A pair of Rust kernel modules [LWN.net]

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 6:11 UTC (Wed) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Well, if you wanna be glass half-full(ish), I believe Lennart received death threats. So progress, of a sort. I would say the community has come a long way, if this is the worst of it. Still a bit annoying, but progress is like that.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 8:16 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (19 responses)

I'm not sure it's a troll. Trolls want to be read but this was too long, unstructured, lacking logic and with more emotional content than technical. I bet most people didn't get past the first few lines. So it was not a good troll but bad trolls are usually not like that either: the English style is usually not that good. So I'm afraid it's someone genuinely getting that emotional because of... computer code? Concerning, someone should help.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 9:20 UTC (Wed) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (18 responses)

Grow up. Criticism of a programming language on technical grounds is not "emotional". What is emotional is the trolling and dogpiling of the Rust community in response to any kind of criticism.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 9:54 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (17 responses)

It was a troll. For example, you wrote

Nobody has even managed to represent the Wayland memory model in Rust, and the kernel is far more complicated than that. The one serious attempt to do so failed after months of work because it required writing thousands upon thousands of lines of memory management boilerplate.

In fact, the developer of wayland-rs rebutted this two years ago, and both wayland-rs and smithay (an alternative to wlroots -- not wayland -- in rust) are actively maintained today. Not in wide use (gnome/libweston dominates, kde and wlroots are a distant second/third, not much space for others). But it's there. Perhaps you are thinking of weston-rs.

Many of your other comments -- such as they are, omitting the "yeah right", "anyone notice that..." etc -- have been amply rebutted by others above.

As far as the kernel is concerned, if there was a huge issue with Linux's memory model, Linus would have noticed by now, I think.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 10:37 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (16 responses)

> > What is emotional is the trolling and dogpiling of the Rust community in response to any kind of criticism.

Isn't it interesting that milesrout wrote this? Because that is exactly what he is doing ...

Cheers,
Wol

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 11:12 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (15 responses)

How about if we all stop calling each other names here? Please?

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 12:36 UTC (Wed) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link] (14 responses)

As a spectator in this discussion, I have to say that the antics of people like milesrout make me not want to read the comments section at all. I wish the comments section had a way to collapse all replies underneath a rambling / trolling comment (similar to reddit) so I can skip to things that are actually worth reading.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 12:41 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (11 responses)

As a subscriber (at least the "professional hacker" level), you have access to a feature to mask out certain users. I believe it hides the whole tree from any of their contributions.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 13:03 UTC (Wed) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link] (9 responses)

That's useful, thanks! It's a bit sad to me that the editors are allowing the comment section to become toxic enough to require adding such a feature. As a former reddit community moderator, it's frustrating to me when I see people allow this to happen.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 13:17 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

For the most part, it doesn't happen here. I suspect the majority of readers are subscribers, which means it's only "old" articles that get the attention of trolls.

The difficulty is when you get articles that by their very nature are contentious, and debate can easily get heated. That, sadly, then attracts trolls like moths to a flame.

Which then encourages subscribers to subscribe to a level that permits them to apply their own moderation.

It's like democracy - "the worst form of government, apart from all the others we've tried". Moderation is a bad thing. Just is it better than the alternatives? For the most part, for this site at least, it clearly is not.

Cheers,
Wol

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 13:21 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (6 responses)

Out of curiosity, what would you propose that "the editors" do to make things better? Assuming we had the time and stomach to go deleting/blocking posts, what are the criteria we should use? Most of the time, asking LWN readers to behave like adults works; I'm not sure what to do in cases where it doesn't.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 19:21 UTC (Wed) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link] (2 responses)

> Assuming we had the time and stomach to go deleting/blocking posts, what are the criteria we should use?

My opinion is that a large part of the problem is that those two, very blunt weapons are the only ones available. It means that as long as one nominally follows the rules[1], one is completely free to (deliberately or accidentally) abuse LWNs perverse feedback loops to derail discussions: Write the most incendiary thing you think you can get away with, get it as far up the page as possible by being early, fight with every reply and watch your discussion take up vertical space on the page until nobody has the patience to scroll past it to read anything more substantive anymore. At that point you have won by being the loudest and stop replying to avoid getting chastized by Your Editor.

With no mechanism to counteract this, it's unsurprising it keeps happening. Softer measures like hiding, collapsing or locking a thread, sending it to the bottom of the sort order, showing limited reply depth or rate limiting back and forth replies are probably more effective there than hardline moderation.

> Most of the time, asking LWN readers to behave like adults works; I'm not sure what to do in cases where it doesn't.

I think it's remarkable how well this works, all things considered.

[1] https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 18:03 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Softer measures like hiding, collapsing or locking a thread, sending it to the bottom of the sort order, showing limited reply depth or rate limiting back and forth replies are probably more effective there than hardline moderation.

This.

Surprise, surprise, "analog" problems rarely ever have binary solutions (unless of course you read social media).

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 16, 2022 3:32 UTC (Fri) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link]

> With no mechanism to counteract this, it's unsurprising it keeps happening. Softer measures like hiding, collapsing or locking a thread, sending it to the bottom of the sort order, showing limited reply depth or rate limiting back and forth replies are probably more effective there than hardline moderation.

