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https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/
LWN (Linux Weekly News) provides a written account of Benno Rice's talk. The former FreeBSD core developer gives some context around systemd and what FreeBSD should learn from it. He compares the affair to a Greek tragedy which contains much suffering followed by catharsis. His attitude toward systemd is generally not negative, but I won't cherry-pick any specific sections; you'll have to actually read the article for once.
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 4, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Friday February 08 2019, @07:18AM (7 children)
Yes, tempests in pots of tea, or pots of BSD. But then I saw, "τραγωδίos", and thought, "Maybe. The greatest tragedy of all time is Oedipus, by Sophocles. Could this be a rehash of that?" I also recommend the French, much more recent, films, Jean Florette [imdb.com] and its sequel, Manon of the Spring [imdb.com], if you want to understand what tragedy is. But back to Oedipus.
Son of the King and Queen of Thebes, or "Θήβα, Thíva [ˈθiva]; Ancient Greek: Θῆβαι, Thêbai [tʰɛ̂ːbai̯][2]) is a city in Boeotia, central Greece." Wikipedia! [wikipedia.org]. His parents sent to the Oracle at Delphi, always a bad idea, to know their son's future, and the Oracle responded that he would kill his father and marry his mother. This is a bad thing, typically. We will skip over the details except to mention that much later Oedipus was being raised by another family, and had questions about whether his parents were actually his real parents. (Redhat, this is directed at you!) So he went to the Oracle at Delphi (not to be confused with the nasty corporation that owns a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as all supervillians should) and asked if his parents were his real parents, and the Oracle, representative of the God of Truth and Enlightenment, and Music, Apollo, responded, "You will kill your father and marry your mother. Cut to the chase.
Oedipus thought he was smart enought to prevent the Oracle's prediction from coming true. All he had to do was never return home, so he would never see his father or mother again! Problems solved! Programmers call this the "quick and dirty approach". And indeed it was, for Oedipus forgot his original question, which was more than pertinent to his plan! Does not end well for our protagonist. Road rage incident, Riddle of the Sphinx, becoming king, four kids. And then, tragedy. What makes it a tragedy is that it is not just that some fated bad thing happened to poor Oedipus; it is that exactly what he undertook to prevent this bad thing from happening is what causes the bad thing to happen, so not only is it bad, but now it is his own damn fault.
We move on to Lennart Poettering. Now he may not have gone to Delphi, but he did code Pulseaudio. The die was cast. (for the illiterate, and Runaway1956, "die" is singular of "dice", which was the company that bought out Slashdot, and brought us all here, so the oracle was right, from a certain point of view). Now as for the patricide and mother-***, well, I am not one to speak of what I know not. But it does seem like perhaps there is a move to kill Linux, and merge in marital bliss with Microsoft? And the true tragedy is, that it is exactly our attempts to avoid software monopolies that have lead us back to the exact same software architectures, and we have no one to blame but ourselves, and Lenny.
Oedipus, when he realized the truth, and how blind he had been, pierced both his eyes with the pin of his mother/wife's brooch. We can only hope for a similar act of self-awareness and atonement from systemd. But I am not hopeful.
Oh, and, in the spirit of NOT going to the Oracle of Ellison, I did not read the fine article. Others have addressed its shortcomings. And by the way, Tragedy comes from the Greek meaning "goat song". Hmmm.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @07:37AM (3 children)
It is not a perfect parallel unless the true mother of oedipus, to which eventually he is going to work for, is called Microsoft corporation.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday February 08 2019, @08:07AM (2 children)
This is why bots and AIs will never be able to pass the Turing Test, they don't get allegory, or hyperbole, or metaphor. The literally do not understand figuratively!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @10:11AM
It happens that Robert Scott Mitchell [subbot.org] majored in Classical Greek as an undergrad - meaning he read Iliad and Odyssey as they were _first_ written down - then while I don't recall his Master's Degree major, he got Honors in it at the U of Chicago.
After working as a Java coder for a few years - this because Classical Scholars have no job opportunities other than to teach Classics to other Greek or Roman Classics majors - then, because his father was indepently wealthy, and because Robert "doesn't like office politics", he retired quite young, mostly to post about economics at Kuro5hin as well as to write chatbots, last I heard in Ruby.
He has some IRC channels where _you_ can chat with his bots, as well as to set his bots to chatting with each other.
Now, he's barely scratching the surface of Natural Language Processing, but you can be quite certain that Google has oodles of Classical Greek Honors Graduates who are looking quite seriously into allegory.
Consider that my entire _book_ The Frog, Or, The World of Madness is Round, Two Essays for All Humanity [warplife.com] is allegory, and that Richard has been following my work as I - continue - to write it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @11:54AM
>They literally do not understand figuratively!
True, because I understand literally literally, and figuratively figuratively.
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(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @10:03AM
While Homer - if he ever really existed, I myself regard "him" as no more than customary attribution for the many poets who composed Iliad and Odyssey - lived centuries before the tragedies we actually know about, I myself regard both poems - they're not books, rather book-length poems are tragedies. While I'm largely unfamiliar was Iliad as yet, the two together meant that Odysseus and his son missed his entire childhood, as Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War then does not return until ten years after its end.
What _should_ have been a three week Mediterranean vacation cruise took ten years, the lives of all of his men and Odysseus and Penelope are both unfaithful to each other.
However there are some happy times in at least Odyssey. In Solving the Software Problem: a Taxonomy of Error [warplife.com], while I've focussed on the - Medieval Catholic - Seven Deadly Sins [warplife.com] since 2010, only just recently I've also started to cover the virtues of several faiths and cultures.
(The Catholics have The Seven Heavenly Virtues, as well as the Seven Contrary Virtues, the happy counterparts to the Deadly Sins.)
In the case of the Greeks, I have just barely scratched the surface of Xenia, loosely translated as "Friend-Worship". If we had some Friend-Worship here in the modern world, there would be no homelessness, as _every_ formerly-homeless person would quickly find themselves an honored guest in some complete stranger's home! From Solving the Software Problem, a very-rough start at a first draft:
Lost on most modern people is that it _would_ be quite a foul violation for Odysseus and Telemachos to slay every last one of Penelope's suitors in their - Odysseus' and Telemachos' - own home, had it not been for those suitors to have made themselves comfortably drunk by drinking up all of Odysseus' wine and "sacrificing" his "fat goats" so as to enjoy a tasty snack for ten solid years.
If you read the title page of Solving the Software Problem [warplife.com], rest assured: it will put The Fear Of God into you!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday February 08 2019, @01:41PM
TL;DR So when do we get to the part we take Poettering to the field and slit his throat to satiate the furies' thirst for blood and escape the cycle of vengeance?
compiling...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday February 08 2019, @05:37PM
Wait, Linux and Microsoft were secretly married, had a kid, and it morphed into Mothra? Godzilla BSD to the rescue!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..