this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
32 points (70.5% liked)
TechTakes
2733 readers
127 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We should measure Linus by his current actions, not by his actions from the past.
but it's so much harder to glaze the guy if you pay any attention to anything he's done in the current decade:
but if you paid any attention to any of these things, you might think he's an asshole accepting money and tokens (he doesn't pay for any of his own LLM usage) from some of the most corrupt corporations in the world in order to wrench control over Linux away from its own community
and that would be crazy!
oh and who can forget:
at that same fucking summit he talked about how LLMs were irreplaceable tools for modifying the callers of a function whose signature you changed, a thing that IDEs have been able to do much, much more reliably and faster than LLMs since... the 80s I think? possibly the 70s? and they don't drink several bottles of water doing it. they don't even spike your CPU. it's such a basic thing for an IDE or an editor plugin to do.
ctagsis a command line tool for this that came with fucking BSD 2.0.but torvalds famously used to only use a version of microemacs from 1987 to work on the kernel, an ultra cool choice that doesn't even support syntax highlighting and later forked to become...
nanoof all god damn thingsso now he's ultra-impressed by the basic shit you can do, because like a lot of programming dickheads he never learned any of his tools properly and made it everyone else's problem
and now like an MBA who thinks he can slop out a billion dollar app, his fried brain thinks it's so impressive when the LLM does the basic editing tasks he never learned to do himself but much slower and much worse than an editor. and like that same MBA when his project's burning to the ground, he's shouting that it's his underlings' faults for not learning the LLM properly, for not prompting it right. no he won't share his setup, because if he did it'd become very obvious he's out of his fucking depth.
godlike programmer my ass
weird how all the assholes who insisted on making programming worse for themselves and others are now fully addicted to LLMs
Not Every Asshole: I'm an avid vim user and I would sooner switch to emacs than touch an LLM.
I mean, given that I'm typing this from an X window managed by emacs emulating vim...
both vim and emacs are really good editors with an ecosystem of modern features (and a bunch of stuff that goes beyond what IDEs usually provide too). unlike an LLM, an editor is a tool that rewards learning. the problem is, guys like Torvalds are so unwilling to learn a new way of working that they turned the horrible way of working they started with into a fetish, and they made that fetish everyone else's problem. there's a lot of horrible development practices in the kernel that stem from conservatism and an unwillingness to learn.
and as it turns out, LLMs are perfect in so many ways if you're an overwhelmed conservative trying to hold onto power without ever having to learn a damn thing again.
@self Maybe if we tell him that we’ve replaced ctags with a new version vibe-coded in Rust, he’ll be impressed by its newfound power
@self Jealousy's a curse, and Chatbots are worse.
I'd consider both, and he seems much better over the past decade or so.
hahahaha nope