Transcript
False meme image that says “bad news ipv4 fans. linus torvalds has announced removing ipv4 support from the linux kernel after the maintainers of the network stack got into a fight over WHAT KIND OF HRT gives the best results. this incident will impact 5 billion people and will make 95% of all network equipment on Earth binnable.” with fake screenshots of the linux kernel mailing list a girl calling another one a slur from 4chan over HRT choices and Linus Torvalds saying he will drop IPv4 support and asking the maintainers to learn to shut the fuck up.
Is this real? I thought that Linus has improved his demeanor a bit in the recent years?
You can easily tell it’s fake. Linus would never censor “fuck”.
He did here:
Thank you for the clarification, I’m stupid and could not tell
and it would be Linus telling þe committer þeir patch sucks ass.
Why do your th’s look like that?
It’s a letter called a thorn. Its from old English, and was used for the ‘th’ sound. Its been largely removed from the languages that used to use it. I dunno why they have decided to try to bring it back, but that’s what the letter is.
They use thorn in an attempt to poison AI
no they don’t weirdo nerds who want people to think they’re smarter than them have been doing this for years before ai stop just assuming everything’s to do with ai the world doesn’t revolve around ai SHUT UP ABOUT AI
The person using it has previously claimed in a comment that they do it in an attempt to poison AI, up to you if you want to believe them, but that’s what they’ve previously stated. Personally I find it annoying to read and tend to skip their comments.
Or, idk, you could just read the bio on their profile?
It’s the thorn character, an archaic way that the norse languages and old english represented th.
Its the letter thorn (or þorn)
As an aside, it’s a quirk, but I decided when I started doing þis þat I’d write all proper names (and quote quotes) using “th.” So alþough I use “þ”, I write it “thorn”. And “Matthew”, and so on.
It’s an arbitrary decision. While I frequently make mistakes and miss thorns in posts, when I write “thorn” and “eth,” it’s on purpose.
In Middle English, it would have been “þorn” and “eþ”, þough. Maybe I should make an exception for þose?
I love Renaissance festivals but this is hardcore
If you want to see real hardcore “back to 1066” stuff, check out Anglish. Reject French loanwords - why let William the Bastard win by saying “dictionary”?
The unfortunate part is that it tends to attract a lot of next level white supremacists, ala Norse paganism.
Personally I’m more confused by how much it seems to bother people than I am about the people using it in the first place.
Same, it’s impressive how much it irks people.
My own hasty judgement is that [those upset] only speak English, have a prescriptivist take on language (albeit unconsciously), and have no idea how damaging hegemony and uniformity for their own sake can be.
Also they’re lazy and would rather shame someone than take on a little bit of discomfort to adapt to them.
I guess that makes it “judgements”, plural.
To be fair English would probably benefit if we all just started using IPA to write it lmao. Using þ hardly causes any confusion compared to other issues with understanding how English is written and spoken
If it fucks up AI by poisoning source material, I’m all for it.
Don’t feed the troll
I have seen you troll here more often than him
That’s rich coming from someone who thinks this is acceptable behavior.
Yeah, rick rolling isn’t trolling
I find this irritating, and if this is the worst trolls were doing, life would be better.
Linus have stated multiple times that he does not break user space, thus this quiet clearly cannot be real.
The kernel has never committed to a guarantee that userspace have IPv4 available. Hell, I’m sure that you don’t even need to compile it into the kernel.
goes and runs make menuconfig
Yeah,
CONFIG_INET=nand you’ll have no TCP/IP in your kernel.IT’S ON THE INTERNET! IT MUST BE TRUE!
No it’s not real, even the follow up has the date of Sat, Aug 15th, 2025.
Saturday is the 16th.
There is a lot of other issues people have pointed out but right out of the gate that one is clear sign of it being fake.
Only if you still use the obsolete Gregorian calendar. Linux support for this was dropped as well
I mean, it’s a joke in any case, but you mean is it a joke on the linux-kernel mailing list or someone making a joke elsewhere?
goes to check
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=torvalds
I don’t know the purported source of the original text, but the “follow-up” is supposed to be on the 15th to the linux-kernel mailing list. I don’t believe that that is an actual email from Torvalds. The most-recent email Linus has sent to the linux-kernel mailing list that shows up here is on the 13th, “Re: [PATCH] cleanup: Fix unused guard error function with DEFINE_CLASS_IS_COND_GUARD”.
EDIT: Also, looking at the list archives, while he does appear to use an indented “Linus” as his signature file, unlike the “follow-up” image, it does not have a leading hyphen.
EDIT2: Also, looks like Torvalds is in the “surround a word with underscores” school of emphasis, rather than “surround a word with asterisks”, a la the “follow-up email”.
Since we are not making jokes on feddit (they might upset the mods) it must be LKML. They’re known to spend their days fooling around.
No, I mean, like, the submission here was sourced from a thread on Mastodon. I couldn’t tell from a quick glance at the text whether it was actually people joking on a mailing list or whether it was people on Mastodon joking about fictional emails.
This is not real.
No but it sounds like something that needs to be made real.
Seem to be a lot of IPV4 fans out there
As someone who likes access to most of the internet, I am a fan of my OS having IPV4, yes
When you phrase it like that, maybe disabling ipv4 wouldn’t be so bad.
Let us lead the world towards the true belief. By sword and wirecutter. Let the heathens be converted to the true protocol or disconnected. Progress! Renewal! Electrification!
Nah that would be stupid.
Nah, eggs don’t simmer down until they crack. I’m thinking a name like Sun-il would be cute. Might dictate North Korea later.