I interpreted nimskull as self deprecating, IE calling themselves numbskulls.

That is a correct interpretation, we decided some humor won't hurt at the start, and it certainly wasn't as venomous (aka "death to nim") as parent comments suggested

It "wasn't as venomous" .. implies there was some venom, and that you are not being truthful in the first half of your comment, because you actually meant to call Araq a numbskull.

Nim was originally “Nimrod.” It’s probably a play on that.

the legendary hunter in the bible?

More likely Elmer Fudd in more people's imagination

Funny how that worked. Bugs called him Nimrod, a great hunter, sarcastically. Everyone today uses it to mean stupid/inept in any situation.

Akin to one day, Einstein being known mostly as meaning 'idiot' rather than a physicist.

Bugs Bunny is the source of a lot of weird misconceptions.

Example: people think rabbits mostly eat carrots because Bugs Bunny likes to snack on them while leaning on something and saying "What's up, Doc?". Except Bugs doing that was a reference to a movie where Clark Gable... ate carrots while leaning on a fence and calling people Doc.

And somehow a parody of a Clark Gable movie turned into most people believing that carrots are a staple of leporine diets.

> people think rabbits mostly eat carrots because Bugs Bunny likes to snack on them

If that is the case, why is the misconception also widespread in countries where Bugs Bunny wasn't part of the popular culture? E.g. USSR/Russia.

Rabbits do actually love carrots.

I believe it’s more of American thing to put the opposite meaning into a word.

Universal human trait.

Look up the history of the word "nice" in England, sometime. But no, it is not just an English-speaking phenomenon, either.

Right, irony and sarcasm are universal (afaik). But I had in mind that americans tend to use e.g. “so bad” in a sense of “so good”, which is not so ubiquitous. (I’m only familiar with English, Russian, Deutsch and Tatar really, so my thought is limited to these four.)

One summer when I was at Bloomberg, there was an announcement that some interns had been assigned to implement an internet sarcasm detector, and that they had been completely successful. No one questioned it.

BTW when I told my wife about this, she thought I meant they had been completely successful.

I assume it's from "Numbskull".

To me it seems like the people who created the fork may literally not have any known means of judging engineering merit aside from how detailed commit messages are.

If it's a large group then detailed commit messages are critical. If it's likely that between 0-1 people are actually going to read the message in the next month and there are a long list of other plans you have to implement with between 0 and 1 people actually helping you, then the value of more detail in commit messages moves toward the limit of 0.

It is apparently a temporary name, but yes that's what it read like to me.