• T. Hex@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 hours ago

    Never meet your heroes. Have you ever seen the way he rages at people on the mailing list? Don’t get me wrong, he’s made some incredible technical contributions that I’m thankful for, but I have to push back against claims that he is a well-adjusted dude.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      60 minutes ago

      Counterpoint: Linus was all out in the open.

      I wouldn’t want to see what Bill Gates is like behind closed doors…especially as a kid.

      • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        45 minutes ago

        No one is saying hes on the level of gates or jobs or whatever.

        But that doesn’t make him an angel either. It makes him human.

        He famously took a year off because he wanted to work on how toxic he was.

        The comment was never meet your hero’s. Hes a good guy, but if you have had to work with him, you may be leas inclined to agree whole heartily.

        • Dr. Quadragon ❌@mastodon.ml
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          31 minutes ago

          @wholookshere but @JasonDJ never claimed that Linus is perfect. On the contrary, he admires how normal and human and unfiltered Linus is. So in terms of toxicity profile, we don’t need to actually meet him to know what to expect. So your gotcha is kinda irrelevant. We know he’s not a saint, and isn’t trying to be. Which paradoxically makes the guy more righteous than all tech billionaires combined.

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 hours ago

      the way he rages at people on the mailing list?

      not really anymore for quite a while.

      he will absolutely tell someone that should know better, if they are doing a bad job, but the times of random shitstorms is over for quite a while now

        • 4am@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          You also have to remember that he made an OS as a hobby project and suddenly everyone wanted to mess with it. It was the Wild West of decentralized project management in those days, I don’t condone any of that unprofessional behavior but I’m also not in the least bit fucking surprised that he had very personal rage-out moments as unsolicited criticism poured in from around the world, constructive and well intentioned or not. That’s a lot of unexpected pressure.

          He got better, which implies to me that he wants to be a good person; and that’s all we can really ask of anyone.

          • Mikrochip@feddit.org
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            6 hours ago

            True that. Andrew Tanenbaum dissing on Linux in the early days just because it didn’t conform to his ideals of a microkernel is sufficiently uncomfortable to read, imo. It’s not like Linus kept anyone from making their own open source kernel.

    • Fortunafors@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      People need to understand we are all humans and stop idolizing-idealizing people, aren’t you all bored of celebrities/famous people abusing their status?

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Bruh if everything I said to people was recorded and searchable, I’d seem like an unhinged egomaniac with anger issues too, but people can change, and get more mellow.

    • DeLancre@piefed.social
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      8 hours ago

      Not to protect so called “toxic environment”, but sometimes people need to hear what others think about them and their work, preferably without pink glasses. Hiding truth behind fake polite smile is not correct approach either.

      As an example, Linus once harshly commented about breaking user space. Was it impolite to mog developer? Maybe. But nowadays in our “polite circle with pink ponies” people more easily do what they not supposed to, cause there no harsh feedback. My amdgpu crashing and taking full video stack with it each focking time. It can’t restart even if you trigger /sys/kernel/debug, like, it’s dead-dead. And that due to user space program, aka game. This shit should’t happen and yet here we are. Could it be different if Linus kept yelling at people, to reinforce fear of breaking stuff? My money on “yes”. There other examples of course, like compete disaster called “Concord”, where ultra polite environment became so forced that it kinda became toxic thing on itself and we all know the end result of it.

      So yea, not a fan of that.

    • zeroclue@sopuli.xyz
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      4 hours ago

      Have you ever managed a project as large as this? I think we can give him some leeway here. If you invite people to help on your project that is worth quadrillions, but is open-source, you have to be hardened enough. And Linus is just a well rounded person who doesn’t play politics, that’s what I learned from 30 years following that dude. I have to admit, he is a diver, so I am a little bit biased on his personality type (btw, so is Gabe, but he is doing it on a much larger scale now). Anyway, give this guy some space, he is doing good work that we all need to appreciate more.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      8 hours ago

      If it’s any consolation I also worshipped Carmack and Zoid Kirsch (credited then by deadname)…