A rant about lack of support on open source software, or anything else actually

[pcprogrammer]

True that the search for information online may waste a lot of time, but I think a secondary problem is that people's expectations have also changed due to this seemingly infinite resource: instead of just looking for some precise information to help them move forward, many people are now expecting others (and now "maybe", increasingly "AI", which is yet another potential issue of its own) to solve their problems entirely, instead of just getting some specific information and use it to solve the problem themselves. It's a very significant shift, and we're only beginning to see the consequences.

A bit of a problem is that one needs the ability to see the gems in between the garbage, and I fear many have lost that ability and therefore hope on finding complete solutions or want others to give it to them. Laziness might be part of the problem.

When looking for some specific type of integrated circuit it can be very overwhelming to see the sheer amount of valid data to choose from, and then it is up to managing your search parameters, which is a skill in it self. No idea if they do, but this is something that could be taught on schools.

[DiTBho]

But I think there is a more optimistic possibility: enough questions have been answered already, enough tutorials written and videos made, that those with any smarts and searching skill simply don't ask that many questions anymore

That isn't good, either, because nothing truly excellent has been discovered or invented in absolute isolation

Ania is trying to demonstrate how "brainstorming" is a direct competitor to the evolution of intelligence of a species, understood as the "species" ability to solve problems.

Her model works for

• Homo sapiens
• killer whales (would like to prove that they are much more intelligent than whales, given that they have developed group "hunting technology")
• dolphins, which have even developed a language to coordinate their group "hunting technology"

Unfortunately it doesn't work with octopuses, which know how to solve kinematically complex problems; do they do it without thinking? ganglia of neural circuits? From the outside what we observe is that they solve very difficult kinematic problems for our robotic technology, but which are solitary animals and don't form groups.

Octopuses are even relatives of snails, which do not display the same intelligence. They are a mystery, so they are ignored at the moment as not as they are not in the mammals-class.

Anyway then there are forms of "parasitic problem-solving intelligence", where the resolution of problems is delegated to others or to other-things (chatGPT? ... )

oh, but when others means "other people in the team", doesn't sound it ... practically what managers do?
So, now I doubt "managers" are human beings of the same class as developers, not in the same basket, perhaps they are more "evolved" forms that minimize their energy consumption while maximizing profit!

Problem solving requires thinking, and thinking consumes a lot of energy.

And that's the point about parasitic problem-solving intelligence!

They must necessarily be an evolved form 

[pcprogrammer]

But what happens when everybody evolves to being a manager. 

[5U4GB]

But what happens when everybody evolves to being a manager. 

Some companies have means of avoiding squandering talent in this manner by promoting people into positions with management-level pay but that allow them to continue working as before, typically the role has some term like "scientist" or "distinguished" or something in it to explain the pay grade vs. the work they do.

[SiliconWizard]

But what happens when everybody evolves to being a manager. 

Some companies have means of avoiding squandering talent in this manner by promoting people into positions with management-level pay but that allow them to continue working as before, typically the role has some term like "scientist" or "distinguished" or something in it to explain the pay grade vs. the work they do.

Yes true.
Another kind of strategy is to promote someone to a management position to get rid of them eventually (that's when firing them would be difficult or could be risky). As a manager, the person will have less direct operational impact (if any depending on the position), and the company can thus move the person up to their point of provable incompetence, or uselessness, and then fire them at this point with some basis, or make their life so miserable that the person will just quit on their own.

[BreakingOhmsLaw]

They do loads of videos which are barely legible (very poor English).

If you think those are bad, try their webinars. I stopped attending those because they caused me physical pain.

People complain about Americans refusing to learn foreign languages, but trust me, the French take that cake, excuse me, gateau.
You can visit any country in the world, and people will appreciate if you at least do an effort to speak their language. Not so in France, oh no. And in particular, Paris. They will go out of their way to not understand you.

[coppice]

But what happens when everybody evolves to being a manager. 

Some companies have means of avoiding squandering talent in this manner by promoting people into positions with management-level pay but that allow them to continue working as before, typically the role has some term like "scientist" or "distinguished" or something in it to explain the pay grade vs. the work they do.

