25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds
linuxjournal.com
linuxjournal.com
>Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.
This is a problem I don't understand too. If you are really into something you motivating yourself in doing things. You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today. Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
Same with YouTube, when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit. But it's more your own lack if you're not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself.
Sure, at some point it's nice to derive something from first principles to really understand it at a deeper level, but often times that's a complex process and it's aided by learning the thing by repetition prior to learning by how the thing was derived. That's how we learn math after all.
I agree, at least when it comes to problems that don't fall into your core specialization. When you have a broken pipe, you don't spend several years studying plumbing, you just call a plumber. Similarly, when I have problem with LibreOffice, I don't start reading its source code, I go to Stack Overflow.
I resemble that remark!
It was just yesterday that I was looking up a bit of JavaScript trivia, how to format a number rounded to some number of decimal places.
Yeah, I'm supposed to be some kind of JavaScript expert, so I could have done the obvious "mdn tofixed", right?
But I was working on a Google Maps API project and typed in the first thing that popped into my mind:
https://www.google.com/search?q=six+digit+decimal+place+goog...
And you know what? It took me straight to my own Stack Overflow answer where I explained how to do this, either preserving or removing any trailing zeroes.
Who needs to remember things when you have a service like that? ;-)
Following your example, it wouldn't be a question about formatting a number. It would be a question where the user would ask something along the lines of, "how do I write an app that calculates user's effective tax rate?". If someone is not able to decompose this at least to the level of "take input, process it, calculate it, present output" and then ask questions about each of those individual steps, or linking them together - then, in my opinion, he is stupid. (At least in the field of computer programming.)
> But it’s more your own lack if you’re not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself
Maybe that in itself is a taught skill?
Disraeli said “the fool wonders, the wise man asks”
This is understandable as they tend to be written by people who know the thing inside out and backwards, but there can be a gulf between the beginner getting started guides (if any) and the proper docs, that only reading/asking questions can properly fill.
Maybe that's what they need to learn; though maybe they aren't interested in learning it...
OTOH I find many maths explanations wouldn't make sense if I wasn't able to already "imagine it inside my mind by myself" i.e if I didn't already understand it. IMHO this is the fundamental problem of education...
Instead of spending hours working to understand and implement a concept / fix. Get other people to do it for internet points.
Seems surpisingly “smart” to me.
It all depends on what you’re optinizing for.
Overall throughput goes down when someone has to keep turning to external help. Even if they somehow manage to do many tasks in parallel to eliminate as much downtime as possible. And any design issue that requires having insight rather than a well-defined problem space goes unresolved and spirals into a bigger problem as more and more 90% solutions are bolted in.
It does depend on what you're optimizing for, but unless that includes turning over 100% ownership of the codebase, the "just give me the homework answer, don't try to make me understand" approach to problem solving is just shooting the team in the foot.
OTOH given the proliferation of tools a programmer uses in their day to day work and the large number of software dependencies these days, you could end up spending all your time figuring out problems with your tools/dependencies, rather than the problem your trying to solve.
That being said, I do think people owe it to themselves to read the documentation first. I’m extremely rarely in a situation where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option. There are a few exceptions of course, when the official documentation flat out sucks.
I do think we have a general issue with how we teach CS though. Especially outside the hardcore CS degree, because we’re really not teaching young people computation anymore, we’re teaching them how to produce results. This is especially true for places like Udemy and YouTube, but it’s frankly also true on more UX centric or academy/bachelor level degrees.
I do external examinations on academy levels, and earlier this year I went to a place where they teach associate degrees in CS. Only they opted to build their places as a “gaming education”, so they had a heavy emphasis on Unity. And sure enough, the students were pretty good at unity, but only a handful of them knew how to calculate Big O of a few simple examples and only a single student knew how a computer actually works.
When I did my own freshman year, one of my first tests was to decode a hidden message by altering the contents of a bitmap file using C. That’s pretty useless, sure, but it teaches you a lot of things, including how to read the official documentation for a bitmap, which is a much more useful skill than knowing how to use a certain version of some framework. At least in my opinion.
One side argues, they must know what a computer is, how it roughly works, what it can do and cannot do, and how you can program it.
