In a cave with a box of scrap
The biggest tragedy of modern media is that they chose to cast Elon Musk as the real life Tony Stark instead of torvalds who created 2 pieces of truly revolutionary software (with the help of thousands of other engineers ofc)
Made me curious if Torvalds at least got some reward for his work besides gratitude from people who use his stuff. I’m not sure how credible internet estimates of net worth are but looking up “Linus Torvalds net worth” keeps showing me stuff from $50–$150 million so hey, at least he’s (probably) comfortable. Not exactly Tony Stark superhero territory but if he wasn’t rich enough to sit at home and sleep for the rest of his life if he wanted to I’d probably be upset on his behalf for a bit, before I moved onto the next outrage of the day. Glad to see he’s well-off.
Four things went for Musk:
- he was rich
- he had a passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.
- he
madewas closely associated with futuristic hardware (we don’t seem to value revolutionary software the same way as hardware) - he was rich
In all honesty, a lot of solo developers who are directly responsible for the internet as we know it should be getting far more credit than rich ass holes but here we are.
Edit: correct
Don’t forget:
- he was rich
Don’t forget:
- his dad was rich
I mean, let’s be thorough. He’s
- the rich scion
- of a family that made their fortune owning and exploiting emerald mines
- in South Africa
- during apartheid
Kinda tells you all you need to know about him and his family.
Also his dad fucked and
married(edit: correction (side note: fuck me, somehow it was WAY weirder than I had remembered):) fathered not one, but TWO children with his own stepdaughter. No, I’m not kidding.Edit 2: nope, they married in the 90s too! You can’t make this shit up.
Wait what‽
Yep.
And that was my reaction when I discovered that too
he made futuristic hardware
Did he
Yeah Teslas were pretty leading edge at the beginning. Then they started doing weird stuff like removing stalks and making triangular trucks.
Falcon 9 and Starship are obviously futuristic too.
Did he, though?
Look at it. That fuck didn’t do fucking shit but fuck. He also bought shit other people designed and made and put his name on shit he told them to be stupid in certain fucking stupid ways. IDRC what ignorant people say. If you look at real history, he fucked and fucked shit. Oh and sure, he paid a bunch of fancy people to look like they move pretty when speaking about his literal fucking shit. It worked and he paid them to lie about which side of fucking anything he was and/or would be on. If you saw shit up until THAT point, you should have fucking known he was lying. Didn’t matter that he said both. He was lying about everything because he wasn’t anything more than fucking shit, literally.
No not in the same way Tony Stark did. But Tony Stark is imaginary. Obviously nobody can build an electric car or a rocket in the same way that Tony Stark does.
Of all the criticisms of Musk this is the weakest. There are many way more valid ones… for instance:
- He’s an arsehole.
- He straight up called that diver a paedo, and even paid a scammer to investigate him.
- The scummy lottery thing for votes for Trump. I don’t care if it ends up being technically legal, it’s clearly immoral.
- Selling the promise of FSD for hard cash when it clearly is never going to happen as he claimed. I still don’t know why there’s been no class action suit over that.
- Backing proper insane far right groups in Europe. These people are worse than Trump. I wouldn’t say he is backing neonazis, but he’s certainly in the vicinity.
Despite all that he clearly has a pretty good handle on engineering and is definitely involved. He’s not just a figurehead.
I know right, people are multidimensional. You can downvote if that blows your mind.
For me the problem is that he LARPs as Tony Stark and idiots but into it. He pretends to be a smart engineer when he lucked into all of it and is really not all that bright.
Despite all that he clearly has a pretty good handle on engineering and is definitely involved. He’s not just a figurehead.
as far as I’ve read he actually doesn’t, he just pretends to. You can see this in a lot of his interactions with his employees and the public. but yes, people are multidimensional. musk is a good salesman.
Didn’t he buy Tesla? And isn’t there a team on Space X just to prevent him from doing changes to projects? And didn’t he say the government didn’t use SQL?
Also Subsurface, a scuba diving log program, but that one is not quite as well known.
I believe his goto comment on git is that its current maintainer did/does far more work on git them him.
Thank god for that dude.
Handing over maintainership was not a hard choice. It was very much: “The moment somebody else comes along that I can trust to keep it going, I’ll go back to doing just the kernel.”
Priorities
Compare that with someone who wants the appearance of creating/maintaining something, without actually contributing musk of anything…
Nice
Turned out better than javascript.
Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! 😱
Interesting footnote: the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn’t yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest “what if” moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there’s a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I’m not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened.
Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there’s pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows…
Thanks, I hate it even more
The TV company?
Tool Command Language. It’s a shitty stringly-typed scripting language from the 80s that took a neat hack (function bodies are string literals) way too far.
It’s a bit less shit than Bash, but shitter than Perl.
Unfortunately the entire EDA industry has decided to use it as their scripting interface, which isn’t too bad in itself - the commands they provide are pretty simple - but unfortunately it leads to people stupidly basing their entire EDA infrastructure on TCL rather than wrapping it in a saner language.
It could’ve been mercurial, but I’m glad that didn’t happen. Being shouted at in a mailing-list for fixing a bug doesn’t sound like fun. Also, the amount of CPU resources that would be wasted running a VCS in python would be phenomenal. And have fun trying to develop a project using a separate python version than supported by your python VCS.
Care to explain your comment for a layman?
From my limited experience mercurial is way more intuitive than git. The big one is named branches are a thing instead of an abstraction.
What do you mean by “are a thing?” Git has branches.
No, git has labels on heads of branches. Once the head moves you loose the information. It also makes for a more messy history, which I believe created the whole “rebase everything” philosophy to cope.
What information is “loosed” when another commit is made to the branch?
If I hand you a commit, you cannot tell which ‘branch’ it is on without searching the git history and hoping that you only get one answer. That’s a bummer if, for instance, you’re a github action and only get handed the commit. If it’s on the master branch, I want to do different things than if it’s a dev branch.
A commit all by itself doesn’t mean as much without context.
Why would I not want to be able to apply a commit to any arbitrary branch?
Also, GitHub is not git - it’s based on git. Any shortcomings it may have aren’t necessarily due to a flaw in git.
A commit all by itself doesn’t mean as much without context.
Luckily a commit points to its parent, which means the context is inherently present. What’s your point?
Why would I not want to be able to apply a commit to any arbitrary branch?
Nobody said that.
Any shortcomings it may have aren’t necessarily due to a flaw in git.
True enough.
