YouSaid · the spoken record

Linus Torvalds

lines on the record: 48
first: 2021-04-18
most recent: 2021-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Our own entertainment. So, what does this all mean? Probably not much. After all, my theory of the meaning of life doesn't actually guide you in what you should be doing. At most it says yes, you can fight it, but in the end the ultimate goal of life is to have fun.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things change and claiming this isn't so doesn't change the facts. Linux is not the same movement it was five years ago, and Linus isn't the same person he was back then. And part of what makes doing Linux so very interesting to me has been exactly that fact, or excuse me, the fact, that it hasn't been the same and that new issues have continuously kept coming up. Life would be boring otherwise, so he's describing the importance of fun by describing the opposite. It's interesting, it's challenging, and if I didn't have those interests and challenges, it'd be boring. In other words, it wouldn't be fun. And I'll close when he goes back to the meaning of life part two, and this kind of wraps up this whole philosophy. That's it. Survival, your place in the social order and entertainment. The three things that make us do the things we do. Survive, socialize, have fun. That's the progression. And that's also why we chose just for fun as the title of the book. Because everything we ever do eventually ends up being for fun.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then he talks about you have to be comfortable. The only thing constant life is change. You have to get comfortable with that. What started out in a messy Helsinki bedroom has grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world. It has been well established that folks do their best work when they're driven by a passion, when they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He talks about like, I don't try to, no one sold Linux as hey, here's this operating system. No one talks like that. You talk about people want solutions. They don't want products, right? They don't want a drill. They want a quarter inch hole. So says it also makes me personally convinced that if we're talking in a big way about operating systems 15 years from now, something is seriously wrong. This may sound strange coming from somebody whose main claim to fame is writing his own operating system. But the fact is nobody wants an operating system. In fact, nobody even wants a computer. What everybody wants is this magical toy that can be used to browse the web, write term papers, play games, balance the checkbook, and so on. The fact that you need a computer and an operating system to do all this is something that most people would rather not ever think about.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ties into his idea that no one can really predict the future. He didn't predict the success of Linux. They should just try to, again, that's why it goes back to the title of the book. I know I've said this over and over again, but just do things that you find are fun. And that way, like if as long as you keep doing that, you won't give up and hopefully that opens up opportunities in the future. He says, I've not been a very good predictor of much of anything in my life. Did I predict that this little operating system I started writing for my own use would someday be all over the place? Nope. Took me by surprise it did. My only defense is that no one else seems to do any better at this crystal ball thing either. We can, of course, look to past experience. We can trace in sad detail how, say, an invincible seeming company like AT&T went limp, and we can predict that if we stick around long enough, the weeds will overrun those tidy little green buildings in Redmond someday too. Again, talking about Microsoft. Call it evolution. It's certainly not rocket science. No business will live forever.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prevents the market from expanding. He talks about just being willing to try to create a product that competes on its merits. That's a sign of a company that isn't blinded by greed or fear of competition. It's a sign of a company that believes in itself and it doesn't have time to hate.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, really, I'm going to give you the punch on here. Could the entertainment industry not have predicted the obvious that the price of water would get so high that somebody would devise a new method of piping it from somewhere else? So he's like, listen, you know what you're doing. You're controlling. It's like, we like a few songs from this artist. You put two songs that we like and you put it on an album or a CD. And it's like, I don't want that. So then somebody comes and he's talking about Napster and all the file sharing programs that are really popular at the time he's writing the book. And he's like, but this is predictable. Like, this has happened. And I love this because what he's saying is like history doesn't repeat human nature does. Somebody is going to realize, hey, this is a problem. We need to find a way to actually solve the problem because you're the industry that controls this. It's not solving the problem. And so he uses that analogy of water, really, really smart, that the price of water would get so high that somebody else would devise a new method for piping it in from somewhere else. He says what the incumbent typically does during this. The industry moves to protect its fifthum and it backfires.