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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

To save everybody's time: this is about straight white men making an OS for them and thus terrible for everybody else.

And it has some puzzling examples. For example if you want to kill a process according to the presenter you need "ps auxwww | grep process_name | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9". He compares that to GUI Mac OS process manager and how the Unix way is exclusionary for anybody other than straight white men.

Well, how about "pkill process_name"? How can you put the GUI way into a script? Should we replace all code with GUIs, even the presenter's Rust and Python? Why does he pretend that Linux graphical desktop environments like Gnome or KDE don't exist? Can we answer any of these questions without whitestraightmansplaining? Press the flag story button to find out.

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If you have not watched the video, trabant00’s comment will sound somewhat odd. However, the presenter does indeed draw parallels between C and Colonialism around 17:25 into the video, the part about macOS is at roughly 25:30, and the “straight white men” part at around 30:25. Without this context I do think it is difficult to understand why trabant00 wrote what they wrote, especially as the video very much starts out on a much more technical note.

I initially set out to save other people from the bait and switch from unix to politics but then I made a convoluted comment which confused people even more...

Why did you feel the need to bring sexual orientation, skin color, and gender into this? Do straight white men get the chance to voice an opinion without being dismissed as straight white men? Could we, maybe, when discussing technical matters, talk about the topic at hand, instead of discrediting people straight away for their inherent properties..?

*edit:* as trabant00 pointed out, this is actually brought up by the speaker towards the end of the video, I didn't catch this the first time. I apologise for jumping to conclusions here.

Watch the video, the presenter is the one who made it about straight white men vs everybody else.

Then read my comment again. I am opposing bringing race and gender politics into Unix discussion.

> To save everybody's time: this is about straight white men making an OS for them and thus terrible for everybody else.

That's not what the talk is about, that's one of the examples of brokenness he's talking about, as is the kill example, and yes they are deliberately troll-y examples.

The talk is about the very last statement "sometimes you have to drop your tools and make new ones" whether that's "everything is a file", "do one thing and do it well" (the ps example), or the way communities are structured. You don't have to agree with him on any of them but to dismiss them as "whitestraightmansplaining" is to duck as the point flies over your head.

> The talk is about the very last statement "sometimes you have to drop your tools and make new ones"

Go ahead and make them. I see no army of white straight men with unix swastikas stopping everybody else from making their kernel/OS exactly the way they want it.

The talk is not about building new stuff. The talk is about attacking some people based on their race, gender and sexual orientation. The talk is about gaining power over a tool and a community, ousting the ones who built it because "it's wrong and we'll fix it". The talk is political with a thin veneer of tech.

The talk is what it is, the points are the one he makes, there's no emperor's clothes that only you can see but fly over my stupid old head. If the talk would be about building there would be a presentation of some code skeleton or at least some design schemas.

pgrep or pkill.

Because only White people speak either English and/or Romances. Sure.

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