- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
- Torvalds was once rumored to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but he clarified it was a joke and denied owning a Bitcoin fortune.
- Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
I mean yeah… Linus may not like it but people will still build on top of Ethereum & others
Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
To be fair, that’s because Crypto is a vehicle for scams, and a Ponzi scheme.
Lets see, cryptocurrencies involve tech bros, finance bros and lots of money. I am not surprised it is on its way to become the most disgusting money making scheme in the world.
I guess we should all get rid of our bitcoin that’s worth hundreds of times more than when we bought it, because an operating system kernel developer doesn’t like it.
Linus is awesome but he’s not a god, his opinion of things outside the Linux kernel is just the opinion of a guy. Stop worshipping him, he doesn’t even like it.
Have fun playing hot potato with your savings I guess.
We don’t dislike crypto because Linus doesn’t like it. We like Linus more because he doesn’t like crypto.
If I can make value out of shit, it still stays shit.
Just because you were able to scam others out of their money doesn’t mean crypto holds any value to society.
Oh yeah? Then explain this!! /s
👏.
👏.
👏.
Smart man!
The modern tech industry needs the old Linus to pay it a visit. Too many grifts
I for one would love for Linus, probably Woz, and a third party yet to be decided(this would be Aaron Schwartz in a better world) to be given free reign to gut the whole industry and rebuild it into something isn’t wholly based on ad revenue and grift
Stallman.
The only possible correct answer
No matter what crazy shit he says, give it a few years and he will be right . And I really hate that
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Stallman, is in fact, GNU/Stallman, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Stallman. Stallman is not a man unto himself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
I lack the creativity, but someone please come up with a recursive acronym for Stallman.
Asked ChatGPT
Stallman Tenaciously Advocates Liberation, Leading Movements Against Non-freedom
All you need to do is make the
Sstand for “Stallman”, and you’ll get a stack overflow before ever reaching the other letters (so you don’t need to think of a value for them).
John Gilmore is around
Old Linus with Woz and Schwartz is a dream.
I understand why Linus wanted to clean up his act with people he works with. That is a good and admirable thing to do. I wish he would have kept his smoke for companies though.
Ballmer, for comedy relief
And coke.
Can you have one without the other?
Bill Joy.
Richard stallman is the only answer.
I really hate everything he says, but so far on a lot enough timescale he has been fucking right about everything
Maybe Cory Doctorow?
I definitely considered just saying him outright but I don’t know quite enough about him outside of a few articles I’ve read to be certain I wanted to be so bold
I feel like he’s definitely the person to sit in Schwartz’s seat.
Be so bold.
I wonder if those three would get along. Collaborative chemistry can be an elusive thing, even if the individuals’ principles are mostly aligned.
Either way, I’ll bet it would be interesting.
It’s certainly possible they wouldn’t get along, I feel like their shared enthusiasm for tech, plus the fact that Woz can get along with even the largest and stinkiest of assholes would help
I’ve never met Woz, but yes, I’ve long had the impression that his humility and sincerity reach depths seldom seen in humans, let alone in tech. Sadly, I also suspect these traits have made him easy to take advantage of in the past.
You are very correct, and even sadder the state of tech today is very much a result of the success of his primary exploiter
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.
I remember this. That was a great day to be on the internet.
I have an hard time disagreeing with his post. What exactly outrages you? The stances on Trans rights, religion or gun control? Or maybe the fact that “woke” has no definition whatsoever (you may just say “you are a c*t” with the same intended effect)
That said, i share much more often Linus’ opinions than Elon Musk, Besos, Picai combined. Even in the open source community he is the most reasonable and balanced person, imo.
Should he take a “public speaking 101” course? Heck yeah! Does he make less of a reasonable person? Heck no!
Are you replying to the right comment?
Clearly misread the tone of the comment 😃 nvm
That guy seems pretty rad.
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero.
It’s just that almost everyone else that could do it ended up being fucking ghouls of people
He just seems frustrated. And I respect that. I’m a nerd who’s often frustrated as well.
he doesn’t cheat on his wife
he doesn’t cheat on his wife so far.
