog and can be referenced later, or can turn into a FAQ entry. The
> fact somebody didn't already understand it implies that existing docs aren't
> through, clear, or well-indexed enough and something can be done to improve them.
> 
> But "this API is unusable, clearly it should be like this instead" ignoring the
> fact that there are 9 instances of it being used in the current code which you
> could have looked at to see how it was used? And I had to point that out to you?
> That's on you, dude. That's about teaching you, personally, to be a better
> developer. Nothing to do with the project.
> 
> I don't mind "the comment explaining this isn't in the header, the comment is
> right before the function body", but when that's in response to a message
> calling it "defective" in the title, and it's part of a sustained pattern that
> does not get better over multiple months?
> 
> You kept sending me a new issue daily, most of which weren't significant, if I
> evaluated it and said 'no that is not a significant problem I am interested in
> addressing' that kept turning into multi-hour discussions back and forth where I
> had to prove something to your satisfaction or you'd get mad.
> 
> You have always, consistently, treated me like customer service who is not
> responding quickly enough to serve you, and I didn't feel obligated to play that
> role longer than a couple months. It stopped being worth my time.
> 
> > Bye bye, have fun doing what you do with the people that are
> > payed to work with you
> 
> 
> A line like that honestly does NOT read as passive aggressive to you?
> 
> The only person "paid to work with me" is Elliott, and it's really the other way
> around there. He's paid to work on android, he's the one who chose to use my
> open source project in android.
> 
> Elliott is the "Android Base OS maintainer". He maintained the toolbox package,
> which he decided to use toybox to replace in 2015, as he described on a podcast
> a year or two after the fact at
> http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html
> 
> Elliott also maintains Bionic, and he maintained Dalvik before the Oracle
> lawsuit that forced them to switch over to Oracle's Java runtime, and he still
> maintains the android java libraries. But mostly, he's the guy who has the final
> say on Android's non-gui plumbing. Some things other people work on but he
> reviews it all and has the final say, like android's init system, and the
> "zygote" plumbing. There's a dedicated kernel team, and a dedicated testing
> team, that sort of cross-report to him. (Dotted line?) And a whole BUNCH of AOSP
> build plumbing he has a lot of meetings about. (He sometimes laments that he's
> mostly a manager, and submits patches to toybox he does in evening and weekend
> time to keep his hand in coding.) Sadly he does NOT maintain the NDK, that's a
> different team, which is why unifying the toolchains is such a pain...
> 
> No, I don't treat you the same way I treat Elliott. I have great respect for
> Elliott, and I do drop what I'm doing and address issues he brings me as a
> higher priority than what I was already doing, but you and him are not in the
> same position. And it's not just his position at Google: he's been on the toybox
> list since 2015 and he's LEARNED stuff while he was here. I respect his
> technical judgement, and if I got hit by a bus he'd be the obvious new
> maintainer. He has never taken me disagreeing with him on something and wanting
> to do it a different way (or after something else) as a personal attack. When he
> wants to continue an issue it looks like "that doesn't solve X, which is a
> problem for Y, and I think I have more information about it because Z".
> 
> We mostly interact on the same mailing list as everyone else. I only ever
> visited the Googleplex once (in something like 2009, I interviewed for a job
> working on ChromeOS and they tried to make me an SRE, the process dragged on for
> 7 months before I got on with my life), long before I was trying to put toybox
> into android (Tim Bird of Sony got me started down that path in 2011, and of
> course there was a Cloud of Drama from people who weren't even involved,
> https://lwn.net/Articles/478308/). I met Elliott in person once years later (we
> had lunch when I was in San Jose for the Embedded Linux Conference, which is
> also how I'd met Tim Bird back in 2006 by the way: he founded that conference
> and ran it for years, it used to be called the Consumer Electronic Linux Forum
> before the Linux Foundation acquired it). All of that was multiple years before
> anybody paid me to work on toybox: it was a hobby.
> 
> (Full disclosure, I got a "Google Open Source Award" twice, which came with a
> $200 gift card. I managed to enable and spend the first one, bought a Japanese
> language course at the University of Milwaukee in 2018. The second expired
> unused because I could never get "payoneer" to work right. So I couldn't say
> "Google's never given me a dime" after 2016. Although I stopped saying it anyway
> after Elliott bought me lunch that one time...)
> 
> I started toybox as a hobby, and kept at it for 15 years (on and off) as an
> unpaid hobby. In 2011 Tim Bird got me thinking about using it to improve
> Android, and I asked Google's then head of open source Chris Dibona if Android
> might be interested in toybox in 2013 and got turned down:
> 
> https://twitter.com/cdibona/status/342314738660810752
> 
> But I kept working on it, and different people merged toybox a few years later,
> but the first time Google gave me money so I could spend time on toybox as
> anything like a dayjob was 2022, 7 years later. And I strongly suspect THAT was
> mostly because I was so clearly burned out by the pandemic they got worried I'd
> quit otherwise. And this year they came up with 1/3 as much as last year because
> of "budget cuts" relating to the layoffs. (They said I should work half the year
> elsewhere, since I've been a contractor for decades, but I'm trying to sell my
> house and reduce expenses so I haven't really looked into that. The job market
> is kind of terrible right now anyway, and my wife just got her doctorate and is
> job hunting which will most likely involve a move, so it's all sort of up in the
> air at the moment. Lease on the current place ends in August, who knows what
> happens then...)
> 
> Rob
> 
> P.S. I would happily cc: this message to the list if you didn't mind the parts
> of your private email being published. I did spend 3 hours writing it. (Ok,
> there was some filling up the dishwasher and so on in there, but I have not yet
> done anything else on my laptop this morning. Check email, see this, and now
> it's afternoon already and I'm still responding to the first email. No design
> issues resolved, no documentation written, no code debugged, no new tests, no
> additional real world user use case data evaluated... just me telling you about
> ancient history and well-known tropes in private email, which I do not expect to
> make you a better developer because you're just going to get angry again and not
> treat it as a learning experience because the problem is clearly me.)