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> and so people need to stop repeating it

That would seem to be your sentiment, not his, based on the link you shared. Rather than being censorious he shared a nice story on the matter.


No, it is not my sentiment nor am i being censorious.

It can be inferred from Kay's own words. He probably was just poking fun in a tongue-in-cheek manner often seen amongst larger-than-life figures.

John Backus called Edsger Dijkstra arrogant since the latter was highly critical of the former's research in functional programming (not the substance but the hyping). Kay was probably riffing off of that.

The problem is that a lot of noobs/kids/oldies-who-should-know-better often dismiss(!) Dijkstra's work because of this silly quote. Thus in this case, a "nice story" is actually an obstacle to people reading Dijkstra.


> Kay was probably riffing off of that.

You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it.

https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=324


Yeah, i knew of the video. That somewhat proves the point i make here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47331352

People only focus on that phrase since it makes a nice "talking point" and ignore all the other interesting things from Kay's talk. For example; i never knew that most of Euler's proofs were wrong w.r.t. rigorous approach as defined today!


> It can be inferred from Kay's own words. He probably was just poking fun in a tongue-in-cheek manner often seen amongst larger-than-life figures.

...is that not obvious from the original quote? Maybe it's a cultural difference (I'm from Ireland), but that's how I've always interpreted and it's never occurred to me that people took it seriously or as anything other than tongue in cheek.


The problem is with folks who don't know/have never read (seriously that is) Dijkstra.

For example, every time somebody posts something about Dijkstra on HN/etc. somebody will trot out this silly quote and then others pile on (since it requires no effort) and derail any interesting conversation.

It is human nature to have an opinion on everything and mediocrity often takes great pleasure in tearing down the greats (i mean the true ones) in order to soothe their own egos (since they know they don't measure up) i.e. "see? the great one is as flawed/mundane as us and i am showing him up".

And Dijkstra was Dutch who are famously known to be blunt which is often perceived as arrogance by others :-)


Because it's inconceivable that a human could look at a bug report and actually fix a bug.

Forking the code can be perfectly reasonable, with this or any other disagreement about policy. The main point of contention in this thread is whether you ought to lie about having used an LLM. I agree with Jacques: doing something like that would make you an asshole.

> a lot of Linux parts

Anything outside of the stuff required to make a graphical desktop work?


> Anything outside of the stuff required to make a graphical desktop work?

That's kinda big, no?


I think FreeBSD's slogan has been "The Power to Serve" roughly as long as we've been making jokes about The Year of Linux on the Desktop, so we're talking decades. I assume everyone has had plenty of time to make their peace with FreeBSD's mission being focused on the server.

The original question was of interest because, outside of the desktop, Linux does have some other stuff they've cooked up. It really would be interesting if some of that other stuff had jumped the fence. I think FreeBSD is as likely to adopt smf or launchd or something as they are to adopt systemd (not very likely in any case), hence my curiosity about whether something had happened.


Dunno lately FreeBSD has been making a push to be compatible on more laptops and to install desktop environments on install.

What Linux parts are you referring to then?

So true. Keep in mind, OP said it was the worst machine SGI shipped, not the worst machine Sun shipped. SGI's worst machine could be fixed by adding some RAM. Sun's worst machines were completely unsalvageable.

Latency?

Does that even really matter with AI? If you already are waiting >1sec for a response/output, what is 0.2 seconds more?

I get what you're saying but do we really think the AI emanating from these data centers is always going to be limited to multisecond response times?

More cynically, someone in the UK might want to do something that makes money with these data centers once the AI thing goes bust.


I think the OP's meaning was entirely clear and engaging with your questions could only obscure their message.


> If all of the undocumented people in the US spent this much time trying to emigrate legally

Many of the "undocumented people" (what an Orwellian phrase) that have been rounded up by ICE are picked up during court hearings or immigration interviews. An easy way for agents to meet their quota without doing any actual investigative work. Say what you will about them but there's no denying those people were by definition "trying to emigrate legally." This has been widely reported.


> Many of the "undocumented people" (what an Orwellian phrase)

Yeah. Also "Illegal aliens" used often by US government officials is even more Orwellian.


No. If you're "trying to X legally", that means you don't just do X anyway no matter what the legal system says. Next you'll claim that robbers are trying to earn a living legally".

> no matter what the legal system says

I appreciate the way you phrased that, "what the legal system says" rather than "the laws," since it's important to keep in mind a lot of what we're talking about is mercurial executive branch policy rather than statutory law. (which is why US immigration has been such a shitshow for such a long time)

On the other hand, you're apparently ignorant of what's actually happening, and it's making you write stupid things. The Trump administration's policy changes when he took office immediately made a lot of people, not my choice of words, "illegal" immigrants instead of "legal" immigrants. Maybe you support that, that's your business, but to claim those people were not "trying to emigrate legally" because the new administration changed the rules is simply dishonest.


GDP being affected negatively by reductions in tourism, with the loss being offset by increased business for Raytheon as well as the human centipede-like economics of big tech companies buying stuff from other big tech companies, sounds about right.

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