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they want. It's not about trying to control people. If you make money by controlling people or a resource, you'll eventually find yourself out of business. This is a form of despotism and history overflows with examples of its ill effects. So he uses this example. It's like, let's say if you're in the 1800s in the U.S. West, you can control the source of water for local farmers. You start to realize, hey, I'm in a position of power. He goes on for a minute and pages giving this synopsis, right? I'm in a position of power. Eventually you become stingy with water. You start overcharging. At some point, somebody else finds a better route. So they invent a technology, invent a product that renders you obsolete, right? So says our technology advances so that pipes can transport water even from a distance. Either way, as circumstances change, your hold gets broken and you're left with nothing. So that's why it's like, don't try to make a living off of controlling your resource. Just make a better product. He uses an example of the music industry. It's really, really fascinating how he ties this one idea.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought this part was really interesting. It's really about getting extremely good at something, trying to differentiate, like understanding that the more creative, the more unique what you're making or what you're doing or what you're working on, the more valuable it is. He says, human creativity got a price tag, and it turned out to be quite expensive. Creativity is rare. Why? Because most of us just mimic and copy what everybody else is doing, right? Creativity is rare. And as a result, it's not just expensive, but also extremely lucrative. The way to survive, and this is so good, the way to survive and flourish is to make the best damn product you can. And if you can't survive and flourish on that, then you shouldn't. If you can't make a good car, then you deserve to go down like the rock that was the US auto industry. Remember they talked about David, the co-author talked about. He has a surprisingly deep understanding of U.S.-American business history. You deserve to go down like the rock. That was the U.S. auto industry in the 1970s. Success is about quality in giving folks.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important point. He's not just saying that just to you know, like, hey, I'm a jerk, I have bad social skills. He's like, it's Linux organized in a way. It doesn't matter if I am. So he says the point about open source has never been that I'm more”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think what I love about his simple operating system of life is if you're always optimizing for fun, if you don't get too caught up in your social status or whatever people think of you or just chasing money if you already have all your needs met, you're going to enjoy it most. And you see this in one sentence. Most days I wake up thinking I'm the luckiest bastard alive talks about a lot of pressure from as it became more and more popular. The press always make up these weird theories. This is where we see him just, you know, he's like, I have flaws. I've tried to address these flaws. I'll try to address them in the future, but I am what I am to some degree. Anyone reading this column would assume that mounting pressures as my role of chief nerd had turned me into an asshole. But that's wrong. I always was an asshole. I truly always have been an asshole. This isn't anything new. He talks about listen, I'm deficient in social skills. I'm not good with people.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't proactively delegate as much as I wait for people to come forward and volunteer to take over things. It started when I divested myself of the responsibilities I found less interesting. That's also something it repeats. Like the user level code, people step forward and offer to take over the subsystems. Everything filters up to me through the maintenance of the subsystems. I approve or disapprove of their work, but mostly I let things happen naturally. Benevolent dictator? No, I'm just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. See how he repeats himself over and over again? Repetition is persuasive. That's when you get the best results.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More about how he manages or whatever you want to use it for Linux. What seemed to amaze them next was the administration of Linux. They couldn't grasp how the largest collaborative project in the history of humanity could possibly be managed so effectively when the average 30-person company typically degenerates into something resembling barnyard chaos. Somebody coined the phrase benevolent dictator to describe how I ran the whole thing. The first time I heard the term, all I could think of was some sunny nation general with a dark mustache handing out bananas to his starving masses. I don't know if I feel comfortable with the benevolent dictator image. I control the Linux kernel, the foundation of it all, because so far everybody connected with Linux trusts me more than they trust anyone else. My method for managing the project with hundreds of thousands of developers is the same as it was when I coded away my bedroom. I don't proactively delegate the same point he just described in a different way, right?”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes into a little bit of detail about the difference, philosophical difference between Linux and Bill Gates and how Bill Gates actually had him on its target list too. We saw this a few weeks ago in that book, Overdrive. He says, so folks who ventured into the depths of Microsoft tell me that they've seen my face on dartboards.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I took full advantage of that. And the reason he says he took full advantage of that is because he's like, I'm not one of these people that's going to forego sleep. He thinks that's a bad move. A lot of people believe in working long days and doing double, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. My job, nor Linux, has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think it's being lazy. I have a perfectly good excuse and I'm standing by it. You may lose a few hours of your productive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, about 10 hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake, you're alert and your brain functions on all cylinders. That's not, he's not the only one that feels that way. James Dyson says in his autobiography, if he doesn't sleep at least 10 hours a day, his whole day is ruined. Jeff Bezos talks about he needs at least eight hours of sleep a night and he makes his best decisions in the morning. So we just see this over and over again.