It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.

EDIT:

Torvalds’s anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

Another nice quote from Alan Kay (immediately after the above):

Think about what literacy actually is. Literacy begins with ideas, and literature evolved as a way of communicating those ideas. Computer literacy, by extension, cannot possibly be about learning how to put a disk in a machine, and it cannot possibly be about learning a spreadsheet.

Computers are really for helping us understand systems that are too complicated to think about in classical ways, such as political systems or the AIDS epidemic. They are really for letting children build models of complicated ideas and understand these powerful ideas in a direct way at a much earlier age than they would have without the aid of the computer.

Which, in the video, is followed by a nice comparison between SmallTalk and a deceptively similar UI in the Macintosh.