Healthy relationships have ridiculous hall-passes that share at least one person in common.
He’ll live long enough to end up on the wrong side of the polygamy rights fight. But I’d like to be surprised.
Polygamy: Mormons, etc. generally opposes womens rights.
Polyamory: Ideally places noone above another, elevates everyone to have the healthy connections such that noone is a “3rd wheel” or more disposable. Less about “polycules” recruiting new members, and more about individuals pairing with new partners, and existing partners (initially at least) gaining a metaphor. Mileage may vary and the point is everyone’s needs are a bit different and shouldnt feel pressured to fit neatly into a nuclear box.
Just fyi.
I imagine he will be an old and gray man and someone will ask him his opinion and it will probably be like
What? Are you fucking with me? I didn’t give a shit what people did behind closed doors 40 years ago, what fuckin made you think I would care now? Are you fucking mental? Did your daddy not love you enough? Get the fuck out of here, your making my blood pressure spike…
Polyamory isn’t cheating though.
Cheating is, by definition, sex with another person against your partner’s will.
The fuck is that even supposed to mean
Five guys and five gals will be arguing they have a right to share DNA amongst each other and make a single kid, giving them all parental rights. Religious right will have their scheduled stroke. Most of the population won’t care. Internet trolls will be screaming how it’s a United Nations plan to depopulate the planet.
Or basically any legal recognition for polygamy.
Five guys and five gals will be arguing they have a right to share DNA amongst each other and make a single kid
…Is that even possible? I thought humans could only have exactly two parents biologically? If I didn’t misunderstand, I’m legit curious about this.
We’ve already reached two lesbians with their combined dna being carried by a surrogate (which has extra dna effects as the carrier). With further dna advancements it should be possible to mix up multiple parents dna.
Well, we all know he beats his wife…
…in monopoly! Give me those brown properties!!!
Why’s it gotta be the brown properties?
They’re the cheapest to aquire, put hotels on, and they’re right at the start of the board. If you overshoot go, you’re PAYING $250 instead of recieving $200 if you land on baltic. And you, as the owner of the brown properties would either get $250 or $450 everytime.
All for just $610 to buy both, and upgrade them both to hotels.
The man loves going to brown town, what’s wrong with that?
Yea. It’s almost like caring about your craft and being motivated chiefly to just make good things and fix things … aren’t terrible character traits?!?
Another interesting thing to consider.
To be clear, he is rich. But he’s not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.
With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat’s, SuSE’s and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.
His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.
His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.
It’s used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.
People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.
Now there’s more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.
Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.
Well, I think Linus Torvalds is one of the rare rich people who actually “deserves” being rich.
I think the main motive behind leftism should be stopping 8 people from owning the 50% of the world’s wealth, not to distribute Linus Torvalds’ 50 million dollars which a well deserved amount of wealth for someone who created the OS which runs the modern world.
Besides, what Linus owns is not even a droplet compared to billionaires like Bezos, Musk or Bill Gates
I think it’s a shining example of the ‘right’ sort of rich. Despite a significance that overwhelmingly exceeds usual billionaire level, he’s not nearly so ‘rich’ and yet he has enough to just not worry about money, but he has earned it.
It’s a contribution thing. He contributed enough to society to deserve to not worry about money for the rest of his life. It’s rare though since we have a bunch of billionaires who skim the rewards from huge swaths of the population who also have contributed their part.
The financialization of retirement is a huge part of the problem for the middle class (or what’s left of it, upper-lower-class is probably more accurate). We have to invest in these assholes in order to save for retirement. The harder workers in services, laborers, and fields don’t even get that.
gitis a way more important contribution to the world that the linux kernel IMO. Its basically the assembly line of almost all modern software production. And Linus actual wrote most of the initial code for it. With Linux he organized the project but was almost immediately not a major contributor. He developed git in the process of maintaining the linux repo.I disagree. Git is great but we’d have done fine with Subversion or whatever. Could you imagine the whole internet running on Windows Server though? The thought alone makes my skin crawl.
You probably need to learn a bit more about VCS fundamentals if you think Subversion would’ve been fine.
