Notices by Linus Torvalds (torvalds@social.kernel.org), page 2

@w I’d pwn u on in Pokemon GO while I go walking most days (now that it’s not raining any more in Portland).

Yeah, that’s the kind of high-adrenaline gaming dude I am.

Sorry to disappoint.

Dear lazy-web - question time.

I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent.

The version I have grown accustomed to isn’t even the most recent version of microemacs, it’s a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.

Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties.

Anyway.

I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc).

Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”.

And I mean really configurable. As in “I can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be ‘exit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without saving”. Not some half-way state where “sure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you can’t make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?

And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me.

And please - don’t even bother replying with “Xyz is a great editor” unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I don’t use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.

I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.

@axboe you should get rid of the two preceding lines as welll (the iov_base/iov_len initialization). They are now wrong, and the iov_iter_ubuf() will overwrite them anyway. The compiler will presumably not generate code for them as it notices, but still..

@axboe shouldn’t we do that for import_single_range() and for import_iovec() too, and turn those into ITER_UBUF rather than ITER_IOVEC?

Maybe I’m missing something.

@rook it’s easy and probably largely pointless to criticize the consciousness of AI models. You’re inevitably just making stuff up, since you control the very definition of what “consciousness” is to you.

That’s kind of my point. I suspect that ChatGPT could write a decent paper on this very thing.

The much more interesting thing is to see what those models tell us about ourselves, using hard data from AI models. But I suspect there’s a lot of people who are very invested in discussions about qualia and experiences who really don’t want to go there.

@missingno you probably say that jokingly, but I think that’s actually the real underlying truth.

It’s obviously true of ChatGPT.

But I really do think the much more interesting truth is that it’s probably true of us too.

@Inginsub that’s not what I claim. I claim that the people talking about “understanding” do not themselves have the very understanding that they are taking about.

They are literally just doing the same thing they talk about ChatGPT doing: putting likely words into sentences that sound good.

Smarter people than me and you have gone down crazy rabbit holes in this area for centuries.

Please also tell me all about “the quantum mind” or how the machine does not have a “soul”.

Pet peeve of the day: all the people talking about how ChatGPT is not “conscious” and how it does not “understand” what it is saying, but just putting likely-sounding words together into likely-sounding sentences.

Extra bonus points for using an example of a math problem as a way to show how these AI chat-bots talk about things they don’t really understand.

The irony. The lack of self-awareness. It burns.

It’s Sunday, which means no more cat pictures, and instead just the usual -rc release.

Prize for odd bug this week goes to an otherwise harmless off-by-one buglet that then in turn confused clang sufficiently to generate bogus code that our ‘objtool’ checks then (correctly) complained about it.

This is the kind of exciting lives that us kernel developers lead.

@twizzay the vet claimed the peeing in the corners was due to kidney failure. But that face says “payback time”. You be the judge

It’s Caturday.

Minky is no longer with us, but this is probably my favorite picture of her.

Replying to all the random individuals that seem to think that I’m “endorsing” one of the Fediverse products over any other, and seem to be making a big deal over #akkoma vs #mastodon etc.

That’s not the case. I’m actually a horrible MIS person, and I would never want to maintain my own server. I’m a programmer for chrissake!

The same way you should fear me if I hold a soldering iron, you should be very very nervous if I were to do any server management.

So all credit (or blame) for the choice of Fediverse platform goes to @monsieuricon, who maintains kernel.org and just made it really easy for me to try this out.

… and on a similar note: not only am I not much of a MIS person, I’m also not much of a social networking person.

I foresee a lot of disappointment in the future of any followers of this account ?.

Random first trial post: today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement.

Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them.