The other side says, knowing how to use Microsoft Office and Excel, and Facebook and Instagram 'responsibly' is enough, and they fight tooth and nails that the education doesn't become deeper.
This is my experience in Germany, though, where digitalization is understood as replacing books by tablet computers from Apple in school.
Have you made similar experiences?
Edit: Let me reiterate on that. I think part of the fierce resistance against deeper education is fueled by fear.
To explain that, I see how mathematics is used in schools as a rough intelligence test. And the results in math are important, not because people would need differentiation of nested functions at work, but because the grade in math is used as a proxy by the society.
Abstract thinking is difficult for many. And they dislike it. A fundamental education in computers requires abstract thinking. So with that, there would be even more filterng between those who think good, and those that don't. People are afraid of that. So they fight that change.
I think people are afraid of loosing out and becoming meaningless and irrelevant in a world of computers, i.e. a world of abstract thinking.
This is why you see old media, non-STEM academia and other classic playgrounds of the rich first in line to bash tech. It's an existential threat to their power and control over society.
I have certainly encountered efforts to ignore or deprioritize deeper education, but I have yet to meet active opposition to it. What form does it take, and what is the rationale?
>The other...fight tooth and nails
I'd guess a big part of the problem is many teachers not being able to program. After all programming jobs tend to pay more than teaching ones and even with those there are issues eg https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
Anecdote when I was like 15 we had a computer class but the teacher didn't have a clue and I ended up showing the others how to do 10 PRINT "some stuff"; 20 GOTO 10 etc
Does everyone need to know how to program? I don't know, probably not. Us humans specializing is the only way we have to handle the huge amount of knowledge necessary to support our society. I certainly would have a hard time just surviving by myself. Also education slots are limited, we'd have to abolish other courses in exchange. This obviously will generate opposition.
Now let imagine we have an open slot to teach "CS" for 90min a week for a year in such a young age. What do you teach that would actually be useful to most of them later on? A bit of python? Basic C, since it doesn't come with many complicated abstractions on top? Javascript, since many of its courses quickly give colorful results? Even the programming bachelor I later did had trouble answering those questions, they switched from c->java->c++ to teaching 3 courses java. Plus all the languages other courses used and had to teach pretty much from scratch.
That said, I don't think something like haskell or straight assembler is a good choice, but any of the C-likes or Python would be fine, the differences just aren't great enough to matter much for the absolute beginner. A strong case could be made for Javascript, simply for ease of development, since any computer is almost guaranteed to have the basic software for writing, executing, & debugging. It is far from my favorite language, but for early intro courses I think pedagogy is far more important than language or tooling.
And personally, I feel that the only 'CS' that should be required for all students is keyboarding. Does someone who wants to go into the trades (excepting trades like machining) really have any urgent need for programming? However, almost any job will require typing skills.
Students have limited time, and I think it's foolish to force everyone to learn to program. Those classes have their benefits, but so do music classes. But, given avaliable time and resources, should we also require all students to learn an instrument?
I work in UX design and I see similar things on site related to that field. It's becoming popular so you can tell when some people think, "If I do X and Y then I am now magically a UX designer (or programmer)." Sometimes they literally ask, "how do I become a UX designer?" You can spot the smart beginners because they ask, "what is UX design?" The former is only interested in the destination while the latter is interested in the journey.
They're not interested in learning out even in the field itself, they just want to style themselves as such and simply ask others how to do the magical rituals required that they have no actual understanding of.
It's a fine line, because by no means am I lumping all beginners into this category. These people happen to look a lot like beginners, but even the real beginners are more knowledgeable.
Man, opposite experience here. I will cheerfully admit to being way less smart than most HN users, but I find that official documentation almost always lacks egregiously in example code, and also in overview material that gives me a 30,000’ view of the product. So often documentation seems assume that I’m already familiar with the product, when sometimes I’m dropped in for some external reason and just want to get a job done without being an expert.
Documentation can take some getting used to, and like I said, sometimes it really sucks, but I’ve found it to be worthwhile.
I mean technically you can probably google solve how to handle a bitmap in C, but that won’t teach you how the bitmap format works, so the next time you need to do it again, you’ll probably have to turn to google again. Where as I still have a pretty good idea on what to do, even though it’s been a decade since I touched C and even longer since I played around with bitmaps.
