Ken Thompson
American programmer and computer scientist, co-creator of the Unix operating system (born 1943)
The numbers
2 + 3 = 5
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 6, 7, 8. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 5 — The Free Spirit
Five sits at the centre of the Lo Shu grid and at the middle of 1–9, and the tradition makes much of that: it is the number of movement, appetite and change. Practitioners associate it with travel, reinvention and an unusually high tolerance for uncertainty. The reading is equally direct about the cost — 5 is described as leaving at the point where things get repetitive, which is often the point just before they would have paid off.
Complete lines
Line of Expression
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Resolve
The 1-5-9 diagonal complete. Read as determination that survives the middle of a project, when the initial energy has gone and the result is not yet visible.
Cooperation
A complete line in the grid.
What is missing
Missing 6
Read as a complicated relationship with obligation — either avoiding it or over-shouldering it, rarely a settled middle.
Missing 7
Read as reluctance to sit with an unresolved question. Associated with wanting the working answer rather than the true one.
Missing 8
Read as discomfort with power and money — not incapacity, but an unwillingness to claim authority openly.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 4 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 5 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Rahu
The ascending lunar node — a shadow graha, not a physical body. Disruption, ambition, the unconventional. Read with more caution than any other.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e.
When in doubt, use brute force.
Unix was built for me. I didn't build it as an operating system for other people, I built it to do games, and to do my stuff. I was always into games, games was my thing. I used to play pinball machines, and I would pick the lock in the back of pinball machines. Then I'd study the diagrams that I had. That's where I learned a lot of this kind of logic.
We have persistent objects, they're called files.
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