Fucking HOTWHEELS.. fucking faggot is wanted.. can still do interviews eh??
https://t.me/hackernewslive/173074
HackerNews (T.me) Convicted murderer, filesystem creator writes of regrets to Linux
list
"The man I am now would do things very differently," Reiser says in long letter.
By Kevin Purdy • January 19, 2024
With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux
kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the
discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).
Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of
his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan
then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their
wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and
suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum
that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document.
What follows is a relative summary of Reiser's letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we
first saw on the Phoronix blog, and which, by all appearances, is authentic (or would
otherwise be an epic bit of minutely detailed fraud for no particular reason). It covers,
broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users,
beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his
interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about
dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics,
including modern Russian geopolitics.
“LKML and Slashdot.org seem like reasonable places to send it
(as of 2006)”
In a cover letter, Reiser tells Brennan that he hopes he can use OCR to import his lengthy
letter and asks him to use his best judgment in where to send his reply. He also asks, if he
has time, Brennan might send him information on "Reiser5, or any interesting papers on
other Filesystems, compression (especially Deep Learning based compression), etc."
Then Reiser addresses the kernel mailing list directly—very directly:
I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the
discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don’t post directly because I am
in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.
I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but
available to any who ask.
A detailed apology for how I interacted with the Linux kernel community, and some
history of V3 and V4, are included, along with descriptions of what the technical issues
were. I have been attending prison workshops, and working hard on improving my
social skills to aid my becoming less of a danger to society. The man I am now would do
things very differently from how I did things then.
ReiserFS V3 was "our first filesystem, and in doing it we made mistakes, because we
didn't know what we were doing," Reiser writes. He worked through "years of dark
depression" to get V3 up to the performance speeds of ext2, but regrets how he
celebrated that milestone. "The man I was then presented papers with benchmarks
showing that ReiserFS was faster than ext2. The man I am now would stat his papers …
crediting them for being faster than the filesystems of other operating systems, and
thanking them for the years we used their filesystem to write ours." It was "my first serious
social mistake in the Linux community, and it was completely unnecessary."
Reiser asks that a number of people who worked on ReiserFS be included in "one last
release" of the README, and to "delete anything in there I might have said about why they
were not credited." He says prison has changed him in conflict resolution and with his
"tendency to see people in extremes."
Reiser extensively praises Mikhail Gilula, the "brightest mind in his generation of computer
scientists," for his work on ReiserFS from Russia and for his ideas on rewriting everything
the field knew about data structures. With their ideas on filesystems and namespaces
combined, it would be "the most important refactoring of code ever." His analogy at the
time, Reiser wrote, was Adam Smith's ideas of how roads, waterways, and free trade
affected civilization development; ReiserFS' ideas could similarly change "the expressive
power of the operating system."
“I never got to that dream because of my crime”
Reiser writes that he understood the difficulty ahead in getting the Linux world to "shift
paradigms" but lacked the understanding of how to "make friends and allies of people"
who might initially have felt excluded. This is followed by a heady discussion of "balanced
trees instead of extensible hashing," Oracle's history with implementing balanced trees,
getting synchronicity just right, I/O schedulers, block size, seeks and rotational delays on
magnetic hard drives, and tails. It leads up to a crucial decision in ReiserFS' development,
the hard non-compatible shift from V3 to Reiser 4.
Format changes, Reiser writes, are "unwanted by many for good reasons." But "I just had
to fix all these flaws, fix them and make a filesystem that was done right. It’s hard to
explain why I had to do it, but I just couldn’t rest as long as the design was wrong and I
knew it was wrong," he writes.
SUSE didn't want a format change, but Reiser, with hindsight, sees his pushback as
"utterly inarticulate and unsociable." The push for Reiser 4 in the Linux kernel was similar,
"only worse."
Reiser jumps back in time to note how the loss of Gilula to a job in the US, and then that
firm's continual hiring of his team, deeply affected his mentality. With the distance of time,
Reiser writes that he understands they were simply making the best economic decision for
themselves, but "then I felt so betrayed." He could never pay people well, and they worked
for "the guy with more dream than experience." Even if he had gone further, Reiser writes,
he was "callous and indifferent to their needs and dreams when I committed my crime,
and victimized them financially and ruined their dreams that I had talked them into."
"One of my great regrets is that I let go of Mikhail as a friend. I hope he is alive, and doing
well."
A portion of Hans Reiser's letter to Fredrik Brennan, regarding Russian culture, the Russian mafia,
and (crossed out) Reiser's thought about empathy in divorce.
Fredrik Brennan
Russian culture, alienation, and then back to filesystems
The letter shifts abruptly to how Reiser frantically sought funding from DARPA for Reiser 4.
Without making it clear, he suggests that the filesystem's Russian ties hindered its federal
chances, despite being at "a point of light in US-Russian relations" in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. There's a strange aside about the Russian mafia getting him back $300 he
lost in a scam "in 45 minutes." And a note that Russian culture "teaches a better
understanding of people." "As a for instance, one of them told me that my wife was in a lot
of pain. Now I can see clearly that that was exactly correct," he writes, without confirming
if "one of them" was a Russian coworker or Russian mafia member.
There is a section of Reiser's letter, crossed out in an image file uploaded by Brennan, and
so not included in the LKML text post, in which Reiser states that if he could "wave a
magic wand to change the American divorce process," he would require each person be
asked: "Is it possible that your spouse is in a lot of pain, and could that explain their
actions?" Such "inviting empathy," Reiser writes, is something he uses frequently in
conflict resolution and meditation.
Reiser goes on to say that while now "is not the time to try to be a light in US-Russian
relations," he hopes that there's a time to find "friendship and love, between Russia and
Ukraine and the US, and between my children and I."
And then "Back to Reiser 4," which Reiser says was far more adaptable to plugins and new
features than others of the time. His team of four produced "beautiful code," a filesystem
"worthy of their talents." But Reiser's response to those in the kernel community doing
similar work was "screwing the pooch in response" with arguments and benchmarks. It
didn't help that the team was "dropping 90,000 lines of code on them all at once, having
worked on it in total social isolation for 5 years in Moscow."
Reiser expounds on the conflict resolution he's picked up in cognitive behavioral
intervention classes in prison, and how that might have guided his Linux kernel
interactions back then. Making people feel appreciated and asking for their ideas, rather
than asking, "Why do I have to deal with these people who didn't write as fast of a
filesystem?" He notes that he believes elementary schools should have similar kinds of
emotional guidance classes as he's had access to in prison.
“Let their dreams escape from the harm I have done”
Reiser provides many examples of how he could have handled different code and code
submission situations differently. He apologizes for situations in which he made people not
feel "appreciated or included," for failing his team members, and "alienating others in the
Linux kernel community."
Reiser thanks Edward Shishkin for his work on Reiser 5, though he notes he doesn't know
what is in it. He encourages people to "allow those who worked so hard to build a beautiful
filesystem for the users to escape the effects of my reputation."
Under a "Conclusion" sub-heading, Reiser is fairly succinct in summarizing a rather wide-
ranging letter, minus the minutiae about filesystem architecture.
I wish I had learned the things I have been learning in prison about talking through
problems, and believing I can talk through problems and doing it, before I had married
or joined the LKML. I hope that day when they teach these things in Elementary School
comes.
I thank Richard Stallman for his inspiration, software, and great sacrifices,
It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you
well.
It both is and is not a response to Brennan's initial prompt, asking how he felt about
ReiserFS being slated for exclusion from the Linux kernel. There is, at the moment, no
reply to the thread started by Brennan.