Don’t get me wrong, I say these things, not because I think I’m smarter than anyone, but because I forget everything I quick solve through google programming myself.
Let me tell you my problem with documentation, with this example (embellished to emphasize my point): say you're looking at the man page for this new, unfamiliar linux command `abc`. Here, "a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z". That's the documentation, in fact it's the documentation for ALL linux commands. What's wrong? Can't make `abc` work for your use case? OH, that's your fault because you didn't know the one particular sequence to arrange those 27 characters (include the space) to actually give you the information you need. You just didn't read hard enough. I mean, there's only 36^2000 or so combinations. Just keep arranging them until the letters spell out the answer to your query!
Thats why SO is way more popular than RTFM. TFM never tells me what I want. They tell me an encyclopedic, exhaustive treatise on `abc`. They don't tell me something helpful, examples on how to use `abc` to get me from point A to point B.
Here's a toy example, I wish I could think of a real one but I'm on the spot and can't recall somthing concrete, but this happens to me constantly. Also, disclaimer: no matter what example I give, someone is going to shoot me down by searching the man page and 'proving me wrong', but I've been Linux-ing for 20 years and I can't tell you a single time a man page has helped me. Generalize with me here, and dont focus on this command in particular. Say I want to use rsync and ssh. Yeah I know about scp, but there was just an HN discussion a few days ago about how that's "bad", so unless I remember their commands, I might think, "ah, I'll just read the handy rsync man page and that will show me how". Now, here's what actually happens:
man rsync:
<huge paragraphs telling me shit I already know, that rsync transmits files>
<-A does some obscure, esoteric thing that I dont care about>
<-a does almost the same thing as A, but was kept for "Sys-V compatibilty, deprecated">
<-b ....> ... <-r getting close,>
<-s ah , secure mode>
. ok cool, but in all likelihood, it wont tell you HOW to use secure mode. just that -s turns secure mode on. ok, do I just tap -s and magically rsyncs are now secure? Oh, HELL NO! no, no no. First, you have to know that -s has to go before the file you want to transmit. Should the man page tell you that? oh, HELL NO! They'll just let you type it wrong, get the error, and get really frustrated (or just go to google and type "how to rsync+ssh " and get the answer immediately). so going back to my "arrange the letters" analogy, you just have to arrange the -s before, after, or in between the options until it works. The man page is USELESS.
Again, this isnt intended to be a real example. I don't know what -s does for rsync. But I DO know if I were to try to read the rsync man page to do rsync+ssh, without fail, any options documented will not work or do what I want them to, usually because the order they are typed or the format of their arguments are conveniently omitted from the so-called documentation. I used to think it was my fault for pathologically composing the args wrong, but I've come to realize it's that the docs are written by people who already know or wrote the commands, so they omit the most obvious steps, or they don't "test" the man pages (which, arguable for FOSS, maybe they shouldn't. But it doesn't change the fact that the documentation sucks).
Me: "which president authored the New Deal?"
Man page: "`presidents`, displays a complete biography of all US presidents.
<-n> displays the biography of the n-th president. Note, to increase frustration levels, search functionality is disabled for this page. If you want to find out about a specific president, you can just start at 0 and read all of their biographies until you find what you need.
me: "maybe the answer is on SO."
smug hackers: "what a noob, people don't even read the docs these days"
Yet this may be a broader issue, an education issue. As in, if we don't teach children to do and instead tell them they deserve or are entitled are we forever hampering their progress?
I always tell my clients' staff "There are no such questions as 'stupid' questions" to encourage them to explore. People in many cultures don't explore by and large because they're afraid of ridicule. I take pains to tell everyone who is exploring, including myself, that while exploring a new skill, concept or task, a state of discomfort and clumsiness is normal. Somehow our "go-fast", pre-packaged-experience culture has forgotten this lesson that every infant learns early on.
This "what should I do?" posture permeates many retiring individuals, as well. I have an Emacs Org file with over 6,000 lines of "I want to try this..." reminders that I'm adding to many times a week and sometimes several times a day, so this is very much a "...not where I came from..." that I've puzzled over for awhile. I hypothesize that this happens because many people allow a perception (whether by themselves or via others) that pigeon-holes themselves and their human potential.