And what would be the grounds for doing this? Is this JUST for criticism of Rust? Or does it include a broader category of messages than that?

In my opinion there is no issue. The discussion isn't even heated. I made a SINGLE comment and was immediately accused of trolling. It seems to me that ANY criticism of Rust immediately gets labelled as trolling. Yet lots of topics covered here are contentious and prompt back-and-forth discussions that often are not particularly productive. Only criticism of Rust seems to get immediately labelled as trolling, as far as I can see.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 7:05 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Just throwing ideas out: if you ask someone to be an adult more than X times in window Y + random episilon, put them in a cooling off queue - not necessarily a ban, just slow the rate of posts, to a stop, and then ramp back up (assuming no more adult warnings)

It could be automated - other than ticking an "adult warning" on your post. The randomness is to prevent gaming - keeps you wondering if this time is the one.

I know, a bit naive, just thinking what would help me when I get too troll-y. Particularly in my younger years - I'd like to think I'm older and wiser then when I joined. Because I'm definitely older ;)

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 13:24 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Two concrete proposals:

Have the editors able to "flag" a post and all its children as problematic, which results in the thread content being hidden by default, and require readers to click through to read each flagged post in turn. This is a weaker form of deletion.
Support delayed posting, with the minimum required delay set by the editors for replies to any post or its children, and also something that can be set on an individual account - the delay applicable at any point in the thread is the maximum delay of all of its parent posts. This means that when I hit "Post comment", instead of it actually posting, it enters a "quarantine" state, and I have to come back to the thread to release the comment from quarantine at a later time. This is a weaker form of blocking.

The idea behind the first option is to reduce the visibility of overheated threads, allowing you to indicate that you think that a given thread is non-productive (and discouraging people from either reading it or replying to it). The idea behind the second is to let you use time to cool off a thread that's become heated, or to increase the effort trolls and abusers have to put into actually being seen.

Finally, when I killfile a user, I should have the option to not only killfile that user, but also all immediate replies to them; that way, if I killfile a user who's good at trolling, I don't see the replies that they successfully troll for (but I do see the replies to replies, which may be interesting tangents from the troll).

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 16, 2022 5:04 UTC (Fri) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]

Also, an idea would be to add a "cooling down" timer to subtrees selection of discussions, with a visual marker to signal that there is delayed posting enforced in that part of the comments. This can be also linked with a moderator message (typically one "please refrain..." from our favorite editor in chief)

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 16, 2022 12:01 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The system here isn't perfect, or modern, and people often criticise it when there's an angry mob thread like this, but to date I haven't yet witnessed an angry mob directed *at* the moderation. That's a better success rate than nearly every web forum I've used in the past 20-odd years.

Incidentally a major subreddit became Main Character Of The Day on other social media this week for grotesque moderator overreach. I would say the reddit/voat/8chan/urbit model of expendable community and digital royalty built atop it has produced some of the worst results. That website has trench lines by the hundred and the tools are designed to only escalate.

LWN user ignore list pros & cons

Posted Sep 14, 2022 14:54 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Yeah, this helps, and milesrout is one of the people I have on my ignore list. However, this doesn't prevent the "unread comments" functionality from showing child posts to one of the ignored people. That way one is often sucked back in to such threads as reading such a reply makes me often wonder what they're referring to — as I simply don't remember anything they could refer to (due to it being hidden by default).

Not sure what the best solution is here; maybe collapse those as well by default? Even if the top-most shown comment isn't by an ignored user? Or at least marking it in an obvious way?

Anyway, I'm very grateful to have that ignore list. For that & the excellent content in general I continue to be a happy subscriber.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 19, 2022 0:50 UTC (Mon) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link] (1 responses)

> As a spectator in this discussion, I have to say that the antics of people like milesrout make me not want to read the comments section at all.

As a counter point, I've enjoyed the discussion milesrout has created. Some of the replies have been excellent - the best I've seen on this subject anywhere on the web. They're from people who clearly know the subject very well and also write clearly.

I think that's because they are passionate about the subject. They wear that passion on their sleeves, which I suspect is what you are objecting to - it's not a dry "authoritative" academic treatment of the subject. Yes, that passion could easily drag the discussion into the weeds, but without the passion they would not of invested the time and effort needed to craft such replies.

It's difficult to argue passionately about something, while maintaining the disciplined needed to address the just subject and not the people delivering it. Yet, that is mostly what has been achieved here, in what is effectively an open forum. I put it down to corbet's gentle steering. As other's have said, he limited tools available. His most effective one seems to be leading by example.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 19, 2022 3:24 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

LWN is probably the only site in the entire world where you can find people with expertise, writing skills, patience and willingness to politely answer impolite trolls by sharing knowledge badge-like articles - for free. It happens only on LWN but even on LWN it does not happen every time and a tiny bit of semi-automated moderation may not hurt. My 2c.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 22:28 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

That was not anti-Rust, it was anti-anti-Rust. It was in reply to someone who (wrongly) claimed that Rust's safety model was broken because it fails to prevent memory leaks. I was pointing out that Rust never claimed to do this in the first place, and that it makes no sense to assert otherwise. You may disagree with my reasoning, but please do not mischaracterize my position.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 0:50 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Sorry for misunderstanding.