I agree that it’s a “cop-out”, but the issue it mitigates is not an individual one but a systemic one. We’ve made it very, very difficult for apps not to rely on environmental conditions that are effectively impossible to control without VMs or containerization. That’s bad, but it’s not fixable by asking all app developers to make their apps work in every platform and environment, because that’s a Herculean task even for a single program. (Just look at all the compatibility work in a codebase that really does work everywhere, such as vim.)

My point is that the claim in the comic and in other comments that this corrupts your repo or loses work simply isn’t true.

It’s not even actually that bad, at least not since January of 2020: https://stackoverflow.com/a/59687740/1858225

Huh. I had forgotten that git does actually create a file with the branch name. But it doesn’t actually screw up the .git folder or lose your data when you try to do a rename like this; it just rejects the rename unless you also use the “force” option. This has been the case since at least January of 2020. But apparently it actually doesn’t always use a local file for branch names, so sometimes there’s a problem and sometimes there isn’t, which I guess is arguably worse than just having consistently-surprising behavior.

I honestly don’t even understand the joke. Case-insensitive file names cause problems, but what does that have to do with version control branch names?

For anyone else wondering, here’s the text of the actual email cited as the CoC violation:

Michal, if you think crashing processes is an acceptable alternative to error handling you have no business writing kernel code.

You have been stridently arguing for one bad idea after another, and it’s an insult to those of us who do give a shit about writing reliable software.

You’re arguing against basic precepts of kernel programming.

Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.

I agree, but if you look at the specific email linked, it very clearly crosses the line into direct abuse, whereas most of Linus’s rants do exist in a slightly greyer area (even if they’d be grounds for a discussion with HR at an actual company).

Understandable; no time to check details when your fuse is that short

The second button is actually a pretty major change!

It means both.

It had a reasonably clear warning, though; a screenshot is included in this response from the devs. But note that the response also links to another issue where some bikeshedding on the warning occurred and the warning was ultimately improved.

In reality, that was added four and a half years after this issue was opened.

Yes, the dialog was changed, as part of this linked issue (and maybe again after that; this whole incident is very old). After reading some of the comments on that issue, I agree with the reasoning with some of the commenters that it would be less surprising for that menu option to behave like git reset --hard and not delete tracked files.

The user clicked an option to “discard” all changes. They then got a very clear pop-up saying that this is destructive and cannot be undone (there’s a screenshot in the thread).

You are saying “yes” to a comment explaining why the Google AI response cannot possibly be correct, so what do you mean “and [it’s] correct”?

Creation is easy, assuming the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics!

Delete prior iterations of the loop in the same timeline? I’m not sure there’s anything in quantum mechanics to permit that…

In the universe where the list is sorted, it doesn’t actually matter how long the destruction takes!

Reminds me of quantum-bogosort: randomize the list; check if it is sorted. If it is, you’re done; otherwise, destroy this universe.

Or Stockholm Syndrome