Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer' ⁠63%

7/17/2026, 7:02:00 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Unattributed Quote, Appeal to Authority, and Overconfidence Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 43.7% saturation with 243 hits. Analysis detected 1,774 faulty-reasoning hits from 556 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 57.7% and a BS Rank of ⁠63% (8,259 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 62.30% of the article peer group.

Earlier this week, Linux project leader Linus Torvalds told AI haters to fork off, and invited anyone who didn't like his comments to fork the kernel. 
Well, here you go: linux-0.11-rs, a total reimplementation of the Linux kernel, done in langage de programmation du jour, Rust. 
No, this isn't really a response to the Emperor Penguin's challenge – for a start, it looks like it was done with AI – but the timing was irresistible. 
The new project is by an undergrad student at Beihang University in Beijing, China, under the handle Poseidon. 
Never mind not being a fork – Poseidon's kernel isn't even really a port of Linux. 
It's a rewrite, and a rewrite of a very early version. 
It's based on Linux kernel 0.11, whose source code you can peruse on this mirror. 
This was an early kernel from December 8, 1991 – just a few months after the initial release, Linux 0.01. 
Version 0.11 was the last release of that first year of Linux. 
It was followed by version 0.12 in January 1992, then the version number jumped to 0.95 in March, as the young Torvalds started counting down to kernel 1.0 – which arrived two years later. 
If you read the 0.11 release notice, Torvalds said: "Linux-0.11 has a few rather major improvements, but perhaps most notably, is the first kernel where some other people start making real contributions." 
He goes on to say: "This is a major milestone, since it makes the kernel much more powerful than Minix was at the time." 
It's also when "Ted Ts'o shows up as a coder." 
Poseidon's Rust rewrite is quite a lot bigger than the original. 
The hackers of the "Orange Site" have been dissecting it with much greater expertise than this vulture can offer. 
User "dminik" fed it to an automatic code analyzer, and Pajecawav's Ghloc reckoned that it's just over 47,000 lines of Rust. 
Dminik breaks that down: "It's about 15k lines of code for the kernel and the rest is various utilities, libraries and programs that can run on the kernel." 
In other words, linux-0.11-rs is more complete than just the kernel. 
It also includes the core OS as it stood at the end of the year it first appeared. 
"Poseidon" also credits a tutorial on writing an OS kernel in Rust, which implies to us that this was not an entirely bot-driven effort. 
Some work has gone into it. 
Some of the Hacker News commentators call it a waste of tokens, or more pointedly a waste of water and electricity, but it seems to be a kid having some fun, playing around and experimenting. 
For us, that's a good thing. 
We hope that they found the exercise instructive. 
The Reg FOSS desk is not a fan of bot-slop, but we do approve of exploring and learning and having fun. 
At least for as long as code-generating LLMs are cheap and plentiful, it will be very hard to prevent youngsters and students from playing around and experimenting with them. 
Nobody is ever going to deploy anything on a bot-generated rewrite of a prototype kernel from 35 years ago – and don't forget that the original was itself written by a 22-year-old who was doing it "Just for Fun." 
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Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 10.8%The Register: 3.3%Confirmation Bias10.8%This article: 0.0%The Register: 1.0%Anchoring Bias0.0%This article: 5.6%The Register: 3.2%Availability Heuristic5.6%This article: 8.1%The Register: 1.1%Representativeness Heuristic8.1%This article: 12.2%The Register: 1.3%Hindsight Bias12.2%This article: 18.0%The Register: 2.3%Overconfidence Bias18.0%This article: 7.6%The Register: 5.0%Framing Effect7.6%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.7%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 3.8%The Register: 0.8%Status Quo Bias3.8%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.2%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 14.2%The Register: 3.0%Optimism Bias14.2%This article: 5.2%The Register: 2.6%Pessimism Bias5.2%This article: 6.3%The Register: 8.2%Negativity Bias6.3%This article: 7.4%The Register: 1.9%Self-Serving Bias7.4%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.8%Fundamental Attribution Error0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 4.7%The Register: 0.4%In-Group Bias4.7%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.4%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias0.0%This article: 7.0%The Register: 1.4%Halo Effect7.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.0%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 5.2%The Register: 1.9%Recency Bias5.2%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.3%Primacy Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 4.7%The Register: 0.7%Ad Hominem4.7%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.2%Straw Man0.0%This article: 19.1%The Register: 4.2%Appeal to Authority19.1%This article: 10.8%The Register: 1.7%False Dilemma10.8%This article: 5.2%The Register: 1.2%Slippery Slope5.2%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 15.3%The Register: 6.2%Hasty Generalization15.3%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.3%Red Herring0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.7%Bandwagon0.0%This article: 16.5%The Register: 3.0%Appeal to Emotion16.5%This article: 4.3%The Register: 0.9%Begging the Question4.3%This article: 5.2%The Register: 2.0%Post Hoc (False Cause)5.2%This article: 7.0%The Register: 0.2%Tu Quoque7.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.7%Burden of Proof0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.2%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.3%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 8.3%The Register: 2.2%Anecdotal8.3%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.0%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 8.1%The Register: 2.1%Ambiguity (Equivocation)8.1%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.0%This article: 2.9%The Register: 0.2%Special Pleading2.9%This article: 5.2%The Register: 0.2%Genetic Fallacy5.2%This article: 26.1%The Register: 2.3%Unattributed Quote26.1%This article: 7.0%The Register: 1.3%Quote-first Misdirection7.0%This article: 43.7%The Register: 7.3%Biased Writer Voice43.7%This article: 6.3%The Register: 1.5%Indoctrination6.3%This article: 3.8%The Register: 0.2%Politically Left Leaning Bias3.8%This article: 0.0%The Register: 0.1%Politically Right Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 3.6%The Register: 2.5%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…3.6%

556 words analyzed.

Speakers

3speakers24%attributed speech425writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Writer's voice • 7 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 5 words • 100.0% coverageLinus Torvalds • 26 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 20 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 29 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 18 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 16 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 11 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 15 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 20 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 12 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 34 words • 0.0% coverageLinus Torvalds • 32 words • 100.0% coverageLinus Torvalds • 24 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 10 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 11 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 19 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 21 words • 100.0% coveragedminik • 28 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 11 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 18 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 24 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 35 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 8 words • 100.0% coverageReg FOSS desk • 21 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 29 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 39 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 1 words • 0.0% coverage
Selected voice

Reg FOSS desk

100%flagged-word coverage
21 attributed words16% of attributed speech89% writer coverage
0%50.0%100.0%Politically Left Leaning B+100.0 ptsWriter: 0.0%Reg FOSS desk: 100.0%100.0%Indoctrination+96.7 ptsWriter: 3.3%Reg FOSS desk: 100.0%100.0%Biased Writer Voice-51.1 ptsWriter: 51.1%Reg FOSS desk: 0.0%0.0%Unattributed Quote-28.0 ptsWriter: 28.0%Reg FOSS desk: 0.0%0.0%Attempt to Sell a Product -4.7 ptsWriter: 4.7%Reg FOSS desk: 0.0%0.0%Quote-first Misdirection-1.6 ptsWriter: 1.6%Reg FOSS desk: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.