That kind of thing is fairly common, but a version which works well is much rarer. Its quite common for high calibre technical people to leave as they gain experience specifically because a system like that exist in their company, and the day to day working of it is so messed up they see no future there. I've also watched from a distance schemes that celebrate a tiny number of perceived high achievers, but dump on the larger pool of really good people who make up the bulk of the talent pool.

[HwAoRrDk]

If you think those are bad, try their webinars. I stopped attending those because they caused me physical pain.

People complain about Americans refusing to learn foreign languages, but trust me, the French take that cake, excuse me, gateau.

As someone who in a former job had to have regular conference calls with a French colleague, I feel ya. While his grammar and written English were perfectly fine, he made no effort whatsoever to get spoken pronunciation right, so was impossible to understand. These meeting calls must've taken twice as long as they otherwise would because of the need to keep asking him to repeat himself. I felt guilty at first, but after several weeks of this, I stopped caring.

[Nominal Animal]

While his grammar and written English were perfectly fine, he made no effort whatsoever to get spoken pronunciation right, so was impossible to understand.

My English pronunciation is sometimes impossible to understand too, because I speak too little English.  Rally English (Youtube Memesplained, all of Hydraulic Press Channel) is much easier to understand, just a bit funny and possibly unintentionally annoying; but when I lapse into the american/international/mixed English one absorbs from media, it becomes too muddled/mumbly/muddy to decipher, which is exactly why I stopped trying to follow that pronunciation/accent, and switched to clearer Rally English style pronunciation.  For example, my "can't" was impossible to distinguish from "can", so I switched to "cannot" with a sharp T at the end.  All for clarity.

The difference is, I do make an effort to fix each error, and try to learn from them.  To do that, I need to know how what I said sounded like, then what the correct pronunciation is.  Which can be strange/awkward, because I usually ask "What did I say?  How do you say it properly?"
Funnily enough, technical terms are almost always okay; it is the ordinary everyday words like "friend" ('free end') and "spouse" ('pause') and "store" ('sto:') and "can't" (can) and so on that tend to be the problem.  It is the same mechanism as is behind misheard song lyrics!

Sometimes it is not due to lack of effort, just ... languages and people being awkward.

[HwAoRrDk]

I say it was lack of effort because it was literally this guy's daily job to interact with a mostly English-speaking audience - he was a project manager at the Paris-region European data centre of the large American-based corporation we both worked for. While he probably spoke French to his direct colleagues in his own office, everyone else he would speak to within the company spoke English.

[peter-h]

the French take that cake

While his grammar and written English were perfectly fine, he made no effort whatsoever to get spoken pronunciation right, so was impossible to understand. These meeting calls must've taken twice as long as they otherwise would because of the need to keep asking him to repeat himself. I felt guilty at first, but after several weeks of this, I stopped caring

As a pilot, this is a hot topic. A colleague who lives and works in France, specialising in this field, advises me that this is basically deliberate. Today's French kids get a lot of social media exposure to English and speak it well, but are ridiculed if they don't speak it with the drawn-out accent which makes "French English" so hard for most English speakers around the world. France has a long standing policy to block the penetration of English into their language. Anyone who is say 30+ will have been heavily conditioned to do that. And in any unionised profession (another French thing) nobody can do anything about it.

It extends to components used. A friend who is a systems guy in the Airbus sphere tells me that many electronics engineers there cannot read English data sheets. This has led to decades of creation of "French semiconductors" etc so e.g. a 2N3055 (or the more modern version) will be created as a French part, called say 2N1234, with a French data sheet, and somebody is re-marking American made 2N3055s... I have dismantled various French avionics from years past and found them full of such parts. It's quite amusing actually.

In general one is not allowed to talk about it. It is a super hot topic.

[linux-works]

back to original topic: there are commercial versions of freertos and lwip.  its under the 'safertos' banner.

I worked at a car company (previously) and did some lwip work for one of their ecus.  there was no one in the company to help tune this bastard of an ip stack and it has more defines than you can imagine it would ever need.  impossible to understand and tune.