Like really, if you were to try to learn Korean (assuming you don't know it) right now, you think you'd have any simple questions that someone who'd been speaking Korean all their life would find absurdly easy?
Everyone starts from somewhere, this sort of ego-ist stuff is toxic. It is okay to be bad at things and it is okay to ask dumb questions.
Although I have discovered that sometimes things I remember seeing the answer to before are no longer discoverable by search :(
Wow, why the aggressiveness? This strikes me as prime "/r/iamverysmart" material. Yes, we get it, you figured everything out for yourself, well done -.- Yet if something is not trivially apparent to somebody (as everything seems to be to you) why should they not ask questions in a website whose purpose is to ask questions. I find it's almost always better to just ask for help when you are stuck rather than bang your head on a brick wall for hours. It will save you time and, if the teacher is good, it will make things much more clear.
>Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
Again, the "back in my day" cliché. What is your basis for saying this. Sure, we can have a discussion about whether or not the abundance of material can make students more inclined to look everything up before giving it an honest shot, but a priori I would be inclined to say that more material and more teachers, accessible even to those not in formal education, can only be a good thing.
>Same with YouTube, when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit. But it's more your own lack if you're not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself.
To be honest, this attitude makes me quite annoyed.
You will never in a million years catch me ragging on somebody that is making an honest effort to learn, even if they are struggling and it's taking them a long time to grasp the material. And clearly, if somebody is looking up teaching materials online of their own free will, they are interested and curious and motivated to learn. That's commendable, and it's a terribly arrogant and presumptuous thing to do IMO, chastising someone for not immediately understanding everything.
Why do you see people as possessing equal problem solving abilities and resources?
What will society benefit the most from? Teaching the people at bottom and bringing them to average or teaching the top ones and moving them to edge?
You should have made an effort in fixing grammar in the above sentence before putting people down like that. At least, they are trying and not giving up. That's commendable
I don't mean the search results that point to Stackoverflow, which are usually common patterns/answers. I mean looking up official docs, reading the code, just trying things without immediately looking for someone to handhold you through everything. You don't need to read medium articles or watch youtube for every single thing. Even a lot of tech conferences are full of talks going over the same basics over and over again, and these are meant for programmers.
This is a result of social media proliferation and the desire to do everything online and enhance your profile instead of just getting some work done. Y
> Linus: I've never had some "message" that I wanted to spread, so ...
It's a pity that a man with such influence has no message that he wants to spread, but I can somehow understand this respond. My personal take of this quote can refer to another quote from his TED interview[1]:
> I’m an engineer. 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.
While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights, it is just not possible to happen.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...
Or maybe people who have no particular expertise in political matters should stop opining so much about them?
And maybe we should stop politicising all aspects of culture and existence. There is so much more to life.
Saying "I just play football, I leave politics to politicians" or "I'm just an engineer, I leave politics to the experts" aren't doing that. They are simply saying "I'm happy with what everyone else with an audience says". And the other people with audiences aren't experts either for the most part.
If you have listeners you have a responsibility for what you are saying whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter whether those 1M instagram followers just like to see you do backflips on a bicycle. If have 1M followers you have influence. If you have 10M followers you are a political force. Even if you just ride bikes on instagram.
Saying nothing even remotely political is better than completely screwing up ("Lex Notch"), but it's still the easy way out.
They do, their message is usually related to their field of expertise. A good sportsman will act as an example of how to be a good sport, how to conduct yourself when you lose, how to be a good winner, etc. A good OS maintainer will set an example through code and their leadership will show the team what is and isn't acceptable.
> If you have listeners you have a responsibility for what you are saying whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter whether those 1M instagram followers just like to see you do backflips on a bicycle. If have 1M followers you have influence. If you have 10M followers you are a political force. Even if you just ride bikes on instagram.
If you've got a million followers watching you do backflips on a bike then your audience is not there to hear your political opinions. It's a recipe to lose most of your audience, even the ones that agree aren't there to listen to it.
Assuming you're American, half the countries politics are the opposite of yours, most of the worlds politics are the opposite of yours. Do you really want to be hearing those peoples opinions all the time? Many of those opinions will be quite hurtful to many people.
