Theo's rant about what a hypocritical idiot ESR is also sounds pretty reasonable to me: he has a good point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883342

ESR's free to make ridiculous laws about eyeballs that aren't true and nobody follows while never actually reviewing any code himself (except for the climate scientists' code which he totally misunderstood and dishonestly misrepresented), but blaming it on Linus was a dick mode.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Climategate

>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)

porridgeraisin: Speaking of ICCCM (aka I39L) and X11 selections, have you seen David Rosenthal's glorious rant about the Sun Desktop that somebody leaked to the unix-haters mailing list (who, moi?), which comes straight from the author of the ICCCM and co-developer of Andrew, X10, X11, and NeWS. The Roy Lichtenstein line is classic. What he's touching on by "Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously?" is Mark Weiser's "Ubiquitous/Calm Computing". He's married to Mark's widow Victoria Reich, and they both work on LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44045304

    PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
    that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
    doesn't work if CM is closed.  That's a symptom of the kind
    of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
    they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
    screen real estate.  Why can't they just shut up and do
    their job efficiently and inconspicuously?  Why do they have
    to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?

    They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
    fins.  What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
    elegant and understated.  Your focus on the whizzy demos may
    look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
    screaming at them for attention all the time?  It's like
    having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.

https://blog.dshr.org/

>We managed to get the game to be sort-of playable provided you let the machine win.