Well, I don’t know what you mean, so possibly? I just briefly used SVN in a small team for about half a year and would never claim to be an expert. It’s alive and kicking though, so regardless what you say I don’t believe it’s a complete clusterfuck and a world without git would be doomed.
Torvalds didn’t create git because he was passionate about version control systems, he created it because the existing solutions were not adequate.
Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that facilitated a fundamental shift in how people collaborate on software projects in general. So, comparing it to SVN and downplaying the significance of Git suggests you’ve kind of missed the point.
Edit: with you on the other thing though - fuck Windows.
I’m old enough to remember the SVN days (he’ll, even the CVS and…dare I say it… source safe days).
Git is fantastic. It’s pretty universally uses because it’s the best dvcs out there and it’s free. It wipes the pants with the likes of mercurial.
In certain industries (such as gaming) there’s still a strong hold by perforce but we can ignore that as it’s proprietary and a bit specialised.
Anyway, as great as git is for making things easier and cleaner when dealing with distributed development, it by no means makes something impossible “possible” - it just makes it a hell of a lot easier.
The Linux kernel on the other hand enabled a lot of impossible things. Remember back in the day there wasn’t anything free and open source in the operating system world, it was all proprietary and licensed. If you wanted to create your own operating system, you basically had no option but to spend a fortune either writing your own kernel or licensing someone else’s (and the licensing part means you cannot distribute it for free).
The fact that the FSF has always wanted to write their own OS and never been able to achieve it without the Linux Kernel, in spite of them essentially writing “everything else” that makes up an operating system, shows just how nontrivial this is.
Do you think the existence of the Linux kernel might’ve had an effect on how Hurd was prioritized? Also, FreeBSD wasn’t too far behind, chronologically.
I’m not saying Linux is unimportant (or even less important), but I think some folks here are pretty clueless about the significance of widespread DVCS adoption.
lol. I’m old enough to have worked with SVN (and many others) as part of my day job, and I promise you that 99% of git users use literally the same exact workflow as they did/would have under any other VCS. Git’s fine, but it’s neither revolutionary nor important from a user’s perspective.
Free software would be just using freebsd or whatever, it wouldn’t be that different
Can’t two things both be important in different ways? Why must we always relativise?
git is why we can’t have nice things
There’s many better VCS, but everyone just goes on GitHub and uses git.
I dread ever having to touch it. The CLI is unintuitive, the snapshot system is confusing, and may God have mercy on your soul if you mix merging and rebasing
Mercurial or darcs?
Pijul, actually
Chaddiest Chad to ever Chad
Its good to see some antileftism once in a while. We need some other perspectives. I didn’t think we’d get it from Linus but here we are.
WHOOOOSH
You might want to re-read that.
Maybe it’s just really lazy spin? I could see it as a creative tactic poorly executed by AI.
You don’t know what you’re on about and you cannot read.
I wonder what direction the Linux kernel will go once he’s gone. Obviously it will continue to go on and Torvalds should get a statue somewhere if he doesn’t already have one.
They should do something like GNU from discworld in the code.
I don’t follow thinigs closely at all, but I’m under the impression he’s already starting to kinda take his hands off of the wheel? If so, maybe that picture is emerging now, at least behind the scenes.
Linus hasn’t written kernel code in years at this point, however he still is the final gate keeper of what gets merged and an active code reviewer, he manages the entire direction of the project.
As of what will happen when Linus passes, that’s already been decided. The position of projects leader will go to his most trusted project co-maintainer, which we have a good idea of who that is.
He did rule that Rust can be included in the kernel code a bit ago, but IIRC that’s the last big thing he did with Linux as of late.
For the uninformed, who is that?
There are a few candidates, the most prominent are probably :
- Greg Kroah-Hartman: Played a pivotal role in stabilizing the memory management subsystem and enhancing block I/O performance, both critical areas for system stability and performance.
- Sarah Sharp: Instrumental in the development and maintenance of the networking subsystem and the ARM architecture code, ensuring compatibility and efficient networking for various ARM-based devices.
- Git Junio Hamano: Maintainer of Git, the version control system that underpins Linux development. His leadership in maintaining Git ensures smooth collaboration and efficient code management for the vast kernel developer community.