It's rarely that easy. Suddenly you'll be forced to either accept a code of conduct, or actively choose not to do so. The decision will be seen as a political one regardless of whether the person making the decision thinks it is.
The footballer will need to decide whether or not to take a knee during the national anthem, and by no decision of their own (it wasn't their protest!) they are now forced to take a political stance and probably motivate it. There
So in some cases you are lucky and you can "just be an engineer" or "just be an athlete" and the positions you take are harmless and apolitical "I like charities and being a good sport!". But suddenly they will be forced to take positions that are both political and controversial. The audience wasn't there of course to hear Linus Torvalds' views on equality or some footballers stance on politics or racism - but there they are. You can't follow an engineer or a footballer that isn't also a human with opinions you may or may not like. So while it's some times nice to not have to worry about politics in some context - it's always just beneath the surface.
A strange example considering codes of conduct are forcing people to become more apolitcal. They force politics into venues were it didn't exist before.
> The footballer will need to decide whether or not to take a knee during the national anthem
Not kneeling is apolitical, it doesn't mean you condone any stance whatsoever.
I'm getting the impression you only want political opinions that you agree with to be shared, s let's take a real political stance that isn't controversial on HN , "Should society accept homosexuality?". For me that's and easy yes and I'm sure most of HN would agree. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do as well, correct? Well a sizeable chunk of your country (which ever one it is), most of the middle east, most of Asia, most of Africa, most of Eastern Europe and much of the Latin America disagree (https://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-ho...). Most of the world disagrees in fact.
Are you telling me you want most of them to be spouting "We shouldn't accept homosexuality" on every video of them doing a backflip on a bike?
Is it? Who decides that? The athlete might not even know what political position they are taking. Or they might be seen as taking the opposite position as the one they think they are taking. It's all in the eye of the beholder. As soon as enough people believe that not adopting a CoC or not kneeling IS in fact a political stance/statement - then it also is. At that point, it doesn't matter whether a player says "I don't want to take any political side here so I'll just stand, thanks". It's out of their hands. This is an exaggerated example (the CoC one is more reasonable) but I hope you get my point - whether or not you take a political stance might not even be deliberate, or conscious. Some times it might be better to at least do it consciously then.
You've also completely avoid my question, do you want the majority of the world who don't think society should accept homosexuality to be voicing their opinions more?
I didn't understand it tbh, and I still don't...
I don't consider all opinions to have equal value but I do value people being able to express opinions that I disagree with. That doesn't mean someone should be voicing opinions about e.g. homosexuality in a place where it has no relevance (Typical context: a github issue discussion). In those contexts I just expect everyone to be tolerant/inclusive. And as usual "tolerance" does not extend to "acceptance of intolerance".
The point is to highlight your hypocrisy. You say you want influential people to be more overtly political but you really only want people you agree with to be more overtly political.
> That doesn't mean someone should be voicing opinions about e.g. homosexuality in a place where it has no relevance (Typical context: a github issue discussion)
This was my point all along, it seems like you do agree that there is such a thing as being apolitical. So why is context only important now? Why is this political position out of context on a GitHub discussion but in context for a football player or someone doing backflips on a bike?
Funnily, it would allegedly require me to be active to not accept a code of conduct. I would disagree with that.
These code are nothing new and formerly often called something like netiquette or something. Some guidelines a community agreed upon and could be leveraged for common ground in cases of disagreement.
The difference to modern examples of COCs is certainly that they were mostly not mandated upon users. At that point, they become as interesting to users as terms of services. Somthing not on your mind you pay no attention to.
Since most COCs also include some drivel about strict enforcements, learning processes and other completely unrelated topics, I tend to just passively ignore them.
Many of these are also blatantly lying. What better way to champion inclusivity by banning behaviour deemed inconform? While even underlining that conformity is required? I would require an explaination here.
I wonder why people that tend to argue that everything is political are so keen on my and others conformity? What should I answer to that? Sorry, I cannot comply, I need to champion diversity?
Once you reach a certain amount of attention, the question will be raised, and at that point not adopting an explicit CoC will be met with questions and seen as an active political stance. I don't know if I think that's fair - but it's the way it is.
