Submitted 11 months ago by mozz@mbin.grits.dev to technology@beehaw.org
This made me so weirdly sad. I remember this guy; he was well known for being technically skilled but a huge pain in the ass for everyone to work with, and it's weird to see how resigned he is now to his prison life.
He belongs in prison obviously, but it's so, so strange hearing how his time being able to be a free man and just work on his technical projects that he's passionate about, is such a faraway happy memory for him now.
Very interesting to read. I remember doing reasearch back then around 2005 or so which filesystem I should use on my gentoo installation and with a lot of small files it seemed raiserfs to be the best for my use case. So I started using it.
Later I heard about what the guy did and I figured I will need to switch next time I reinstall it because that guy won’t be able to fix critical bugs from inside the prison.
Woah so that’s the creator of 8Chan. Damn that guy has created a lot of harm in the world.
Two different people. Hans Reiser is the filesystem developer who killed his wife, and Frederick Brennan was the 8chan creator who wrote to Reiser and got back the published letter.
Yes I know, I found that part more interesting than the murderers story.
Yeah, I was a Linux user at the time, I remember 2.4 to 2.6 kennel transition, it was a breath of fresh air, filesystem wars, some people liked xfs, others jfs, normies used ext3, reiser4 with all the shit they promised, like accessing mp3 on the filesystem level etc was mind-blowing, them he killed his wife…
Yeah, around 2.2 - 2.6 time was wild. I was a lurker on LKML at the time and I remember a lot of the same. There was which crazy filesystem to use, there was Alan Cox's huge work like memory or scheduler improvements (I still remember once he started getting it really right I started like 4 compiles in the background and then just went back to working, and it was so responsive still that I forgot about them and left them running), there were whole sagas like ReiserFS or like BitKeeper and the creation of git. Or my all time favorite... CML2.
With Jeff's email, the thread was essentially moved to the lkml, an often less-than-friendly environment.
I remember observing things like Reiser or Bitkeeper play out in real time taught me a lot about how it's not enough to be technically better, you also have to be able to work with people and not be a jerk about things. That's another thing that's great about hearing from Hans, looking back on it all now through the distant lens of hindsight.
Lol, I remember -ac kernel, it has a modified I/O scheduler or something, also I remember using some guys kennel, he went silent one time, after some weeks the guy’s wife wrote on the forum he fell off the ladder, became a vegetable and soon died…
vmaziman@lemm.ee 11 months ago
May we all learn from his mistakes and heed his call for better empathetic communication in our daily interactions.