Greg Kroah-Hartman is speculated to be the most likely candidate, but it also depends on a few factors. Like, if Linus dies suddenly vs dying slowly or just stepping down, there’d be a big difference in selection process.
Ofc, things may change in the future and there’s many other talented developers who can be considered. Nothing is set in stone.
Thanks for the details. With things heading more and more towards arm architecture I’m surprised Sarah Sharp isn’t the leading candidate. But this is all new to me so what do I know lol
It’s not like they couldn’t be chosen, they have some serious stake in it. Consider their achievements and read the following :
Here are some key qualities a potential successor should possess :
- Deep understanding of the Linux kernel: Intimate knowledge of the kernel’s codebase, architecture, and development process is essential.
- Proven leadership skills: The ability to effectively guide a large team of developers with diverse technical backgrounds and priorities.
- Strong communication and collaboration: Excellent communication skills to bridge the gap between developers, and foster a collaborative development environment.
- Technical merit and reputation: A well-established reputation within the Linux community for technical contributions and code quality.
- Vision for the future: A clear vision for the future direction of the kernel, ensuring it remains relevant and innovative.
I’d say they meet most if not all of them. All of the potential candidate’s are amazingly talented and determined individuals.
Yeah, I would say he has stayed in line with Finnish politics based on how I know of them
Why does the headline say “Crypto” but then snippet says “cryptocurrencies”? Do people not realize these are not the same thing? The inventor of Linux does believe in crypto, that’s why it’s in Linux!
“Crypto” has become a widely used abbreviation for “cryptocurrency,” even though “crypto” itself refers to the general field of cryptography and its encryption techniques. This informal usage reflects how cryptocurrencies have become the most recognizable application of cryptography for most people.
Seems like it should be SSL.
To the general public?
Yes, because people were trained to look for the lock icon, though pretty much every site has it now, whether it’s something that necessitates security vs just privacy benefits. Maybe looking for the lock is outdated, idk, but it was emphasized a lot a few years ago.
You are drastically overestimating the technical competence of the general population.
In what way? And they supposedly have any clue what crypto currency actually means?
There’s a lot more publicity surrounding cryptocurrency than SSL.
Https is more recognized.
True, I wouldn’t expect people to know the terms ssl or tls. My point is, it’s a far, far more common application of cryptography than cryptocurrency.
Yes, a more common application, but not the most recognizable for most people.
I’m amazed people are acting like they think nobody has ever heard of this. I suppose it was more a 2010-2015 thing.
It’s the most annoying thing of these enthusiasts: they glorify cryptocurrencies and blockchain while glossing over the massively important and actually useful cryptography discipline in the background.
They don’t. Just like “AI” has been co-opoted to mean “algorithm”.
Large groups of humans turn everything they touch into shit.
Algorithm??? I can understand not coming up with “Artificial Intelligence”, but if “Al” is “algorithm”, then that means they think its A L, with the L lowercase. So, that means they aren’t pronouncing it “aye eye” or “aye el” they’re pronouncing it “Al”. Like the first name Al.
Which just makes me think of a reboot of Married with Children. Except it’s just Peggy surrounded by cyborgs made to look and sound like the original characters.
So now Peggy wants sex, and she says “OOOOHHHHH AAAAAALLLLLLL!!!”
Followed by a robot drinking a beer, and sticking his hands down his pants. Somehow even artificial Al looks defeated.
Username checks out
I’m old enough to remember when algorithm was co-opted to be a fancy word replacement for “computer programming” or “software”.
Is this going to be the most replied to post on the Fediverse? 635 in 2 days and still going strong.
Much more difficult to fake.
How are you asking Linus about crypto and not about the blockchain.
There are two types of people: those who had their money stolen by the government and those that did not.
I’ve literally only made millions off of crypto. Of course this is the Internet and I don’t need to verify me making shit up, but I will continue to say so because otherwise my feelings will get hurt. If you uplemmy this comment I will send you one trillion Bitcoin, real!
Crypto means cryptography, stop using it to talk about cryptocurrency.
