[Arm-netbook] Logging and journaling

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 4:53 AM, Christopher Havel
<laserhawk64 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Julie, while I appreciate your efforts at convincing our kind leader here to
> change his mind, you're not going to make any headway. And, for the record,
> one of the reasons that Luke has trouble explaining things is because he has
> Asperger's Syndrome, a form of Autism and a disorder primarily affecting
> communication and social skills. I have Asperger's as well, and so I can
> appreciate how it sometimes renders one speechless, or forces one to use the
> wrong words for things -- often at a sensitive time.
>
> It's unbelievably frustrating.

 ... would you believe it, my conversations with dr stallman cause
*me* to have to take deep breaths on a regular basis.

 chris, i appreciate your insight (from personal experience) here.
your phrasing is, in places, as bad as mine can be, but i know your
heart's in the right place.

 it is a recurring theme from interactions with people around me that
they in effect ask "give me ONE good reason why i should listen to
you", and i simply... can't.  the reason is: my brain simply doesn't
work that way.

 in researching why that is, i came across something called "demster
shafer theory".  it's a generalisation of bayes theorem, and i was
interested in it as a way to work out *why* i was good at
reverse-engineering (from my work on samba) but also to find out if
there was a way to *improve* my ability as a reverse-engineer and
knowledge derivation expert.

 demster-shafer theory basically says that you may statistically
derive a result by taking two *independent* variables in a
massively-complex field, work out the probability of them occurring
together (independently) then you are permitted to *REPEAT* that
exercise and to *SUM* the resultant totally independent results as a
way to gain a statistically-valid result across the ENTIRE FIELD.

 in this context, the question "give me ONE good reason" is a
completely INVALID one.

 hence, can you (all) understand that if you ask me "give me ONE good
reason" i LITERALLY cannot do that.  i could however give you about a
hundred SMALLER reasons each with a low statistical probability of
them occurring.

... but it would overwhelm you to do so, you would (as you have
clearly done so) REJECT the entire APPROACH that i've taken because
it's NOT SOMETHING YOU UNDERSTAND AS BEING VALID.

i come across this time and time again, in the physics forums i'm on,
on free software mailing lists, at workplaces where i can tell there's
something deeply wrong from a whole stack of clues but i CAN'T
VOCALISE THEM ALL.

my brain *literally* works in a completely different way from most
people's on the planet, in a massively-parallel statistical-inference
fashion that hugely and rapidly short-cuts areas of avenue that would
cause most people to get stuck and waste months to decades of their
life investigating to no avail... but this type of approach is NOT
what the human brain was designed to do, and it comes with a heavy
penalty both for my health but also in terms of making it REALLY
difficult to justify the conclusions (or "intuitions") that my brain
flags up as being so brightly "red" that i can no more ignore them
than i could if they were say actual threats on my life.

i would *really* appreciate your patience on this.  knowing what i do
about myself, i deliberately tackle areas that nobody else does.
unfortunately, what's happened in the past is that people have stolen
the results and the credit for the work that i've done.  did you know
for example that the openchange project's success is down to my work
(not theirs) in reverse-engineering exchange 5.5 back around 2003?  of
course you don't... because after tracking my research continually
they DIDN'T MENTION WHERE THEY GOT THE INFORMATION FROM.

 that means that you BELIEVE i am not worth respecting, because my
name is not up there in neon lights next to those of "linus torvalds"
or "eric raymond" or "bruce perens" or any other person you've heard
of and respect in software libre for their achievements.

i act in the background, tackling the things that these people *CAN'T*
understand and, because of their position, couldn't deal with anyway
because they now have too much responsibility in their chosen field of
expertise and endeavour to consider abandoning the people who now
depend on them.

put another way:

systemd has a huge - MASSIVE - series of independent statistical
correlations associated with it, none of them INDIVIDUALLY being
statistically significant or indicative of anything (because they're
independent events) but when added up overall, using demster-shafer
theory, give support for the hypothesis that there is something
deeply, deeply wrong with systemd with a confidence level somewhere
around 4 sigma.  i simply cannot ignore that, but equally i cannot
really explain it in ways that you would ACCEPT, either, because my
name is not "linus torvalds" or "dr richard stallman".

anyway.  the fact that the 3.4 kernel has to be used makes it entirely
moot.  which reminds me the last time this happened, was when i was
working in portsmouth, something similar happened.  i was ORDERED to
deploy ubuntu, but could not explain or vocalise the dozens of reasons
why that was a bad idea.  finally one of the sysadmins got fed up of
hearing the discussion, did some research and found that canonical had
long since terminated support for 486 processors.

so please.  understand.  sometimes i *can't give you a concrete
reason* because there are instead potentially *hundreds* of
lower-probability ones, some of which i'm not even consciously aware
of.

l.