> I wonder why people that tend to argue that everything is political are so keen on my and others conformity?
I'm not sure who you mean or which conformity you refer to here.
In case you are actually interested and don't just want to support a certain political position, this could be a quick introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I got up early this morning to look at the fog that had rolled across the city. Politicise that.
> and leaving "politics to those who knows about it" isn't really viable.
Viability is relevant to desired outcomes. What outcome do you desire? Is that outcome a political reality? Given you believe everything is politics anyway - we can safely assume yes to that question. Of course - you're going to want YOUR political outcome and for these leaders to represent your political beliefs. So - really I find it hard to believe you really want anything other than an opportunistic desire to leverage platforms to achieve your desired political outcomes. And for you to achieve that - of course you have to first successfully politicise those platforms.
Some of us - on the other hand - believe that the fewer the vectors of political co-ercion there are - the better. And also - we'd like to get some engineering done among other things - which is harder when things are politically co-opted. Making everything political detracts from quality work generally.
edit: Just to add, I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be politically active. Just because I don't want to talk about how woke a particular pull request might be - doesn't mean I won't take to the streets to demonstrate against some injustice that I oppose.
What are you doing to ensure that in 10 or 20 years time other people will be able to do the same? Your ability to look at the fog rolling across the city is the result of a finely balanced set of climatic factors. If it's something you cherish, it is something you should think about preserving.
> Some of us - on the other hand - believe that the fewer the vectors of political co-ercion there are - the better.
But you're happy to do nothing, other than hope that technology will fix it.
... Clearly I'm exaggerating to make a point, and I know nothing about your political beliefs, but I hope you understand the point that I'm making.
This is an ideology. People don't think this way, most of us just enjoy the view.
Well, the first part is science. The desire to preserve it for others may be an ideology. It certainly requires political action.
The point is that if you wish to continue the activity you enjoy, you may well need to be politically engaged.
If you have been in Seoul or Beijing, this sentence automatically politicises itself. Not fog but smoke though.
I mean - it doesn't even achieve what it's aiming for. I haven't been in either of those two cities - so by your own logic, my statement isn't political.
And either way - it can't be true that my statement would politicise itself. Statements just represent states of the world. It is humans and their beliefs that politicise them. No statement can politicise itself.
BUT EVEN IF THEY COULD...lol - this just gets better... You just got done saying that my being in another city is what is somehow causally related to the politicisation.
Your response is so far from being an intelligible thought... you need to tear it all down and start again. Go slow... maybe test it out on a family member first. Workshop it.
No. NOT P does not necessarily imply NOT Q.
> it can't be true that my statement would politicise itself.
Environments matter. That's why I pointed out those two cities, where your statement can deliver totally different meaning and depth, and cause totally different consequences. Does that make any sense to you?
> Your response is so far from being an intelligible thought... you need to tear it all down and start again. Go slow... maybe test it out on a family member first. Workshop it.
Thanks for the feedback.
"Meanwhile, those in power went on their business as usual, and I was letting them, sending a signal that I'm ok with that, or at least that I wont stand in their way".
No, but many hours can. If those aren't, appreciating nature (or gardening or whatever) instead, has political implications...
As someone quoted, "You might not care for politics, but politics cares for you".
> No, but many hours can. If those aren't, appreciating nature (or gardening or whatever) instead, has political implications...
Sure. But also, spending time on politics has gardening implications. What is your basis for deciding that politics should be the thing that wins? Further, what is your basis for saying that politics should be the thing that wins for my use of time? I'll be involved in politics when I think the issues are important enough, and not otherwise, you got a problem with that?
I don't want politics to dominate my life, my time, and my mind. I deny you the right to tell me that it should.
I vehemently agree with the second statement but the first is absurd without further establishing what "politics" means in this context.
> If you have listeners you have a responsibility
Not everyone listens to admire a person or to see your own views approved. On the contrary, I don't think popularity or visibility implies responsibility. That would also not hold up to reality, restrict the dialogue and patronizes listeners.
Maybe try to convince people on the merrit of your position without treating them like children.
Sigh. Are you posting this Twitter meme seriously or is it a joke? It doesn't even stand up to light intellectual scrutiny.
