Linus Torvalds

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torvalds_at_social.kernel.org@mostr.pub

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relay.shitforce.one

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Last Notes

2024-03-15 00:33:04

Some of you know today as π-day.
But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

2024-02-28 19:14:43

- reply

@npub1jfd…s8ga I think we should do this by default on the security list.
Not for the levity, but just to counteract the “security is more important than anything else” vibes. Security researchers have this “the sky is falling” thing going on for everything, it’s very tiresome.

2024-02-16 16:43:20

Being the responsible parents we are, we have Carbon Monoxide alarms in the house, because hey, it’s what you do. Right?
Of course, they have never gone off (knock wood), so you do tend to forget that they exist at all.
Well, yesterday one of those alarms decided that it needed to really remind us that it exists, and that it’s been ten years since we activated it. Because it’s now time to replace it.
Of course, nobody was home - except for the dog. Who is now traumatized by that beeping hell-box that suddenly decided that it was a good idea to tell everybody out of the blue that it needs replacing - at 95dB, just to make sure.
Kidde - I’m sure you could at least start out with just a mild chirp, instead of going full “the bark collar from hell” crazy. No?
https://social.kernel.org/media/891b3a423abf567cd48e61e43bfce2c684befad695cd05ae2aef9d5442e04d1f.jpeg

2024-01-19 19:45:18

Staycation: day seven.
We had power back twice yesterday for a couple of hours each time. The weather and PGE were just teasing us, and I will not consider that a real break in the cold darkness and despair that is being without electricity.
But I still have battery power, and while it froze some more overnight and outside is now very slippery, it’s once more above freezing. So frozen pipes remain a thing of the past.
End result: I have a handful of pull requests left (most of which came in in the last few hours), and no reason to believe that I won’t close the merge window normally on Sunday.

2024-01-18 21:02:43

Well that didn’t last long.
Do I reset my staycation counter to day one, or do I keep this at day six?
https://social.kernel.org/media/cf9d575257178e9c366944e786b50da40a2145e286231944a79d13b8434ed56a.jpeg

2024-01-18 18:26:17

.. and ten minutes after posting that, power and internet are back up.
#note1tpe…wq3l

2024-01-18 18:08:08

Staycation: day six.
To nobody’s surprise, power didn’t come back yesterday, but neighbors report that the tree across the power lines has been cut up. So hopefully the electrical crew can come in and fix the power line.
Of course, there may be other issues lurking. We lost power at 5am Saturday morning, and apparently the tree fell a few hours after that. So now there are conflicting theories about where our power is actually fed from.
Presumably somebody at PGE knows, but they aren’t telling.
Once again - there is a pattern emerging - PGE reports that our otage will surely be fixed by 10pm today. And there are now sufficiently few outstanding outages reported that our little area with only 174 customers affected might actually merit some attention.
In the meantime, while temperatures might dip just below freezing again, it won’t be bad enough to freeze any pipes again, so while the kitchen is at a balmy 8°C, I don’t feel worried about the house freezing.
So I’ll continue the merge window on battery power.

2024-01-17 18:38:59

Staycation: day five.
Power still off, but outside is warming up. So now it’s a big ice rink outside with people playing bumper cars with the real things.
Not interested in partaking in that particular contact sport, and as a result I’m still not leaving the house even if the worry about frozen pipes is fading.
Instead trying to see how far I can get on the remaining merge window pulls on just battery power. Not very far I bet, but at least something.
PGE claims power back tonight. Of course, they did that yesterday too…
https://social.kernel.org/media/a971ace2b7bfc56f7c20282a1ecf920d1bd7d421eb7301043e2e4014f9134629.png

2024-01-16 17:10:40

The reason why it’s taking so long is mostly that we’re in a fairly sparsely populated area on the outskirts of town. So not only do we have a lot of these big trees around, PGE also always ends up prioritizing the areas with many more customers affected.
But it doesn’t help that this really is a pretty massive tree, and it has also fallen in a way that makes it hard to remove, with the middle unsupported.
One of our neighbors has a brother that is a logger, and he apparently thought you might want two trucks to get it out: one to support the tree while the other cuts it from above.
Me not being a logger just nodded wisely.
#note10ja…wd4s

