Glimpsing the lives of others

I had an interesting conversation with a member of cabin crew on one flight recently. I often sit near the back of the airplane which is a good way to get to chat with them. She was surprised that I opted for a window seat and I thought about it rather and, at least for shorter flights, I supposed that I like them for a few reasons. One is that the window affords a striking view that has been unavailable to humanity for much of its history so I feel obligated to take advantage of it. It took many people a lot of work to get us that view. Another is that, perhaps related to imagining the life of the monks in the abbeys I visited, I do like to think about what I see. For instance, I saw a large barge, maybe on a river to a Great Lake, and I thought about the people on the barge and how they know about managing and navigating it and whatnot. Also, I've mentioned coming into Newark: all the cargo containers and cranes and whatnot at the port's docks are a large, complex world unfamiliar to me but many others there know it well. Another thing about Manhattan is, in visiting it, I like to see places that are already familiar to me from television and movies: for instance, I was pleased to find myself passing the courthouse steps often seen in Law & Order (1990). I realized that a common thread here might be that I like to know about others' lives and to connect with them in tangible ways like sharing their world in person. This kind of thinking had my interlocutor label me a dreamer.

Corporal punishment of children

Physical punishment of children has returned to the news in Britain. I don't know why, I didn't catch the relevant story, just some of the resulting discussion. I figure that it is right to not be secretive about punishments, that way lies bad things, so I'll mention here that I have smacked my children before; not so as to cause injury, but people are typically quite absolutist about this kind of thing.

As my children have become older, other punishments have sufficed. A common quite serious punishment a few years ago tended to be that they would be sent to their room for some period, though less effectively as they accumulated entertainments there. These days I might just cut off their tablet from the home wifi or whatever. The real problem was more when they were much younger and were incapable of understanding either why the rule existed or the dangers they faced.

The main example that comes to my mind is when they were toddlers. I tried to keep the rules simple and one important one was that if I bark stop! at them then they immediately cease and desist. For instance, once I was walking with one of my children and they unexpectedly made a beeline for the road and started across it, not stopping when instructed. I pulled them back onto the sidewalk and quickly smacked them: via their diaper, mind, so the affront was rather more to their dignity than it was physical. That stop! rule was one for which I really was not wont to tolerate violations.

Had I had some less-physical effective option available then I would have gladly availed myself of it but I value my children's safety rather more highly than the sensibilities of onlookers or my own legal impunity, and I absolutely needed some reliable way to cause them to stop moving into danger. You can justifiably blame me for not properly restraining them in the first place (I believe my hands were full of shopping at the time) but that wouldn't have been much comfort had they been struck by a vehicle once loose. People also frown at those parents whose toddlers are harnessed.

Admittedly the discussion I've heard more recently has been more along the lines of clipping schoolchildren around the ears and suchlike; I don't know what happened recently but I'd concur that there's no need for that kind of thing once intelligent conversation is possible and consequences can be understood. Still, while I certainly prefer other solutions, it is right for me to be open about not wholly avoiding corporal punishment in my children's earliest years: I took one of my first duties as a parent as simply that of keeping my children alive however I could and, while corporal punishment was a means of last resort, lightly applied it was a means nonetheless.

Mind you, the cynic in me would have those who object to anything consistent with that violence is ever a way to solve problems to try living in the real world.

Open-source software projects, personality disorders, working practices

My earlier observation, which I'd mentioned here, that it seems odd for OpenBSD to make a big thing about security yet encourage people to use their binary package repository which does not receive prompt security fixes, seems to have caused its founder to double down on positively flying off the handle and to rant about people demanding things and whatnot. (Apparently the word security in this context doesn't include yesterday's bugs.) It's quite peculiar and I kind of pity him; I wonder if he has some diagnosable psychiatric issue. At least the disconnect between the basic point and what he seems to imagine is being claimed speaks of some massive chip on his shoulder that prevents him from engaging logically with reality. This seems incongruous in someone whom I'd be inclined to esteem highly as a software engineer but clearly there's much I don't know. In the meantime I am merely glad to be able to avoid direct engagement, consume his good work, and donate to the OpenBSD foundation which is an entity quite distinct from him. (He observes that he receives very little in donations himself and I can't help but wonder if he's surprised given his temper.)

I doubt OpenBSD has the resources to keep the binary package repository up to date with frequent builds, though Void Linux seems to have no trouble with this; I'd be quite content if they simply encouraged people to watch the mailing list for word of security vulnerabilities and to build from source from the ports repository as indicated by alerts, but I don't want to trigger anything by suggesting such. Personally I shall simply risk trusting M:Tier's binary package repository though I will certainly not suggest that the OpenBSD FAQ reference them.

More generally I wonder at the frequency with which I appear to run into what I can only describe as rude assholes who are significant and valuable contributors to open-source software projects, yet largely in other spheres of life I am lucky: for instance, generally in my normal professional life as an employee in computing my colleagues have been great. It saddens me that last week when I contributed to somebody's open-source project and got a Thanks for the PR! it was actually a surprise: just a few words, but unusually pleasant. Being an asshole isn't a requirement, it just seems oddly common, and over the years is one of the things that has prevented me from engaging more fully with any of the larger projects. We'll see how Void Linux goes I guess; its founder has been happy to silently merge a small commit of mine so that's something. My current avoidance of anything but smaller online communities is partly about wanting to minimize the possibility of there being the kind of rudeness that I find myself increasingly unwilling to tolerate.

I should add a clarifying aside: I'm happy with people simply being direct about their criticisms, that's different and good. There's no need to spare feelings if people's work or ideas genuinely require some correction. I publicly raised an issue just today regarding a mistake that a member of our management team made and yesterday I thanked another member for catching an omission in some of my work.

The PR mentioned above references a GitHub pull request. They're the usual means by which I contribute to projects. That appears to be another sore topic among the OpenBSD folks whose preferred approach is to use CVS (yes, really; I'd completely forgotten how to use it!) and to e-mail diffs to a mailing list and then e-mail reminders because the original fell through the cracks! Apparently GitHub is somehow insecurely untrustworthy despite how, e.g., for releases of our software from work we OpenPGP-sign the release commit so anyone can pull our public key from the servers and verify the signature. Am I mistaken in trusting this approach? It's another issue upon which I'm certainly not about to opine in OpenBSD circles anyway, I've already watched others catch that flak.