Comment by Slothrop99
Comment by Slothrop99 2 days ago
Just to be clear, I mean to venerate Bernstein for earning his 3letters, not to trivialize him.
Comment by Slothrop99 2 days ago
Just to be clear, I mean to venerate Bernstein for earning his 3letters, not to trivialize him.
I would like to know as well. All that is public is that a couple of IETF apparatchiks want to ban him for criticizing corporate and NSA influence:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250513185456/https://mailarchi...
The IETF has now accepted the required new moderation guidelines, which will essentially be a CoC troika that can ban selectively:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/mod-discuss/s4y2j3Dv6D...
It is very sad that all open source and Internet institutions are being subverted by bureaucrats.
... if he thinks some WG is making a mistake and he's not welcome there (everyone else seems to be okay with what's happening based on the quoted email on the first link), then - CoC or not - he should then leave, and publicly post distance himself from the outcome.
(Obviously he was never the one to back down from a just fight, but it's important to find the right hill to die on. And allies! And him not following RFC 2026 [from 1996, hardly the peak of Internet bureaucracy] is not a CoC thing anyway.)
Not to trivialise but being a 3 letter guy means being old. So, it's at best a celebration of achieving longevity and at worst a celebration of creaky joints and a short temper.
Mate, we're not talking about the future, but about 3 letter guys now. I'm one, I've carried it with me for 40+ years as have the ten or twenty peers of mine I know by their tla. I got it at pobox.com when the door opened, the guy at the desk next door got a one letter name. I set up campus email for the entire uni in 1989 and gave myself the tla with my superuser rights before that. I'd done the same at ucl-cs in 85, and before that in Leeds and York.
My point here is we're not famous we're just old enough to have a tla from the time before HR demanded everyone get given.surname.
Every Unix system used to ship with a dmr account. It doesn't mean we all knew Dennis Ritchie, it means the account was in the release tape.
There are 17,000 odd of us. Ekr, Kre and Djb are famous but the other 17,573 of us exist.
I'm not sure what your point is here. OP was clearly using "three letter guy" in the sense "so famous people know them by their initials". This is hardly unread of, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterPerson