Well, you can run it and it does things, which effectively puts the question of "real" or "satire" into our hands. At this point, it is what we make of it.

You can use an onion article as a force to motivate activism, unleashing a very real effect upon the world. But it remains satire.

Your post is more about real vs. not real, while I think the question was supposed to be satire vs. not satire.

The parent post from jff was explicitly framed as "real vs satire" and not as "satire vs not satire".

It used the word "real", but I'm pretty sure it was a synonym for "not satire", not the more philosophical meaning that callahad took. It's very common to use the word "real" that way, for something that isn't just extant to demonstrate an idea.

That was gloriously poetic.

I've said this before but one of the very cool things about programming is that it can easily be both.

I get the feeling that they are going to work on it come hell or high water until it lives up to their intentions. So while it might read like satire today, it probably won't in the future. But yeah, I don't have a non-costly use for it today despite reading the docs...

That's how I feel about Unix, too.