I guess I hadn’t seen so many people jumping to his defense on these things. Until reading the comments in this thread. Damn, son.

That being said, I’ve never read too far into the drama around Linus’s behavior, and I don’t care to. I understand he’s overly abrasive, and he has taken steps to remedy it, but I can also understand where you’d end up lacking empathy after years and years of handling PRs (and some have mentioned that he typically only goes off on people who are otherwise themselves being obnoxious–still not a good reason, but I can empathize).

I guess I hope we can treat Linus like a human, neither deifying nor demonizing him. Praise him for his accomplishments, and call him out when he’s unreasonably being a dick. It’s not good for anyone to normalize shitty behavior, least of all for Linus.

You can guard the fort effectively without being an asshole. I admire Torvalds for his work, but his behavior is still awful.

I am but a simple racoon, stealing your otherwise useless goods. Pay no mind.

Yeah, that’s what I mean. It’s possible to acknowledge his genius as well as call out his shitty behavior. We can and should do both.

It’s possible to acknowledge Torvalds as both a technical leader and overall smart guy, as well as acknowledging his poor treatment of people and generally being an asshole. A person can be both of those things.

Yes, that’s exactly what it is. I had to get one for work because they wanted everyone to use the MS authenticator app on their (personal) phones. I got the Yubikey instead.

But yeah, gotta watch that you don’t accidentally touch it. I had a colleague carry my laptop once and was surprised to find some interesting additions to my code.

Can confirm, I have one just like this. The giveaway is the conductive metal bit, to have it be able to detect finger taps.

You should be safe to remove it. It probably has some info stamped on the metal somewhere.

I’ve never seen this one. Awesome!

Related xkcd

How does Wikipedia continue to be such a bastion of awesome in an increasingly shitty internet? Keep on, good folks!

I may not know much.

There’s no “but”, I’m just clueless.

I host a Jellyfin server at home on an ODROID HC4 that I also use for some backups with rclone. I’ve got it set up with tailscale to connect when not at home.

I have another server that I use to host multiplayer games (Minecraft and Terraria, mainly) but I only have that running sometimes (it’s my old desktop PC from a decade or so ago, so it’s not terribly efficient to leave running).

Estimate Me: 2025-07-30 (Nerds in bottle cap) Rank #3 of 49 🟨🟧🟩 🔗 https://estimate-me.aukspot.com/archive/2025-07-30

To be fair, we skinbags do ruin everything.

Oh dang, I wasn’t aware of that. That sounds at least as scummy as Rogers/Bell. Good to know.

Right… they’re using Rogers infrastructure. I guess MVNO usually refers to cell providers, I was using the term to refer to a wholesaler. In any case, it’s been great for me.

Yeah, the Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer. As others have noticed, you can go down the rabbit hole a long way, depending on what you define as a computer. Fascinating stuff.

Yeah, the whole history is fascinating. I also like to remind my college students that computer science/engineering is one of the rare branches of science/engineering that was founded at least in equal part by women, if not more (again, an arguable point, but undeniable that there is a larger influence from women compared to other scientific disciplines).

Yeah, there were plenty of precursors (hence the MB was arguably the first). But the Manchester Baby was the first stored-program general purpose computer. Gotta pick a point somewhere.

Alan Turing was the father of computer science, but didn’t invent the first computer. Arguably the first computer was called the Manchester Baby and was created by folks at the University of Manchester.

Alan Turing was an absolute boss, though. Huge respect.