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That line where he's like, Oh, people are, oh, look, he's changing now, he's working for a commercial company. He talks about he got a lot of pushback. And again, he's just going to make his own decisions. He's going to be comfortable. Sounds like he's got an inner scorecard if we go back to that idea Warren Buffett for Warren Buffett as opposed to an outer scorecard. But, you know, people are like, oh, you should just work on this for free forever. He's like, this is ridiculous. Like, I have skills. I'm going to go work at this company because I think it's interesting. And so there's a lot of conflict in the book where he just kind of pushes and does whatever he wants to do. He does something smart though. He gets a job and he gets to work on Linux at work because they're also using it. They're developing some kind of chip, I think. They're going to do hardwares, but they're also using his technology. I continue to, I could continue to think of Linux as a hobby in which only technology mattered and nothing else held sway over my decisions. My deal with TransMeta was clear. I had been given vague, it's funny, he said it's clear and it's vague. I had been given vague assurances that I could work on Linux during work hours too.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fairly busy time. We had absolutely no money. I had a great salary, but everything went towards getting furniture, buying a car, doing all the other stuff you'd have to do when you moved to a new country. My computer was on a ship that was inching its way around the Horn of Africa. It was the first period of time when I was quiet on the web, and my absence worried a lot of people. It was like, okay, now he's working for a commercial company. I wasn't going to go away. I couldn't think of a way to say that I was just catching my breath. He just needed a break.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was madness. I wrote my thesis over a long weekend and turned it on minutes before taking Tove, that's his soon to be wife, to the hospital to deliver Patricia, who was born forty hours later. That was december fifth, nineteen ninety six. Being a father seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Our visas arrived and on February 17th, nineteen ninety seven, we boarded a flight to San Francisco. I remember the temperature in Helsinki, zero degrees Fahrenheit. He talks about this over and over again. I remember Toe's family at the airport crying as we said goodbye. They were very close. I don't remember if my family was there or not, more about his dysfunctional family, right? We landed in the United States. It felt surreal, particularly the 70 degree difference in climate from Finland. I talked about early days in the United States getting used to everything with the move and getting accustomed to the new job at Transmeta. That's the company he was going to work for. He winds up working for a few years. I didn't have a lot of time to devote to Linux during the first couple of months.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another good idea for you at this point, he decides, hey, I know I'm going to have some life-changing decisions. Why don't we just do them all at once? So he's going to move to a new country, get a new job, become a father, and get married all at once. And he's writing a thesis. So he says, I said yes. He has an opportunity to he's recruited, as he was just describing for other people. People are like, wow, this guy's really valuable. He's got a ton of job offers. He doesn't go for an interview. They just like, we want you. It's interesting how much weather played into it. He found some interesting companies, but he's like, I don't want to deal with the snow, and I want to be in California, so that helped him make the choice. So he says, I said, yes, it felt weird. The next thing I did was tell the university it would be leaving. That's when the stress really began. For me, it was a giant step that meant there was no turning back. We were having a new child, moving to a new country, and I was leaving the safety nest of the University of Helsinki. He'd been there for like almost a decade. In retrospect, I guess getting all those changes over at once was a good idea.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“development gives programmers that chance. And again, I think I'm glad he makes that distinction because he's like, just because I'm not charging for it doesn't mean money doesn't motivate me. And in fact, he talks about he feels the U.S. system of valued employees making a lot more money than just everybody makes the same, like in Finland or similar is a lot better. In America, you give them a lot more money and it works.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate to even hate that word. A direct way to make money, but do you think about it one, it's a very obvious way for a potential employee to be like, wow, this person's really talented. Let me go hire them, right? Instead of, as opposed to, I think I read somewhere right now, it's like for every remote job, there's like 400 on average of like 400 applicants, which you turn an outbound process into an inbound process if you think about it like that, right? But two, you're also, because your work is and everybody wants to hear people value their work, right? So because you're motivated, you're doing good work, and then it's a sense of satisfaction for that person, for that individual to hear other people like, hey, that's interesting, hey, that's good job. So says hackers also, I just read that part, it's a significant motivating factor. So he's talking about gaining esteem in the eyes of your peers. Everybody wants to impress their peers, improve their reputation, elevate their social status, open source.