I pushed my company to buy the supported version (which was also safety certified and MISRA compliant) but the company was a cheapskate and pushed the purchase down the road many years (when 'we need level 5 performance').  short sighted, too, since it will take you a while to get used to the supported ip stack code and get them to help you tune it.  by the time the product NEEDS that level of service, you'll have a few years of use under your belt.

the company said no.  china company that makes smart cars.  go figure.

[5U4GB]

People complain about Americans refusing to learn foreign languages, but trust me, the French take that cake, excuse me, gateau.
You can visit any country in the world, and people will appreciate if you at least do an effort to speak their language. Not so in France, oh no. And in particular, Paris. They will go out of their way to not understand you.

That's Parisians specifically, even the rest of France complains about them, however given the masses of annoying tourists they're overrun with I have at least some sympathy with them.  The folks I interacted with in the south of France were really nice, tolerated my attempts at French and then responded in English, I'd go back there again in a heartbeat.

[pcprogrammer]

People complain about Americans refusing to learn foreign languages, but trust me, the French take that cake, excuse me, gateau.
You can visit any country in the world, and people will appreciate if you at least do an effort to speak their language. Not so in France, oh no. And in particular, Paris. They will go out of their way to not understand you.

That's Parisians specifically, even the rest of France complains about them, however given the masses of annoying tourists they're overrun with I have at least some sympathy with them.  The folks I interacted with in the south of France were really nice, tolerated my attempts at French and then responded in English, I'd go back there again in a heartbeat.

True. Over here in the Correze people appreciate it very much when you at least try to speak French, but they hardly speak English though. Even though it is taught in school, they never use it and with the TV programs dubbed in French they don't get to hear it either.  Some will make an effort to speak less fast or use more comprehensible words, but English hardly.

[peter-h]

Safertos is just Freertos but rewritten and "certified". Fortunately Freertos is quite easy to set up and build into your product. The defaults work fine.

LWIP is much much more complicated; you could spend man-months getting it to work reliably. Having lots of RAM helps because you need less understanding. LWIP really suffers from poor documentation, and no functioning forum(s). I believe this is due to it being some 16 years old so the original dev(s) moved on long ago. A big issue with LWIP is not LWIP itself but the low level input/output code for the particular chip; ST's code is junk.

[JPortici]

They do loads of videos which are barely legible (very poor English).

If you think those are bad, try their webinars. I stopped attending those because they caused me physical pain.

People complain about Americans refusing to learn foreign languages, but trust me, the French take that cake, excuse me, gateau.
You can visit any country in the world, and people will appreciate if you at least do an effort to speak their language. Not so in France, oh no. And in particular, Paris. They will go out of their way to not understand you.

they do understand you
we have some french clients that will refuse to use google translate when we ask them to, as none of us speak french. we reply to them in italian
same to our friends from tyrol

i concour with peter on this argument

[linux-works]

there is a lot of legal cover if you buy safertos and stay within their boundaries.  its why companies buy and use it.  look up MISRA and tell me how long it would take to convert any free code base to be completely misra (or whatever air guys use for their stds) compliant.

its worth it.  you'd be nuts to roll your own if you are a big company and safety matters.

[peter-h]

MISRA is just normal decent coding practices.

It (or Safertos) won't stop your company getting sued for product liability or customer factory downtime, and you won't be able to sue the next party either because they will fight it.

It is practically almost meaningless, although I can well understand why corporate users buy into it. But really you are buying integration assistance, which is what this thread was about to start with

[coppice]

MISRA is just normal decent coding practices.

MISRA is a mixed bag of good sense, and serious stupidity. I've had to turn quite a bit of clear simple code into a tortuous mess to avoid flagging from MISRA tools. Like most methodologies its more cult than good sense.

[Nominal Animal]

Over here in the Correze people appreciate it very much when you at least try to speak French, but they hardly speak English though. Even though it is taught in school, they never use it and with the TV programs dubbed in French they don't get to hear it either.  Some will make an effort to speak less fast or use more comprehensible words, but English hardly.

Here in Finland, TV and movies are not dubbed, so the vast majority of Finns do understand English.  It is also taught in school.  Pronunciation is a different issue.

