Poul-Henning Kamp

Quite! Some like big endian, because tradition ('network byte order'); little endian, because simplicity (current CPUs); mostly it's actually just classic bikeshedding¹. Since X25519 and Ed25519 had already been deployed by a fair few people, all of whom used little-endian, recommending the opposite without a compelling reason would have been a bit too silly. (Upstream working groups are encouraged to consider the field elements as opaque octet strings, to try to avoid arguing the exact same point again.) [1] http://bikeshed.com/

On a related note, Poul-Henning Kamp's 1999 "bikeshed" e-mail to the FreeBSD list (with his take on Parkinson's Law) is still a good read: http://bikeshed.com/

Exactly. Spending more than five seconds on this (before you have data), and even worse, involving more than one person, is a recipe for fail. People just love to argue about silly shit like this. Homework assignment for everyone who felt compelled to chime in with their well-reasoned opinions: http://www.bikeshed.com/

Thanks for the link. It wasn't clear to me, however, who was doing the bikeshedding. If you read the original source for the term at http://bikeshed.com/, Kamp shows his respect for the submitter of the change: I bow my head in respect to the original proposer because he stuck to his guns through this carpet blanking from the peanut gallery, and the change is in our tree today. I would have turned my back and walked away after less than a handful of messages in that thread. This is how I feel about the pull request: a seemingly innocuous change that looks, to this outsider anyway, well worth making. It seemed to have been declined over a concern that people would come to expect Rails to formalize undocumented behavior that others had relied on. I've been consuming Rails docs for years (thank you to the contributors), and that doesn't seem that crazy to me. (Edit: formatting.)

> Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’ Exactly right. It's the other end of the bikeshed continuum[1]. If you send out a two-page design doc or a hundred like pull request, the recipient will actually review it. Let AI inflate that to ten pages or a thousand lines of code and they feel like they don't have enough mental capacity to tackle it so they let it slide. [1]: https://bikeshed.com/

All these "constantly challenge your own assumptions" prompts really do in practice is make it second guess assumptions that actually are obvious and true, which pollutes the output further. In a sense, it bikesheds[1] itself. It's been told it needs more discussion/debate to solve a problem, but it's only smart enough to tackle minor details that might not matter. And when it does try to tackle major details, it screws them up, causing a cascade of compounding bullshit. And it also tends to cause it to roleplay someone who constantly bungles things, which is bad because it takes it away from its default RLHF tuning for factually accurate outputs on first shot (not that it lives up to this goal, but that's how they've tried to train it). Getting this right seems to be a very tricky problem. 1: https://bikeshed.com/

This would be useful on https://bikeshed.com , instead of having to manually refresh the page!

I've read https://bikeshed.com/ several times over, but never bothered to look at who Bret Glass was. Well, four years ago, he published a rebuttal on quora.

So many of these comments just feel like bikeshedding. By most arguments here basecamp is an awful name for a company and hey is a terrible name for an email application - it doesn't seem to be holding them back though. For those not familiar with bikeshedding please see: http://bikeshed.com/

That's another perspective on bike shedding. http://bikeshed.com/

This is a textbook example of a bikeshed: http://bikeshed.com Nobody is calling true or false in a script with options/arguments. Nobody hss ever seen true/false fail because they crashed in setlocale. Nobody's highest, second-highest, or 1000th-highest risk to their code is the performance of their true/false implementation. But it's a really easy thing to have opinions about. You use UNIX for one week and suddenly you're exactly as qualified as Dennis Ritchie to have opinions on the matter.

> but the committee meetings aren't expensive. They are basically free. And there often should be far more of them. The real cost comes from major changes in the design too late in the project plan. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding > The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp[1] and has spread from there to the software industry at large. http://bikeshed.com/

This is the quintessential example of “bike shedding”[0] is it not? Only this time reason failed and we bike shedded the nuclear power plant instead? [0]: http://bikeshed.com

The latter half of http://bikeshed.com/ has some nice ideas on how to phrase the feedback ;-)

http://bikeshed.com/ - with random colors on every reload. Quote: "(If you don't like the way we painted this bikeshed, try bikeshedding.io, or the minimalist shed.bike. Or set up your own? That's the spirit!)"

I think this might be a bikeshed discussion. http://bikeshed.com

This reminds me of that story about the bikeshed[1] colour: "This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change." [1]: http://bikeshed.com/

I think it was a reference to this concept: http://bikeshed.com/

I've written CSS for over 10 years, and I don't use preprocessors at all. I've written small web pages, e-commerce sites, enterprise applications with tens of thousand users. And I find it really offending that you think this is because of lack of experience. I don't care about mixins, variables, a few instances of duplicated code and my clients doesn't care about any of the code under the hood. In fact they care about time to market, and that is something I am exceptionally good at in my area. In fact variables has always been possible with multiple class names. The discussion about what we should choose between traditional CSS, SASS and LESS is on the same level as what color the bike shed should have. http://bikeshed.com/ Pick one and be happy, neither is better or worse. When you're building web applications, CSS is least of your problems.

It should be noted that the sender of this e-mail is Poul-Henning Kamp, known among other things for another e-mail from back in the day (relatively speaking): http://bikeshed.com/

This is called 'bikeshedding': http://bikeshed.com/ . How do you all like that design?

This sounds like the in-house equivalent of The Oatmeal's "How a Web Design Goes Straight To Hell" (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell). Both stories share a similar problem: a designer (or engineer, it doesn't really matter for this story) is brought in because their expertise is needed. Then, rather than trusting that experience, the thing is micro-managed to the point where it is ridiculous (or, as The Oatmeal says, you are just a cursor in a graphics program, controlled via email). I feel that with design this happens more, because it's more tempting to believe that their own user experience is representative of anything more than themselves (the first thing a proper designer knows NOT to do) and it's easier to get into bike shed discussions (http://bikeshed.com). I'm bookmarking this, because I might need it in the future.

http://bikeshed.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality

But the question is, would daily iteration reduce the rate of bikeshed[0] arguments? I guess I could imagine how it would make it worse, but it seems more likely that it would make it better: the people who know nothing about the process (and don't care) won't be at the daily meetings, and the people that know just a bit about the process will be there and will learn all the details of the big project (i.e. the atomic power plant, to continue the original metaphor). [0] http://bikeshed.com/

Because they have done what (almost) everyone on here wants to do, get funding for their idea. The fact that the idea is "obvious" and "simple" means everyone can bike shed [1] it to death. [1] http://bikeshed.com/

Ha, read up on http://bikeshed.com/ if you don't get this joke.

"::" wouldn't work, because it's ambiguous at compile time. Personally I would have preferred ":::", but at some point it turned into a [bike-shed discussion](http://www.bikeshed.com/), and then a few of the core developers made a judgement call. I don't think they realised how controversial a choice they'd made, or perhaps they just didn't think it through, but once the pick was made, there was really no turning back, because of the politics. That's php core for you, and honestly I think it's a major flaw of php. It's sort of the same way that GOTO entered the language too.

In other words, this is a bikeshed argument. http://www.bikeshed.com/

A bikeshed (from a discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list -- see http://www.bikeshed.com/).

Isn't bike-shedding when other people block you with low-effort critisism. """ Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions. Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books. A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here. """ https://bikeshed.com/ Yak-shaving comes to mind, but that is more when you have a large boring project you have to get through first in order to get to the interesting parts.