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This point, Linux is already really popular. He's having spent a lot of time explaining to it for reporters. And in this section, he talks about that people are astonished that the open source model works. But then he lists some of the incentives that helped it succeed. So I thought this was very fascinating. Open source hackers aren't the high-tech counterparts of Mother Teresa. They do get their names associated with their contributions in the form of the credit list or history file that is attached to each project. So it talks about why are you spending all these hours. People, especially Americans, couldn't understand. It's like, you're spending all this time, you're not getting paid. You're getting paid in other ways, and then you can monetize that later. The most prolific contributors attract the attention of employers who troll the code, hoping to spot and hire top programmers. Hackers are also motivated in large part by the esteem they can gain in the eyes of their peers by making solid contributions. It's not a direct monetization.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he continues that theme listen, let's just have people, they know what they're interested in. If they want to work on something, they'll volunteer to do that, right? And that will keep me from quitting because he says, I divested myself of things that didn't hold much interest for me.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is where he goes into his, what I found interesting, talks about the way he quote unquote manages or approaches work. I did learn fairly early on the best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do the things because they want to do them, not because you want them to. The best leaders also know when they are wrong and they are capable of pulling themselves out. And the best leaders enable others to make decisions for them. Let me rephrase that. Much of Linux's success can be attributed to my own personality flaws. One, I'm lazy, and two, I like to get the credit for work of others. Otherwise, the Linux development model, if that's what people are calling it, would still be limited to daily email messages among a half a dozen geeks, as opposed to an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of participants.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kept track. While I might be somebody's idea of a folk hero, I've never been the selfless, ego free, techno-love child, the hallucinating press insists I am. And he talks about I want to do good work, and for me, I want Linux to success and the definition of that success is a lot of people would use it.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the computer. This is not an exaggeration. I rarely even knew if it was day or night, weekend or weekday, but I didn't feel the least bit pathetic. Here's that word again. I was having fun. So he's talking about the very first version he releases. You really couldn't do anything, but you could see that it was something resembling Unix. In fact, it worked like a very crippled Unix. So I just decided I'd make it available. I wouldn't tell anybody publicly. Instead, I had just informed a handful of people by private email, probably between five and ten people.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was the point where I almost gave up, thinking it would be too much and not worth it, and really what kept him going is the fact that he had two modes. I'm either programming or I'm doing nothing. So he says, but there wasn't much else I could do, or excuse me, much else to do. And so we see his schedule at the very beginning of creating Linux. And this went on what I'm about to describe to you goes on for months. This took a lot of work. A program sleep. program sleep program eat program sleep program shower briefly program schedule by the time i did it this way it was clear the project was on its way to becoming an operating system so i'm skipping ahead a couple months so he finally sees the very first light that he actually did something that may have sense of usefulness only to himself but other people i felt a great sense of satisfaction i think that was particularly important because i hadn't been doing anything that summer except working”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say one of the main reasons of reading and picking up this book is actually because he talks about problem solving a lot. And again, that could be applied to every single domain. It's still hard to explain what could be so fascinating about beating your head against the wall for three days, not knowing how to solve something the better way, the beautiful way. But once you find that way, it's the greatest feeling in the world. And then the next few sentences, next sentence actually, is so important. I think it might be the most important reason that I encourage you to read as many biographies as you possibly can. And it's the fact that no one, there's a quote from James Dyson that I love. He says, everybody gets knocked back. No one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, right. Let's give it another go. Every single book, every single story you have a fork on the road they're presented with a fork in the road on the left that can go left, give up or they go or they figure it out and keep going straight or go right or whatever the case is. That's not the best analogy I'm going to roll with it. So anyways, this is an example.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There. Okay, so this is on problem solving and almost giving up. We're still working on Linux. He says you can do something to brute force way. This stupid grind the problem down until it's not a problem anymore way. Or you can find the right approach and suddenly the problem just goes away. You look at the problem another way and you have an epiphany. It was only a problem because you were looking at it the wrong way.