Work on GEFS (the Good Enough File System) for OpenBSD progresses
54 points by jbauer
54 points by jbauer
I spent the morning reading design document on GEFS. It’s quite interesting! https://orib.dev/gefs.html
I too really wanna recommend that read to everyone, even when not interested in GEFS or file systems. This is what in my opinion technical writing should look like. Really great clear non-self-obsessed writing.
[off topic rambling on scientific writing]
I think scientific paper authors can learn something from this as well and hopefully make it easier to peer review and maybe help a lot with so many papers not being reproducible, even when ending up in major journals. I know academia is a lot (too much IMO) about self-advertising in order to get funding, but it's just sad when on one hand there is that ideal of following the scientific process and the lack of thereof when looking at successful reproduction of findings, the amount of personal and journal biases, etc. And that's not even talking about malicious intent which certainly also exists or the lack of published "negative" outcomes, etc. While I certainly don't think it's all about writing style, I do think it influences good peer review. Given the size and idolization of science I think the practice way too often seems lacking. Not saying there is an easy solution and I certainly don't try to talk anybody down. I just think clear writing might be a relatively easy[1] maybe sometimes overlooked step into this direction.
And of course all that is true outside of scientific writing as well.
[1] Not for everyone of course, but often there are co-authors to ask for help and I hope people are not ashamed of doing so. I know people that struggle with writing, but do excellent scientific work. This isn't about that. It's about papers that feel like their primary goal isn't the finding, but selling the author(s), institutions or worse a product. And even then there are papers where this doesn't affect the paper much, and ones where it feels like important parts are skipped over. Then it barely feels scientific anymore.
Ori is also a terrific guy in person. I had the honour of meeting him around 10 years ago and he is extremely humble and wise.
Sadly, the incentives often work the other way. If a paper explains its core ideas well enough, reviewers often say that it is too obvious to merit being a contribution at a top-tier venue. I tend to have the opposite view: if you have explained the problem so well that your solution is obvious after reading that part of the paper (but not before I started reading) then you're a best-paper candidate. But I have had a lot of arguments with other reviewers about this in PC meetings.
If a paper is hard to read, it makes you feel like you've done a lot of thinking to understand it and so it must be a difficult subject, so it must be a serious contribution.
I'd love for papers to have a first-pass-reject round where anything where it takes more than five minutes to understand the problem that they're trying to solve and at least have a vague notion of their approach gets a quick reject. Until we have something like that, I encourage academics to write blogs and extended technical-report editions of papers, which are easy to read and contain all of the important background.