Entries tagged 'mental health'

I have been thinking more about bullying in the open source community being a security problem and how part of the process of getting the XZ backdoor into play was playing into the mental health struggles of the original maintainer.

It reminded me of a flawed system that I found having a large impact on my mental health while running our store. Like any diligent small business, we claimed our listings on Yelp and Google and the other major spots where people leave reviews.

I can still feel my stomach dropping when I would get a notification from Yelp that said someone had left a review. Thosee notifications didn’t give the single most critical bit of information: how many stars. Was it going to be a nasty one-star review, or was it someone leaving a wonderful five-star review? No clue! First you have to log in to the Yelp for Business website to see how the rest of your day would feel.

It was the “we need to talk later today” message from your boss that anyone could lob at me at any moment, maybe without even knowing they were doing it.

This was also brought to mind when I read about Daniel Stenberg’s experience with AI-generated security bug reports for curl and besides the aggravation of the reports being nonsense, I could only imagine that adrenaline spike when the report first comes in.

And bringing this back to something I linked to yesterday, where someone from Microsoft reported an issue with ffmpeg as “high priority”. Again, I can imagine one of the maintainers reading this request and feeling that adrenaline spike, that anxiety trigger.

It turns out that it wasn’t even a bug in the project, the reporter just didn’t know the right command line options to use. (I will also point out that they also said they were going to provide updates on whether the free support they received worked, but then they never did.)

Maybe the ffpmeg maintainers and Daniel are good at shrugging this stuff off. I thought I was, but one of the lessons that I learned from running our store is that the effects are cumulative even when individually small, and it is a good idea to figure out how to combat it.

And while there won’t be any simple technical solutions to these human problems in open source, it is very important to make sure whatever tools are being built don’t create these same sorts of anxiety spikes. We need to make sure to build kindness into the tools, whatever they may be.