Anakin – Automatically Kill Orphans | Hacker News Reader

Anakin – Automatically Kill Orphans

github.com

89 pointstimhh23 comments

The name is definitely clever. I do feel like terminology in our field might need to change a bit at some point as to make communication easier with other fields.

Anakin only killed the Jedi younglings and it's not clear whether when he killed the sand people he killed their young in any particular order relative to their parents so he's not a perfect choice for a tool that specifically only kills orphans (i.e. children without living parents).

There was a documented German reserve police officer who volunteered to kill the children during the genocide in Poland but only under the condition that he would do so after his comrades killed their mothers because he could justify it to himself as an act of mercy.

Let's just say there would have been names that better fit the metaphor but that doesn't mean they would have made for better names. Arguably it might demonstrate a need for better metaphors instead. If killing children is the norm, maybe children aren't a good metaphor given how we normally think of child killing.

I know this is really off-topic... It's just that the Anakin thing is something I have been thinking about a lot. I think he was unfairly judged and got kind of a raw deal in the grand scheme of things. He also wasn't fully in control during Order 66, that was more the Emperor and the "Dark Side".

Anakin was sold into what is basically slavery as a child, tried to do the right thing along the way and survive, then he believed he was rescued by a Jedi, who cared about him to a degree as a padawan, but ultimately restricted him and did not trust him, which is part of what the Emperor used to manipulate Anakin into doing all of the things he wanted. Then you have Padme, who was much older than Anakin, and manipulated his mind as only an older woman can do. This was the second half of the Emperor's plan to turn Anakin to the dark side. I think the full story about Anakin is not as bad as it seems, and Obi Wan did not have to take it as far as he did and leave Anakin alone after being cut up and burned to die slowly to death. He didn't even care enough about Anakin to put him out of his misery after defeating him. He just wanted him to suffer.

So it's really like what Anakin said in the Ahsoka series, "I am what you made me"

EDIT: Obi-Wan series, not Ahsoka series.

"but ultimately restricted him and did not trust him, which is part of what the Emperor used to manipulate Anakin into doing all of the things he wanted."

Mace Windu actually did ultimately trust Anakin. He said "you've earned my trust" shorty before Anakin chops his hands off. If Anakin hadn't betrayed them he would have become highly trusted. Though he still may have been expelled from the order for loving Padme maybe?

The jedi were in a no win situation with Anakin. He clearly lacked the temperment to be a jedi, but firing him would have made him turn to the dark side quicker. So they kept him around but didn't promote him to the council.

Even as a 9 year old they had sensed he lacked the temperament to be a jedi and they were reluctant to recruit him.

I'd go even so far as to say that the Jedi were institutionally unequipped to deal with Anakin. They tried to have it both ways by keeping him around to prevent him from turning to the dark side and stunted him to prevent him from becoming too powerful while also failing to provide him with an environment to deal with his emotions other than appealing to stoicism and abstinence. Their obsession with dogma over people is what ultimately led to Luke destroying the ancient Jedi texts in the sequel trilogy after similarly failing his own nephew.

Luke doesn't destroy the texts, he was going to until Yoda's ghost appears to do it with lightning then they show Ray had stolen the texts. (I think it would have been better if Luke was going to destroy the texts, Yoda does it, Luke is outraged and realizes he doesn't want the Jedi to end, then Yoda says "then you'll have to tell people what was in the texts" and then Luke becomes a teacher again and doesn't die)

The sequel trilogy really has nothing to say about the prequels. Luke doesn't fail because he's following Jedi dogma, he doesn't even have the texts until he leaves and finds the first Jedi temple after Kylo turned evil, which had nothing to do with worldly attachments as far as we see.

Chicks are a chicken's children.

How was your omelette today?

I can’t see how any of this could be misconstrued /s:

“Anakin uses Linux's PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER feature to mark itself as the "child subreaper", which means any descendants that are orphaned get reparented to this process… then periodically polls its children and kills any that have been orphaned to it.”

IMHO, needs some surrounding animated context/integrated display execution : Anakin[0] wanders around in a hascii star wars[1] theme version of psdoom[2] and reacts to AI request/return key force to free midi-chords[3] from the NyquestIDE[4] / SAL[5] path to make the largest chord[6].

Add in some variety to the swan song / episode 1 score[7]

So, obviously didn't succeed as still able to tune-in.

Would a carbonite option to suspend/hibernate processes require a jabba the hut ide to recoup the time/expense of process reanimation?

----------------------

[0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873861

[1] : https://asciimation.co.nz/asciimation/index.html

[2] : https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

[3] : https://github.com/ldrolez/free-midi-chords

[4] : nyquest ide : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/nyquist/title.html#toc

[5] : sal : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/nyquist/part2.html#6

[6] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTygKpi6pI

[7] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E9AOweTwG0

This seems like it would be very useful for running flaky programs under Wine, which I find often ends with me crafting pkill regexes to tidy up the dozen or so helper "explorer.exe" processes left behind.

I had the same thought. My current solution is to just run ‘wineserver -k’ after I’m done with the program.

I like that it reveals itself as the parent of the orphans before it tries to kill them

This is some dry humor.

Why not just use tini with subreaper flag set? It handles edge cases like signal handling, is a viable init process, and it is smaller.

Looks similar to tini [1].

—

1: https://github.com/krallin/tini

It still won't be a master program

I think in addition to orphans, it should also kill daemonized children that are out of their parents’ control.

lol

Child, orphan, zombie" computing terminology is goofy at best. A process has a child? Already doesn't make sense, it's replication and mitosis, not reproduction via fertilization. To anthropomorphize (make human, apply human qualities to) computing processes, threads, and conceptual allocations of heap space is an attempt to invite our biological comprehension into a digital domain, but sometimes it is better to invent new words.

The description for mitosis is usually "a cell splits into two daughter cells" so we're right back to parents and children even with that analogy — which doesn't actually fit, because a process spawning a new process isn't usually duplicating itself.

Doesn't one have to swap pages around in order for split bits to byte? ok, just imagine one doesn't need a dinning philosopher.

Hence, my suggestion to invent new words!)

"Child" and "Parent" are already universally understood and easy to remember. No reason to invent new words to explain this concept, it will only make IT harder to learn, not easier.

Some other terminology is taking this metaphor a bit far, like "Orphan", but it makes sense even if it's not a 100% ideal analogy. What matters is that it's easy to remember and explain.

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