i don't really care for mindless appeals to authority. make your own arguments and defend them or don't bother.
this gpu driver looks pretty cool though. looks like there's much more to the rust compatibility layer in the asahi tree and it is pretty cool that they were able to ship so quickly. i'd be curious how kernel rust compares to user space rust with respect to bloat. (user rust is pretty bad in that regard, imo)
Mindless appeal to authority? I don't think that's how the fallacy really works. It's pretty much the authority that seems to disagree with your sentiment, that is if we can agree that Torvalds still knows what he's doing. Him not sharing your skepticism is a valid argument. The point being that instead of giving weight to our distant feelings, maybe we could just pause and be more curious as to why someone with much closer involvement would not share them. Why should we care more about the opinions of randos on hn?
To be fair, assigning the highly competent BDFL of Linux who has listened to a bunch of highly competent maintainers some credibility isn't mindless.
Unless you have a specific falsifiable claim that is being challenged or defended, it's not at all a fallacy to assume expert opinions are implicitly correct. It's just wisdom and good sense, even if it's not useful to the debate you want to have.
Not every mention of an authority's opinion needs to be interpreted as an "appeal to authority". In this case I think they're just trying to give you perspective, not use Torvalds opinion as words from god.
It’s very intellectually lazy of you not to be curious about why the creator and decades long, knowledgeable guardian of Linux has the opposite opinion as you, all because you read the Wikipedia about logical fallacies one time.
Also the guy that created "the world's most important piece of software", as you put it. Appealing to the authority on the exact thing you raised concern about is the single most important authority one can cite.
> Surely it's better to cite the authority's reasons as to why they think this way than just to cite the authority itself
Why? When disagreeing with an authority, you want the audience to pay closer attention to your arguments as you demonstrate why the authority has it wrong. When you're just sharing distant and likely under-informed opinions with no arguments to back them up, it's not up to other people to do homework to show you why you're wrong. Appeal to authority is a legit call to a fallacy only when people give next to no consideration to your arguments, focusing instead on the opposing party's stature.
So rather than pointing to experts who're in the best position to know, you'd prefer bad rephrasing and airchair experts? Do you 'do your own research' too?
i don't really care for mindless appeals to authority. make your own arguments and defend them or don't bother.
this gpu driver looks pretty cool though. looks like there's much more to the rust compatibility layer in the asahi tree and it is pretty cool that they were able to ship so quickly. i'd be curious how kernel rust compares to user space rust with respect to bloat. (user rust is pretty bad in that regard, imo)