When someone refuses to speak English here, it is because they're deadly afraid you'll laugh at their accent or rally English.

[linux-works]

this was the story given to us as to why to choose a supported already-misra os versus the free version.  the free version of the code would show so many diffs (due to misra and other things) that its not just a license issue, the code is really different (at a level).  and yes, there is a safety guarantee (when you go the whole route, with model based code creation and simulation and all that pointy clicky stuff that real engineers hate to have to use).  some companies are going autosar and follow all the rules; some follow some and some (like tesla) roll all their own (and it shows).  at any rate, with misra already setup, its days and weeks of NOT having to code all kinds of exceptions in the tools that we were using and the automation.  just easier to buy that already done.  and when making cars, you should not even think to quibble about small cost of this.

[linux-works]

some places require a bit of red tape to be able to suppress this or that warning from the misra craziness.  a lot is over the top but if you now go and pick and choose, its now up to you to use good judgement and bet the farm on it.  a lot rides on that.  much better to buy solutions and spend you TIME on things that you add value to.  os's are already solved.  ip stacks, the same.  just buy it and yell at the vendor (and write a good contract) and spend your time on your true core business.

[pcprogrammer]

Over here in the Correze people appreciate it very much when you at least try to speak French, but they hardly speak English though. Even though it is taught in school, they never use it and with the TV programs dubbed in French they don't get to hear it either.  Some will make an effort to speak less fast or use more comprehensible words, but English hardly.

Here in Finland, TV and movies are not dubbed, so the vast majority of Finns do understand English.  It is also taught in school.  Pronunciation is a different issue.

When someone refuses to speak English here, it is because they're deadly afraid you'll laugh at their accent or rally English.

 

The average Dutch person speaks English, but the accent will make your hair stand up straight. I'm an exception of course. 

p.s. I have met plenty of English people who praised my English, and not out of politeness. It is even so that I often know the English word for something and can't recall the Dutch one. 

French is a different cup of tea though.

[DavidAlfa]

I undertand your frustation, but it's free software.
That guy still has a normal job to pay the rent, food, and needs free time for the family and other stuff, and it's up to them to chose how much time they dedicate.
Have you ever sent $10 - $20 to developer for the countless hours he sat developing the thing?

Most people doesn't, just use it and run away, it's free.
Submit issue if bug found. Fixed. OK, bye.
In expensive, highly profitable commercial products, this boils my blood off. If you use OSS, show some damn gratitude and give'em a small part of you big income.

Just an example: Years of maintaining/developing the STM32 soldering firmware, helping in the forums because lazy people doesn't RTFM...
I can see the traffic in Github, about 500-900 visits a day and 60-100 unique visitors.
Hey please fix this. Please add this, please help me.
I can count the entire donations with my two hands.
Want support? Sure!

[Nominal Animal]

In expensive, highly profitable commercial products, this boils my blood off. If you use OSS, show some damn gratitude and give'em a small part of you big income.

It's even simpler, in my opinion: if you eat from a pond, make sure the life in it is sustainable; don't count on draining it yourself and moving on before anyone else notices.

Just an example: Years of maintaining/developing the STM32 soldering firmware, helping in the forums because lazy people doesn't RTFM...
I can see the traffic in Github, about 500-900 visits a day and 60-100 unique visitors.
Hey please fix this. Please add this, please help me.
I can count the entire donations with my two hands.
Want support? Sure!

Exactly.  And conversely, if you get the right people the monetary support they need, they can dominate an entire niche.

The problem is that companies and organizations that throw that kind of money around, simply don't have the technical ability or knowledge to pick well.  It is either done at a personal level, or via social interactions.  You never get funded because you're the best around; you only get funded if you get a people-person to promote your work and convince the money-bags it is the right thing to do.

And this is how we end up with something else than a meritocracy in the support of free/open source projects.

If it matters, it is the exact same thing in scientific research.  It is much easier to get funding for research already being done elsewhere, because those are proven popular, and thus low-risk to those who decide who and what gets funded.  The science itself does not matter that much anymore.  Even in industry, a single eccentric billionaire can revolutionize an entire industrial field, if they simply break out from that mold.