As for actors, musicians etc blabbering about politics, the things they say tend to be elitist, disconnected and uninformed. Don't think it does the world any good, apart from highlighting just how far removed they are from the common man.
Actually, far from a Twitter meme, it's a millennia long empirical observation.
It's only the disconnect from power of today's citizen that make them thing they can be uninvolved with politics (and that this doesn't send a political message and have political impact).
The very definition of a citizen was one who was active in politics (the inverse being someone preoccupied with their own private matters, an "idiotis" in Ancient Greek, and the etymology for "idiot").
Um, OK... but not everything is a political act. It's just a ridiculous meme I see now and again.
I've noticed the people who make such claims tend to have horrible politics that need a signal boost. There's a reason why you need to latch onto the success of others and resent those who will not play ball. Have fun with that.
@coldtea: If your ideas are so virtuous, you wouldn't need such fervent help. They're not.
And people who say the above are ok with the established politics, no matter how horrible they are.
"Used car salesman meets Jehovah's Witness" approach to talking about issues can work for larger injustices, but doesn't generalize well when everyone wants to air their personal grievances. Pushing a message onto every possible forum isn't going to help much, but is sure as hell going to grow divisions and just tire people out.
And people who say that haven't noticed that the "self-destructing" is going quite well by itself, and that some guilt-trip is actually needed to avoid it...
E.g. the division between the civil rights people and those that wanted a segregated society.
Or the division between the anti-war movement in the later sixties and the "patriotic" pro-Vietnam war establishment.
Else, the bipartisan consensus (or small differences) just leads to the incremental management of what's there, and no real initiative for change (e.g. like the last 3+ decades regarding the environment or inequality).
No, I am not going to give any credibility to random Instagram "influencers".
Yes, and speaking only about things you have expertise on rather than talking about "values like democracy or human rights" is a very much responsbile way to treat and show respect to your audience
It's this line of thinking that leads to people with minor platforms telling me to do things I already agree with, but in the most self-defeating and insultingly paternalistic ways possible that I wind up questioning my own positions because they advocated for them so goddamn poorly.
>Saying nothing even remotely political is better than completely screwing up
I think we don't understand just how badly the well-intentioned idiots are screwing it all up. See also: every Twitter fight between team We Know Best, and team Go Fuck Yourself.
People act like "everything is political" is such a stunning insight. I disagree. It's as stunning an insight as saying "everything affects everything else". Yeah, sure, everything does affect everything else. Everything affects everythign else in mysterious and unknowable ways but that isn't particularly interesting and it isn't clear how that fact should affect one's behavior.
> If you have listeners you have a responsibility for what you are saying whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter whether those 1M instagram followers just like to see you do backflips on a bicycle. If have 1M followers you have influence. If you have 10M followers you are a political force. Even if you just ride bikes on instagram.
This makes my skin crawl. The presumption here is that a person can calculate how that person's beliefs and the expression of those beliefs (i.e. actions) will benefit/harm the world and act accordingly. Yeah, no. People think they can do that, but they're deluding themselves. In order to do that, you'd have to model the world. We can't even model a single person.
> Saying nothing even remotely political is better than completely screwing up ("Lex Notch"), but it's still the easy way out.
No, it's the hard way out, which is why most public figures babble endlessly about politics.
Hannah Arendt:
> The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.
Sorry, "should" is not in my vocabulary.[1]
>Because there is a message, even from quiet people.
A very useful lesson I learned at a young age. You are in control of your words and actions. You are not in control of how people interpret them, and shouldn't stress too much about it.
The other useful lesson: People will interpret a vacuum, unless they've trained themselves not to. They will find meaning when there was none.
>If you have listeners you have a responsibility for what you are saying whether you like it or not.
Yes, but you are not responsible for things people are assuming from your silence.
I've been hearing this "celebrities have an obligation to speak up on things beyond their expertise" since I was a kid. In most cases, I believe the person saying it merely wants the celebrity to say something political that the person agrees with.
Along the lines of communication skills (the URL I link to below): Your message is devoid of almost any nuance, and is loaded with absolutes. I would recommend reading any good book on communications if you want people to take you seriously.