2024-01-16 16:57:13

Day four of no power and no Internet. This big tree is the reason. One among hundreds in the area, but this is the one that took out *our* power and Internet.
PGE (Portland General Electric) claims we should get power back by 10pm today, but the ice storm arrives today, so we'll see.
https://social.kernel.org/media/dce00d722743a2409047402309b887ef2be4656d14630df269091adaa41ce871.jpg

2023-10-14 19:23:45

https://social.kernel.org/media/0adf3deeed50428f15549bd2bffd1ea9507f9592ec775760b2cdd035276059c6.jpg

2023-08-29 21:46:26

We have some kind of super-mole infestation in our front yard.
The mole people have been here weekly for the last two months, and have caught at least two moles (“they are solitary creatures, and territorial, so you probably only have one”), but today they apparently admitted defeat.
I think I can hear the mole giggling.
You win, mole. You win.

2023-07-09 21:28:49

I’m clearly a master of SEO.
When I google for “cold dark place filled with sadness and despair” right now (with the quotes), google gives me exactly one result - my Linux kernel github repository.
I will call my new hobby “Reverse Emo Googlewhacking”.
You’re welcome.

2023-06-07 20:40:52

- reply

@npub12hl…yqd2 I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.
Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.
I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

2023-06-07 19:55:45

Bye bye, nytimes.
When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.
Ironically, another pet peeve of mine was the “you can sign up online, but you have to call and talk to a human to cancel”.
But with apparently nothing but your main page (and your ads - surprise surprise) working, that was actually good for once.

2023-04-17 16:42:47

- reply

#[0] I have solved the problem of ironing simply by not wearing suits. Win-win.
But not washing dishes isn’t really an option.
Dishwashers (and washing machines) are just not optional. I’m not some kind of animal living in a cave any more.

2023-04-17 16:32:07

Life is good. We have a dishwasher again.
Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking.
I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.

2023-04-06 18:05:31

Dear lazy-web - question time.
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.
The version I have grown accustomed to isn’t even the most recent version of microemacs, it’s a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.
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.
Anyway.
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 I mean really configurable. As in “I can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be ‘exit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without saving”. Not some half-way state where “sure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you can’t make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?
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.
And please - don’t even bother replying with “Xyz is a great editor” unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I don’t use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.
I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.

2023-03-30 20:55:07

Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are…
We have a brand new family car (replacing one that was twenty years old - just to clarify that this is not something very common in our family). The wife is taking it up the mountain for some late spring skiing, so even though the season is pretty much over, it wants proper traction tires.
No problem. I’ve done this before, even if it’s been a few years. Order tires from Costco (they aren’t in stock, since what idiot would install traction tires in March?), and have them install them.
They call back half an hour after I’ve dropped the car off, because the new car has locking lug nuts. I’ve never heard of such a thing, didn’t know my car had them, and have absolutely no idea what a lug nut key is, much less where it would be.
So I go back to the tire center, google what said “key” is even supposed to look like, and try to find it, eventually just give up and say “let’s reschedule”.
In their defense, the tire techs keep a straight face, and don’t laugh in my face for never even having realized that my car has such things.
As I drive away, I light goes on. I have a manual. It tells me exactly where said lug nut key is (It’s under the carpet in the frunk, in case anybody wonders).
I drive back, feeling really stupid. But at least the car is ready for skiing now.
Moral of the day: RTFM.

2023-03-22 21:45:59

- reply

#[0] that’s not what I claim. I claim that the people talking about “understanding” do not themselves have the very understanding that they are taking about.
They are literally just doing the same thing they talk about ChatGPT doing: putting likely words into sentences that sound good.
Smarter people than me and you have gone down crazy rabbit holes in this area for centuries.

2023-03-22 21:31:01

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.

2023-03-19 02:11:30

https://social.kernel.org/media/031107efa381cbb027c8e43e06794c23c9b5007dd3402a0b6696d92abfe84bf9.jpg

2023-03-16 17:45:54

Replying to all the random individuals that seem to think that I’m “endorsing” one of the Fediverse products over any other, and seem to be making a big deal over #akkoma vs #mastodon etc.
That’s not the case. 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.
So all credit (or blame) for the choice of Fediverse platform goes to #[0], who maintains kernel.org and just made it really easy for me to try this out.
… 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 🔮.

2023-03-14 22:51:11

Random first trial post: 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.