Computer Scientists

"It's Easter Sunday, which means that we're all about to gorge on mämmi (Right? You *do* have your carton of mämmi ready to go, don't you?)."

"I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent... Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties... I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc). Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”... And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me... I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor... I’m not interested in yet another “runs in a terminal” editor, or some even older editor (ie “real” emacs, or vim) that just has had more lipstick applied over the years."

"Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are... Moral of the day: RTFM."

"Pet peeve of the day: all the people talking about how ChatGPT is not “conscious” and how it does not “understand” what it is saying, but just putting likely-sounding words together into likely-sounding sentences. Extra bonus points for using an example of a math problem as a way to show how these AI chat-bots talk about things they don’t really understand. The irony. The lack of self-awareness. It burns."

"It’s Sunday, which means no more cat pictures, and instead just the usual -rc release. Prize for odd bug this week goes to an otherwise harmless off-by-one buglet that then in turn confused clang sufficiently to generate bogus code that our ‘objtool’ checks then (correctly) complained about it. This is the kind of exciting lives that us kernel developers lead."

"It’s Caturday. Minky is no longer with us, but this is probably my favorite picture of her."

"I’m actually a horrible MIS person, and I would never want to maintain my own server. I’m a programmer for chrissake! The same way you should fear me if I hold a soldering iron, you should be very very nervous if I were to do any server management... and on a similar note: not only am I not much of a MIS person, I’m also not much of a social networking person. I foresee a lot of disappointment in the future of any followers of this account."

"...today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement. Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them."

"Please, as you emerge from your holiday-induced food coma, do give it a quick test so that we can all be happy about the final release next weekend."

"I know most of us are preparing for Christmas, but give it a whirl, ok? How important are those presents (and that family) anyway?"

"You don't know what you are talking about, you don't know what mRNA is, and you're spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you've talked to "experts" or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don't know what they are talking about. But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me. [...] Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies. And if you insist on believing in the crazy conspiracy theories, at least SHUT THE HELL UP about it on Linux kernel discussion lists."

"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me."

"This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry."

"Can I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn't perfect, but I've skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it's a work of art."

"It looks like the IT security world has hit a new low. If you work in security, and think you have some morals, I think you might want to add the tag-line "No, really, I'm not a whore. Pinky promise" to your business card. Because I thought the whole industry was corrupt before, but it's getting ridiculous. At what point will security people admit they have an attention-whoring problem?"

"BULLSHIT. Have you _looked_ at the patches you are talking about? You should have - several of them bear your name. [...] As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. [...] WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?"

"None of this "there is no way to continue" bullshit. Because it is pure and utter SHIT."

"I've been personally pretty disappointed with ARM as a hardware platform, not as an instruction set, though I've had my issues there, too. [...] What I wanted to upgrade to was Acorn Archimedes ... the thing that gave ARM its name."

"The fact is, the people who have created open source and made it a success have been the developers doing work - and the companies that we could get involved by showing that we are not all insane crazy people like the FSF. The people who have *destroyed* projects have been lawyers that claimed to be out to "save" those projects."

"Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice."

"The desktop hasn't really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I'm known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That's why, to me, it's not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it's a really hard area to enter. I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down."

"I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, "I love other people!" Don't get me wrong -- I'm actually not a people person."

"I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really -- I mean -- I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there." But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am."

"Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again."

"Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings)."

"We don't merge kernel code just because user space was written by a retarded monkey on crack."

"I am a lazy person, which is why I like open source, for other people to do work for me."

"the most important part of open source is that people are allowed to do what they are good at" and "all that [diversity] stuff is just details and not really important."

"I don’t care about you."

"On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle."

"I may be a huge computer nerd, but even so I don't think education should be about computers. Not as a subject, and not as a classroom resource either."

"[GPL] version 3 was not a good "here we give you version 2" and then we try to sneak in this new rules and try force everyone to upgrade; that was the part I disliked. The FSF did really sneaky stuff, downright immoral in my opinion."

"One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging [...] making binaries for linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass."

"I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple."

"Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant*. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here."

"XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist."

"Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways."

"That's the spirit. Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me. Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies."

"There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap."

"Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot."

"I hope I won't end up having to hunt you all down and kill you in your sleep."

"But this is definitely another of those "This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Al-biwan Ke-Viro, you're my only hope" issues. Al? Please don't make me wear that golden bikini."

"Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems."

"I realize that lawyers are brought up (probably from small children) to think that "technically true" is what matters, but when you make public PR statements, they should be more than "technically" true. They should be honest. There's a big f*cking difference."

"WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"

"I'm not sentimental. Good riddance."

"Obsessing about things is important, and things really do matter, but if you can't let go of them, you'll end up crazy."

"[...] I really hate big laptops. I can't understand people who lug around 15" (or 17"!) monsters. The right weight for a laptop is 1kg, no more."

"Somebody is trying to kill all the kernel developers."

"[In response to Good job. More public indecency, less TSA, that's what I say."