(And yes, I responded somewhat in kind. I could have taken it further, by pointing out that by taking your stance, you are contributing to the increased polarization in the world, and adding to the culture of no compromise deadlocks. If it is off-putting, you will have a window into how others see your comment.)
If you are a sensible person, you also know it's not possible to have an opinion about everything out there. Every topic is a rabbit hole if you want to understand everything in and out. Most politicians only touch at the surface of things and never go in details. I can understand why someone like an engineer may be reluctant to talk about politics in that sense.
What I mean is that good ideas in tech tend to be somewhat of a logically sound and mathematical nature.
Which means it doesn't matter what you believe about your code, or what you had to go through to write it, or what it would mean to society if we just used your code regardless because you just so happen to belong to some historically oppressed minority group that is under represented in the tech industry as a whole.
If your code isn't demonstrated as being technologically superior after measured up against my code, guess what... your code goes in the trash, mine gets merged upstream, and everybody gets to come to the common consensus that as far as all the bits in our cosmos are concerned, every thing can be explained as being binary.
Why would he have any great insight on "democracy or human rights" compared the average population? Because he wrote successful software?
Linux project itself has been showing how people can collaborate so well. Obviously politics is also something that requires people to work with each other. It is hard to say if he, as a maintainer of this project, has insights of human collective behavior in general.
Yeah, lets just ignore thousands of years of civilization doing that long before some Finnish guy made a software.
What the fuck could possibly go wrong
I think the ancient Athenian democracy had it right: some law-making bodies should be filled by lottery -- akin to juries or the draft.
Really, who cares? No, he is not a "leader" in any way outside kernel development.
Are we going to ask everyone now for their opinions on anything just because they are domain experts on something completely unrelated?
What is next? Asking (insert random famous politician) about kernel development?
There's some people who think the cult of personality is a bad thing to promote and then there's people who wring their hands and cry about people who aren't using it. You can't win.
Maybe he just like playing with computers?
I read this after I just read Atlas Shrugged and wondered how my convictions fitted into the objectivists' world view. Whether this was the real Linus or not, I liked his view, as I generally do. And it matches his down-to-earth-ness. BTW: Please don't butcher my karma again for mentioning Ayn ;)
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&ei=6IOkXO2a...
And I'm very much happy not everyone uses their influence to turn every speech into a political opinion. If I read a Linus piece, I want to read about Linux, software engineering, git, kernels, operating systems, etc. If he started rambling about democracy and human rights, it would only introduce noise for me.
Hard to argue with his technical chops and many successes, but that doesn’t make him expert in everything he’s got an opinion on. He even punts on a softball question and makes it about himself: “what advice do you have for young programmers and students?” - how about “have fun, exercise and stay healthy and dive in!”
I’m sorry to be negative here, but I wish Linus did better in this regard.
It was his interview, asking him for his opinions and takes. I feel like that’s a perfectly valid answer.
That's because it was about himself! Bob asked him for his advice.
> how about “have fun, exercise and stay healthy and dive in!”
That's such an overused, uninspired, undistinguished answer. Why would you ask Linus if that's what you want to hear?
>The kind of languages people see under active development aren't for low-level system programming.
I found it interesting that he didn't mention Rust. Or is Rust not suitable for kernel development?
> To anyone who wants to build their own kernel from scratch, I can just wish them luck. It's a huge project, and I don't think you actually solve any of the really hard kernel problems with your choice of programming language. The big problems tend to be about hardware support (all those drivers, all the odd details about different platforms, all the subtleties in memory management and resource accounting), and anybody who thinks that the choice of language simplifies those things a lot is likely to be very disappointed.
> Looks like you're right. Ice hockey is the national winter sport of Canada while lacrosse is the summer sport.
See here for the formatting options supported: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
The questions he asked doesn't even give us new insight into Linus's opinions on tech.
> Nancy and I and our three daughters are all doing well. Our eldest, Zoe, who was 11 when Marc and I started Red Hat, is expecting her second child—meaning I'm a grandparent.
First off, I don’t give a damn about the interviewer’s family, Red Hat founder or not. Not sure why it’s included in the article. But you know who does? Identity thieves. I feel like Young should be more aware of the issues this kind of thing can pose. He’s a high net worth guy and it seems reckless to publish anywhere, much less an unprotected article like this one.
Meaning what?