Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Youāre being perhaps too generous to consider ESR a famous FOSS personality.
Heās definitely up there, or at least used to be. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his attempt to justify why Linux is more successful than GNU or BSD, used to be very much a part of the open source canon. He cofounded OSI. He forked some POP3 client to make his own bad and insecure one called Fetchmail, then refused to improve it.
Personally Iām happy to know heās become less relevant nowadays.
Emphasis on used to. He worked fairly hard at becoming a household name, but ultimately his fame was pretty brief. Stallman achieved meme status, love him or hate him. Torvalds actually ships shit people use. Thereās just no discourse around Raymond these days, good or bad.
Every once in a while someone trips over one of the pitons heās driven into the wall of FOSS to try and climb it, discovers his abysmal takes, amd everyone promptly forgets about him again.
dunno, itās definitely up there. maybe not a recent one, and I could understand people sub-25 perhaps not knowing the name, but across a fair bit of the foss space the name is household
unfortunately
Yes, he even gets mentioned by xkcd in the same breath as Stallman or Linus. (That it turns out the latter is the least worse of the three (he actually realized that being an asshole was bad) is quite the surprise).
That was way back in 2007. Probably close to when I read his stuffā¦ but even then he was clearly still clinging to the Halloween Letters and seemed extremely old school.