I can't imagine how interesting your childhood must have been where you had not one but 2 VT-100s that were expendable enough to be used as the high-tech version of two tin cans and a string.

That would mean not being able to vibe code up an entire app to deal with something as insurmountable as looking at a list of numbers and post it on HN for those sweet, sweet upvotes. Why would they not do that.

Only if you are paying them. If you don't have a service contract for RHEL, you have no grounds to sue.

What is sad is having a world view where the value of a human life is duration, not accomplishment.

If you value accomplishment, then adding more years to accomplish more things is a no-brainer

There is absolutely zero proof that more years would mean more accomplishments. Bad assumptions are bad assumptions even in fantasy land. No-brainer indeed.

"un-hacker ethos". I'll put that on the shelf next to "it's only an engineering problem" and "assume a spherical cow".

Oof...I know of at least 1 embedded shop still using 2.95.4 for various 'reasons'.

Sorry to derail...but that brought up some bad memories. The networking company Wellfleet (became Bay Networks thru merger with Synoptics, then died as a chunk of Nortel Networks) had a management tool called 'Site Manager' (SM, aka 'Site Mangler' aka 'S&M').

SM was a monstrous Java app that papered over the (horrifying) fact that everything on a Wellfleet router was configured with SNMP (full-body shiver). Oh, there was a CLI, but even a hard-core CLI pilot like myself couldn't face stuff like "set wflplnterfaceEntry.2.192.168.10.10.3 1" all day long.

Wellfleet clearly employed no software engineers, only monkeys that hammered on keyboards and piled cruft upon cruft to the SM codebase. The end result was that every release of Wellfleet device code (down to point releases) relied on a particular version of SM, which, of course, relied on a particular version of Java.

Now, since virtually no site over a certain size could count on every device running the same version of code, you had to be able to switch between a couple of versions of Java to run a given version of SM. And, as a consultant to Wellfleet shops, I had to be able to run all of them. I got really good at multibooting Windows, but in the end I had a 'Wellfleet' laptop modified a bit so I could easily pop it open and swap disks, each one for a different version of SM running on a different version of Java.

Good times...it was not.

Often in mathematics (and by extension most science I guess), when something is named after someone, it usually means there's a huge amount going on behind the scenes if you start looking.

The cynic would say primers on basic stuff are easy to create even if you're not really any sort of expert in the area, so people create a lot of them and lots of people who also aren't expert think that's great.

This, however, is pretty damn nifty, esp relative to most 'let me explain to you with prettier pictures what google (now chatgpt) just explained to me' fluff.