Linus Was Prompting Kernel Devs Like LLMs

Description

A dark-terminal screenshot of a truncated Linux kernel mailing list email. Visible text: "On Thu, 6 Jun 2002, Rusty Russell wr" then a quoted line "> The method is: open /dev/futex" followed by Linus Torvalds' reply in white monospace: "STOP! What madness is this? You have a damn mutex system call, c" and "Do we create pipes by opening /dev/p". It is the famous 2002 futex-interface rant rejecting a /dev/futex device node in favor of a syscall. The Telegram caption says nobody is joking that Linus was prompting programmers 20+ years ago like they were LLMs: the email is a system prompt with a hard STOP token, an insult, and a reducing analogy. The technical point still stands—not everything is a file, and pipes are not created by opening /dev/pipe.