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computer science has a lot in common with physics. Both are about how the world works at a rather fundamental level. The difference of course is that while in physics you're supposed to figure out how the world is made up, in computer science you create the world. He italicized the word create there. You create the world within the confines of the computers. You're the creator. You get to ultimately control everything that happens. If you're good enough, you can be God on a small scale.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And where the end result is whatever you can make of it. And yet to the outside, it looks like the most boring thing on Earth. Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain. Just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it does it, unerringly, forever, without a complaint. And that's interesting in itself. But blind obedience on its own while initially fascinating obviously does not make for a very likable companion. In fact, that part gets pretty boring fairly quickly. What makes programming? So engaging is that while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how. I'm going to interrupt. I just got one more paragraph here, but there's a sentence on the next page I underlined because I really do speak to how he goes about solving problems. He says the problem gets solved by thinking about it. I'm personally convinced that”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is his sister talking about him. He is motivated by honest curiosity and a wish to conquer difficulties as they arise, and to do it unquote the right way. He talks about that a lot because that's the way it is and he won't give up. Okay, so now I'm going to read of several paragraphs. He's talking about the beauty of programming. We're using this for a metaphor, like we always do, right? This is really the way a person who loves their craft speaks. So he's going to talk about programming. This could be Steve Jobs talking about making insanely gay products. And so Ferrari talking about building the world's greatest race car. This could be Henry Royce, the founder of Roy's Royce, talking about his desire to make a car better than anything that's ever existed. They all talk the same way, right? I don't know how to really explain my fascination with programming, but I'll try. To somebody who does it, it's the most interesting thing in the world. It's a game much more involved than chess, a game where you can make up your own”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And we're going to talk more about how he thought about it and why he thought open source is almost like a, how would I put it? It's almost like a way to demonstrate your skill level to the world at large in doing so, you'll be able to reap unexpected benefits later on. So again, I'll share more from the book on that because I think it's one of the most interesting parts. So he says, I didn't need to start a commercial company. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn't take care of employees if I tried. He still has the same writing style. A company that I would have started would have never succeeded. It's simply not what I'm interested in. So instead, I have a very good life doing something that I think is really interesting and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good. And so even as an older person, you see he's echoing that same thing. It's like, I'm not doing anything that's not fun. And I'm not going to just do something that's not fun to have a lot more money when I already have what I need out of life.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start a collection to pay off Linus' computer. It was wonderful. I had absolutely no money. I always felt it was important not to have asked for money or beg for money, but the fact is it was simply given to me. I'm getting choked up, talking about getting choked up, thinking about all these people volunteering to pay off his computer because they loved what he made so much. That's how Linux got started. And this is also talk about later in the book about he started getting a lot of media attention and they compare and contrast the media automatically compares and contrast Linus with Bill Gates. Bill Gates is living in this Xanadu or whatever he calls his 50,000 square foot house. He's a billionaire. Linus is driving a pontiac and living in, I think, a duplex in San Jose, California at the time. And he's like, would people get wrong is like they come some kind of monk? He's like, I didn't have money, but I wanted money. I just didn't want to have to get money from selling Linux. And then he winds up later on in life talking about his.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of dedication again, he's just having fun because he'll tell you over and over again in this book. I'm lazy, I'm lazy, I'm lazy. I don't like working hard. I only do things that are fun. And so this is where he accidentally starts to create Linux. It was March, maybe April. I was spending most of my time in a bathrobe huddled over my unattractive new computer with thick black window shades shielding me from the sunlight, not to mention the outside world. I was eking out the monthly payments for my PC, which was scheduled to be paid off in three years. What I didn't know then was that I would only be sending in payments for another year. By then, I would have written Linux, which would be seen by many more people than just Sarah, that's a sister and Lars that's his friend. Another person that was interested in Linux would have started a collection on the internet to get my computer paid off. Everybody knew I wasn't making any money on Linux. People just started saying.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hand comes with a small as beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for infinite complexity of expression. Then he gives us a history of where Eunuch comes from. It came out of 18-tailbill labs. But really, this is the punchline, and I really appreciated what he said here. You should absolutely not dismiss simplicity for something easy. It takes design and good taste to be simple. So it's funny that he says that, because that sounds like something exactly, I've heard Steve Jobs say things like that. And so he goes to meet Steve Jobs at this time. This is maybe late 90s is when he meets him. And he's like, listen, I disagreed with him about technology. We wind up having arguments. But he's like, I kind of like the guy. It was really interesting. And because the operating system wasn't considered a serious project back on the history of Unix, by the way, because the operating system wasn't considered a serious project, AT&T didn't think of it as a commercial venture. This is now rereading this. This is going to echo exactly how he thinks about it.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is where it really sunk in my mind because I'm not a programmer. And the way he describes, even though I'm not a programmer, hearing somebody speak about something they're passionate about, it's just, it's an infectious. It's very attractive, right? So he says, it's the same with languages. The English language has 26 letters, and you can build up everything from those letters. And he's going to compare languages, the difference between the English language and the Chinese language with complicated operating systems and the ones that he wanted to build, right? Or you have the Chinese language in which you have one letter for every single thing you can think of. In Chinese, you start off with complexity, and you can combine complexity in limited ways. And he says, this is the approach of Windows. So remember, this is written in 99, 2000, maybe 2001. So I've covered a bunch of books from this era, including the one I just did a few weeks ago, the Bill Gates one. And it's just everybody's obsessive with Microsoft at this point in history. So it says Unix, on the other hand,”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, it never subsided to more than a decade later. He's still working on it to this day. So, multiple decades later, I hope you can say the same about something. So he starts reading the book. He becomes completely obsessed. And we're going to see, he's going to focus on, he's going to sleep, and he's going to write, who's not, I guess I need to back up and tell you. He did not plan on writing his own operating system. It just happened that way. So it says there were two things I did that summer. Nothing, and read the 719 pages of operating systems design and implementation. So now he talks about his philosophy about ugly systems and simplicity and everything that goes into how he approaches his work and the product he built, right? An ugly system was one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about. This is a really fascinating metaphor he uses here. Check this out.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was fairly useful. As I read and started to understand, I got a big enthusiastic jolt. Frankly, it's never subsided, and this is the most important part. And really, I think, again, think about his entire, you can summarize, the title of the book is his entire philosophy on life, on work, and everything else, just for fun. And the reason I find this book so appealing, and I'm glad it was recommended to me, is because very few people actually live their lives that way. It's extremely, extremely hard to do so, but it's a really fairly simple operating system. And he talks about his love of simplicity, which I'm going to share some more quotes on in a minute. But he said, I really like the sentence. I hope you can say the same about something. So he's saying, hey, I was a young kid, maybe 19, 20 years old, whatever he is at this time. I got a big enthusiasm.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so fast forward, he's at university and he talks about the power of a book, and this is just fantastic. Now everybody has a book that changed his or her life, the Holy Bible, Das Capital, Tuesdays with Mori, everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten, whatever. I sincerely hope that having read the preface and my theory on the meaning of life, you will decide that this book does the trick for you. The book that launched me to New Heights was Operating Systems, Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tannbaum. In the book, Andrew Tenabaum, a university professor in Amsterdam, discusses Minix, which is a teaching aid he wrote for Unix. Soon after reading the introduction and learning the philosophy behind Eunuch and what powerful, clean, beautiful operating system would be capable of doing, I decided to get a machine to run Unix on. I would run Unix, which was the only version I could find.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly it has to do with the fact that some of the smartest programmers out there are fifteen year old kids playing around in their rooms. This is what I thought sixteen years ago, and I suspect it's still true today.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He winds up, his parents are divorced. His dad spends a lot of time in Moscow, and here he's going to tell us an entire story in just a few sentences. And I love this. He says the sweetest language has no equivalent to the term dysfunctional family. As a result of the divorce, we didn't have a lot of money. Mom would have to pawn her only investment. The single share of stock in the Helsinki Telephone Company. Now this is a mind-blowing next sentence. Ready? I remember going with her once and feeling embarrassed about it. Now I'm on the board of directors of the same company. I love sentences like that. It made me think of the autobiography of Chengduang, the founder of Hyundai, when he grew up in abject poverty in Korea. And he winds up working in a rice shop. And there's a sentence in his autobiography. He's like, the delivery, he started off as a delivery boy, do anything possible. And two years later, he's like, the delivery boy had become the owner. Fantastic. So now this is the co-author.