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25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

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Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#61

Post by Cthulhu_ »

qlk1123 wrote: post #18

> Bob: Anything else you want to comment on, either publicly or otherwise? > 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…

Probably smart; if he makes any political statement, ANY, he'll draw in a lot of drama, media coverage, angry mobs with pitchforks - shit he can't and shouldn't be arsed with.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#62

Post by ToFab123 »

qlk1123 wrote: post #18

> Bob: Anything else you want to comment on, either publicly or otherwise? > 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…

> It's a pity that a man with such influence has no message that he wants to spread

Maybe he just like playing with computers?

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#63

Post by mikorym »

coldtea wrote: post #40
qlk1123 wrote: post #18

> Bob: Anything else you want to comment on, either publicly or otherwise? > 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…

> While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights, it is just not possible to happen. Why would he have any great insight on "democracy or human rights" compared the average population? Because he wrote successful software?

Silly people want silly rolemodels? /s

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#64

Post by coldtea »

flukus wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got up early this morning to look at the fog that had rolled across the city. Politicise that. "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".

That is just absurd, not every hour of every day can be spent in resistance of things you don't like. I doubt you were actively resisting the powers that be while you were sleeping last night, does that mean you were sending them a signal that you're perfectly happy with the way things are?

>That is just absurd, not every hour of every day can be spent in resistance of things you don't like.

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".

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#65

Post by coldtea »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #47
coldtea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've noticed the people who make such claims tend to have horrible politics that need a signal boost. And people who say the above are ok with the established politics, no matter how horrible they are.

And people who say that want to guilt-trip the entire civilization into self-destructing. "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 want to guilt-trip the entire civilization into self-destructing

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...

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#66

Post by coldtea »

zeropnc wrote: post #60
bsaul wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is such a true remark. I’ve always been shocked by the unsufferable ego one needs to have to feel authorized to give public statements on complex global issues or life advices.

Yeah we live in an age where professional athletes, musicians and celebrities play an integral role in shaping global socioeconomic policy. What the fuck could possibly go wrong

Or worse, career politicians and career policy advisors. That is, people totally removed from any implication of their policies for others, and usually far removed (economically, socially, culturally) from the population they decide for.

I think the ancient Athenian democracy had it right: some law-making bodies should be filled by lottery -- akin to juries or the draft.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#67

Post by golergka »

Stratoscope wrote: post #9
ben165 wrote: post #3

>Bob: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students? >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 i…

> 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. 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", righ…

I don't think that you're and author of parent comment are talking about the same thing. Most of low-quality questions on SO that make you think that author is lazy and unqualified are not about trivia or API bits like that. They're about a medium-level task that could be decomposed into more elementary subtasks without the need to know anything specific about the language or framework - but the author didn't even do 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.)

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#69

Post by reallydude »

rujuladanh wrote: post #50
qlk1123 wrote: post #18

> Bob: Anything else you want to comment on, either publicly or otherwise? > 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…

Why would we care about Torvalds' political views at all? 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?

> It's a pity that a man with such influence has no message that he wants to spread

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.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #65
TeMPOraL wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people who say that want to guilt-trip the entire civilization into self-destructing. "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 want to guilt-trip the entire civilization into self-destructing 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...

No, a lot of this guilt-tripping and politicizing is actually contributing to the self-destruction - it divides people more, makes them less likely to care about each other, and sucks out the oxygen in the media, so that the big problems cannot be discussed productively.
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