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That's why I don't go to conferences.
It was a while since the last time Ken Thompson did a talk somewhere. He somehow decided to share his hobby at SCaLE (a linux conference):
I strongly suggest you to watch the whole talk, it's beautiful, but if you don't want to do it, here a quick summary: Ken Thompson shared his "75 years project", essentially, collecting as much music as possible from the 20th century. He gave a great insight about things he did during the time like: "putting two iPads as monitors on a Jukebox from the 50's", or "interfacing the Jukebox with a restored piano player. Ken goes on sharing technical details about audio encoding techniques, compression algorithms, the fact that to filter crappy MIDI tracks he wrote a MIDI interpreter (sic!), how he hacked a DSP interface communicating through SCSI and so forth and so on.
The whole talk, is a wonderful journey both on the huge amount of technical knowledge Thompson has to share with the folks in the audience and, at the same time, a journey in the history of computing (the PAC encoding algorithm, the kind of software Ken wrote in the past for his collection, etc..).
Now, not every day you have the opportunity to listen to a computer science pioneer and legend sharing the technicalities of his hobby, right? Personally, I would ask all sort of questions about how he achieved such results, the techniques he used to write the software involved, how he programmed the voice recognition for the Jukebox, or how, even if obvious, he interfaced the ipads with the Jukebox buttons.
If you watch the talk, the QA time come, and I turned everything off at the first question:
How did the Bell Labs managed the BSD stuff for UNIX blah blah blah blah....
In the video, Ken's face isn't well visible, and maybe he is cool enough to keep a straight face while trying to answer the question from this frigtard, but I can tell you one thing: Ken wasn't there to listen to a bunch of morons asking questions about stuffs he finds boring. He made UNIX 50 years ago, and he made many more interesting things after that. I'm pretty sure that he died a little, inside, thinking: "what a bunch of clowns". He doesn't care about UNIX, he doesn't care about Linux either. He was there to talk about his Jukebox and all the technical work he made around it. Not to answer for the 1000000000th time to a question about something HE, CONSIDERS, OBSOLETE, AND, BORING.
Reading around the internet about opinions of the talk, I understood that another retard asked him the most stupid, idiotic, boring and lame question you may ask to an 80 years-old computer scientist legend:
What operating system are you using now?
*Plonk* *Plonk* *Plonk*
If you will, ever, see Ken Thompson on stage again, you know the reason.
When on the fediverse I discuss with others that todays IT landscape is a huge amount of old, boring and recycled stuff, this is also what I'm talking about. Linux is an obsolete operating system. A clone of a more than 50 years old one with a, badly ported, set of "innovations" from another 30 years old os (Plan 9).
Going to conferences, Linux or otherwise is boring. Boring boring boring. Yeah, Rust will save the world, C is obsolete, Linux is the best thing since sliced bread (sorry guys, but as a UNIX user myself, I find Windows much more interesting, technically, from a pure computer science point of view). 30 years of this shit, *yawn*, I'll go for a beer, thank you very much. And mind that, I'm not that old, I'm quite young, in fact, but old enough to find what the IT world has to offer today still boring.
The technologies are boring, but worst of them all: the people are boring as hell.
That's also why I don't go to conferences, there is nothing to learn there and I understood one thing: learning for the sake of learning the IT technology du jour is just a waste of time. There are no interesting new programming languages out there, I just keep fresh the three of four that matter in any given context, but I generally use just one or two, excluding the shell (C, Erlang, Tcl/Tk, Ada, ok plus some minor more) and focus on the platforms. I prefer to focus on solving problems than to learn yet another thing that doesn't give me a real advantage. I don't need a borrow checker, when Ada is even safer, I don't need yet another way of writing distributed systems when Erlang solved that problem almost 40 years ago.
Boredom, boredom as hell.
Today is Kubernetes and yeaaaaaaaah yet another "how we deploy our pods" talk. Tomorrow will be Rust and "how we rewrote our backend, in Rust" talks will pop up like cookies. Pink unicorns? If you find them, it will be an awash of talks about them at the conferences.
But nobody will tell you a tale about their 75 years music collection project, buying a restored piano player from a company in Tennessee while making a really cool, and modern, Jukebox, letting stuffs communicate through UDP and hacking their way to integrate those components. And when somebody with a bit more wisdom than you will do such a talk:
You will find a way to annoy them, because you are a boring human being.
Ken: ignore those retards, they can't appreciate something cool when they see it.