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Comment by Slothrop99

6 days ago

Just to be clear, I mean to venerate Bernstein for earning his 3letters, not to trivialize him.

Despite the cool shit the guy has done, keep in mind that "venerate" is not the word to use here. djb is very much not a shorthand used in any positive messaging pretty much ever by any cryptographer. He did it to himself, sadly.

Not to trivialise but being a 3 letter guy means being old. So, it's at best a celebration of achieving longevity and at worst a celebration of creaky joints and a short temper.

  • Most of us will have a problematic joint or two by a certain age. Almost none of us will be recognised by any name by that time.

    • Mate, we're not talking about the future, but about 3 letter guys now. I'm one, I've carried it with me for 40+ years as have the ten or twenty peers of mine I know by their tla. I got it at pobox.com when the door opened, the guy at the desk next door got a one letter name. I set up campus email for the entire uni in 1989 and gave myself the tla with my superuser rights before that. I'd done the same at ucl-cs in 85, and before that in Leeds and York.

      My point here is we're not famous we're just old enough to have a tla from the time before HR demanded everyone get given.surname.

      Every Unix system used to ship with a dmr account. It doesn't mean we all knew Dennis Ritchie, it means the account was in the release tape.

      There are 17,000 odd of us. Ekr, Kre and Djb are famous but the other 17,573 of us exist.

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