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your grandfather's computer is more interesting. His machine is its own world where logic rules he talks about in these talks. I don't think you mentioned the book, but he's like, I don't know if I'm autistic or I'm on the spectrum, but I really want things to make sense. I like them to be logical, and a lot of the world is not logical. So that's why I spent so much time with computers. There may be three people in class with computers, and only one of them uses it for the same reasons. You hold weekly meetings. It is the only social activity on the calendar. And this is where we come to find out he becomes obsessed really, really early. No fun could compare to computer fun. With the computer at home, this is after his grandfather died, so now he gets to keep the computer. It was possible to stay up all night with it. I would fake sleep, wait for my mom to go away, jump up, and sit in front of the computer. And part of the reason that he was so obsessed with the computer, other than it was a lot of fun, is because he came from a pretty unhappy family life.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple talks he gave. They're available on YouTube. And he talks about this over and over again the fact that he really liked to be able to control computers and that he felt he didn't have a sense of control with other humans and the real world. So he would kind of escape into this almost like this world within the world because he could play God in a sense. You were able to push what the computer can do. You control every single small detail and now he's trying to give the reader an idea of what it was like to be him when he was younger. He says you're 12, 13, 14.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being a nerd was considered a good thing. So now he tells us a little bit about school, and I'm going to tie all this together with an idea that I learned from David Olgovie. So he says, I might have been a nerd, but on the whole, school was good. I got good grades without having to work at it. Never truly great grades because I didn't work at it. In an accepted place and I had an accepted place in a social order. Nobody else really seemed to care too much about my nose. He talks about his big nose over and over again. This was almost certainly in retrospect because they cared about their own problems a whole lot more.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it says I was an ugly child. Don't get me wrong, it's not as if I look like the hunchback of Notre Dame. Envision instead large front teeth so that anybody seeing a picture of me in my younger years gets a slightly beaverish impression. Imagine also a complete lack of taste and clothes coupled with an oversized nose and the picture starts to complete in your mind. Now to add to that picture start filling in the details brown hair, blue eyes, and a slight short sightedness that makes wearing glasses a good idea. Happily, our family wasn't very much into photography. That way there's less incriminating evidence. I was pretty much the youngest in my class at school, and that in turn meant the smallest. I was a nerd, a geek. From fairly early on, I didn't ductate my glasses together, but I might as well have, because I had all the other traits. I'm good at math, good at physics, and no social graces whatsoever. And this was before.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's you're meant to have fun. So it says, everything in life progresses in that order, and there's nothing after entertainment. So in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And once you've reached that third stage, you're done. But you have to go through the other stages first. So what this builds up to is that in the end, we're all here to have fun. We might as well sit down, relax, and enjoy the ride. And it's really, now that I'm rereading these highlights after I finish the whole book, it's really smart that they put that at the very beginning. Because he tells you right at the beginning what's important to him and how he's going to make decisions. And I don't think out of all the other books that I've read so far for the podcast, I don't think I can think of another person that thinks like Linus or is able to communicate as clearly, can communicate his thoughts to other people as clear as he does. So let me go back to his early life. He begins Linux when he's really, really young. I think he's in his early 20s. And he's living in Finland at the time.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Book on the meaning of life and ends the book on what he feels is the meaning of life. And this is another example of them breaking the fourth wall. They're having a conversation in the car taking a road trip and they're going back and forth and David asks them, like, what is the meaning of life? What's the answer to that first question? And this is what Linus says. He says, basically it's short and sweet. It won't give your life any meaning, but it tells you what's going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life and for anything that you do or any other living thing does. The first is survival. The second is social order. The third is entertainment. Everything in life, this is, he'll repeat this many, many times. So this is extremely important to him that you put these things in order. It also talks about how do you motivate people. So first you have to survive. Then you worry about where you are in relation to other people. And then once you progress past.”
2021-04-18 · Founders · #176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source