Maybe he composed the message using a machine with non-ECC RAM and suffered a bit flip, which through some chain of events, led to the ' being added. Best to give him the benefit of doubt, I think!

The mistake was that it was included.

Oops, that was dumb. Fixed, thanks.

How is your Finnish?

Or Swedish for that matter, as I believe Torvalds maternal language is Swedish

Finnish is stupendously hard. Far harder than Swedish, at least, by my estimation.

Yes. Swedish is also easy compared to English and French, the other two languages I've learned after early childhood. The only thing that makes it hard is that you never really have use for it and you're forced to learn it nevertheless here in Finland.

I'm happy to see people here on HN respect the difficulty of learning languages. Most foreigners that speak Finnish do it very poorly at first and even after decades they still sound like foreigners. But it shows huge respect to our small country for someone to make the effort, and we really appreciate it. I'm hoping other people see learning their own mother tongue the same way. Sure, most of us need English, but learning it well is still a huge task.

It is. Swedish and English are both Germanic languages, so there are a lot of commonalities. Finnish is in a completely different language family. English and Swedish are more closely related to Persian and Hindi than to Finnish.

Yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rL-0LAy04E

Linus must have English as his '1st' language now. For non-originally-native speaker mistakes like 'it's vs its', 'than vs then', etc. are pretty uncommon.

I've spent my whole life speaking multiple languages and this still trips me up every now and then, in fact quotes as such are a problem for me and I keep using them wrong, no idea why, it just won't register. So unless I slow down to 1/10th of my normal writing speed I will definitely make mistakes like that. Good we have proofreaders :)

(guessing you mean apostrophes)

It's because they have two different uses (three if you count nested quotes, but those aren't common and are pretty easy to figure out), contractions and possession, and they seemingly collide on words like "its" where you'd think it could mean either.

Not sure if you've already learned this (or if it helps), but English used to be declined, and its pronouns still are, e.g. they/their/them. That's why "its" isn't contracted; the possessive marker is already in the word.

His, hers, its

I guess this is what happens when someone first learns to speak the language, learning how to write in it only later on - as it often is the case with children.

I spent my preschool years in a multicultural environment and English was our lingua franca(ironically the school-mandated language was French), so I didn't properly learn contractions until grade school - same with similarly sounding words like "than vs then" and "your vs you're".

It could use some Polish.

Dobrze ;)

I have a simple way of remembering when to leave out the apostrophe. His, hers, its are all possessive and none of them have an apostrophe.

In this particular case 'it's' can also be possessive although it's considered non-standard, so to be correct you can always treat it like a contraction of 'it is'.

That would be contracting "its is"?

The ambiguity makes it hard for me to say. "It's the best" vs "its is the best"

It doesn't feel right dropping the is

He uses "do do" instead of "to do" which is a more obvious typo. Linus usually comes across as borderline arrogant, and deservedly so, but not necessarily perfect in his writing. I think it's an effective strategy to communicate his priorities and wrangle smart but easily intimidated folk "do do" what he believes is right!

Yeah I'm always annoyed with this kind of mistake. Especially as non-native speakers should know better than the native ones (which usually don't give a f.).

Now the point about internally doing ECC is an interesting one, could be a way out of this mess. And apparently ECC is more available in AMD land

For a 2nd language speaker making these homophonic mistakes is actually a sign of fluency. It means that you just transcribe a mental flow of words instead of consciously constructing the language.

The first time I wrote "your" instead of "you're" in English I thought it was quite a milestone!

Yes. I noticed this. When I was younger, I thought how can you mix up 'their, they're, there' people you do this must be the opposite of smart. This lasted for 4 years living in an English speaking country....

As an “english as a second language” user, I can’t see myself writing e.g. “should of” instead of “should have”, however fluent I am. I think you don’t make that kind of typo unless you have learnt english before grammar.

I also wouldn't do this one, but that's because in my English accent I simply wouldn't pronounce them the same way. Also the word sequence "should of" is extremely uncommon in proper English, so it catches the eye more easily I think.

"You're/your", "their/they're", "its/it's" and the like are a different story, because I do pronounce those the same and they're all very common.

I was quite surprised when it started happening to me.

Wow that’s interesting!

> For a 2nd language speaker making these homophonic mistakes is actually a sign of fluency.

I kinda disagree because while the homophony works in (spoken) English in written it stands as a sore thumb. So yeah you will make it if you only heard it but doesn't know the written form.

(And in their native language it's probably two unrelated words, so that might intensify the feeling of wrongness)

I mean, my native language is French where "your" is "ton" and "you're" is "tu es", yet it (rarely) happens that I mix them up in English. If I proofread I'll spot it almost every single time, but if I'm just typing my "stream of consciousness" my brain's speech-to-text module sometimes messes up.

meh, plenty of (intelligent!) native english speakers do not know all the canonical grammar rules. english contains a lot of what could be considered error correction bits, so it doesn't usually impede understanding. syntactically perfect english with weird/misused idioms (common among non-native speakers with lots of formal education) is harder to understand in my experience. I imagine this is true of most natural languages.

For what its worth as a non-native speaker I too started making this kind of errors when my English became fluent enough.

The really annoying thing is that auto correct on mobile device keyboards will often want to incorrectly change "its" to "it's" or vice versa.

Yes, auto-corrects compound the problem.

>> But is ECC more available in AMD land?

Yes it is. The problem is they dont really advertise it. I'm not certain but it might even be standard on AMD chips, but if they dont say so and board makers are also unclear, who knows...

It's a market size problem.

For consumer motherboard OEMs, only AMD effectively has ECC support (Intel's has been so spotty and haphazard from product to product), and of AMD users, only a small number care about ECC.

So motherboard companies, being resource and time-starved as they are, don't make it a priority to address such a small user-base.

If Intel started shipping ECC on everything, it would go a long way towards shifting the market.

I think it's available for customer SKUs on AMD and not just for servers like in 'Xeon-land'... How I've wanted an ECC-ready NUC...

The AMD parts all have the ECC feature but the platform support outside of EPYC may as well not exist. Most motherboards for the Ryzen segment don’t do it properly or don’t do it at all, some support it but aren’t capable of reporting events to the operating system which is dumb. Ryzen laptops don’t have it either.

Closest you can come to a nuc with ecc is I think a mini server equipped with one of the four-core i3 parts that have ecc.

Ah thanks for the real-world check on AMD Ryzen and ECC. Sad state of affairs really, when so many things are integrated in the SOC, why skimp on this...

As for NUCs, I thought there were some Atom chips with ECC but not in NUC form factor ? Something shiny from Logic Supply might do then...

Probably not what you meant but https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190108/... has support for Xeon (and ECC). Now how to actually practically source 32GB ECC enabled SO-DIMM sticks ..

Oh thanks! TIL. Then I just saw the price tag, ouch.

I've realized that when I'm engaged in the writing (angry or emotional in some way) I tend to commit more of these mistakes, even though I know the difference between "it's" and "its". Linus is always angry, so that probably makes him commit more orthographic mistakes.

As a non native speaker, my phone has both the Italian and English dictionary, when I write its it always auto corrects to it's as soon as I hit space and sometimes it gets unnoticed.