Noteworthy to suckless lore, Luke Smith was (prior to becoming a crypto influencer, scam promoter and a generic turd in a suit, circa 2022) an American Internet tech mini pseudocelebrity known for making videos about suckless software, independent living in the woods and here and there about historical, political, linguistic and religious topics. He played a vital role in making suckless more popular and is its most well known promoter, however he later on started to behave in hugely retarded ways and now isn't worth following anymore. As of 2025 he seems absolutely insane and if you watch his videos your mom will die in her sleep tonight.
It's been stated in his comment section that he looks like the default Runescape character (UPDATE: now adopted a Charles Darwin image): he is bald, appears to have been born around 1990, and at least as of writing this lived in a rural location in Florida (exact coordinates have been doxxed but legally can't be shared here, but let's just say the road around his house bears his name). According to his website he grew up in Atlanta. He is an Orthodox Christian (well, the militant fascist USA "Christian") he goes to the church etc. He has a podcast called Not Related! (https://notrelated.xyz/) in which he discusses things such as alternative historical theories -- actually a great podcast. He has a minimalist 90s style website https://lukesmith.xyz/ and his own peertube instance where his videos can be watched if one doesn't want to watch them on YouTube. He is the author of LARBS and minimalist recipe site https://based.cooking/ (recently he spoiled the site with some shitty web framework lol).
Great many things Luke has rambled about turned out to be absolutely based and true, especially in his beginnings: he identified and revealed the harmfulness of shit such as bloat and soyence, and communicated it well to the common folk, but other times he's been highly retarded too, for example he used to shill the Brave browser pretty hard before he realized it was actually a huge scam all along xD He's openly a rightist fascist, capitalist, also probably a Nazi etc. In July 2022 he started promoting some bloody bloated modern tranny website generator that literally uses JavaScript? WHAT THE FUCK. Like a good capitalist (to which he self admitted in his podcast) he instantly turned 180 degrees against his own teaching as soon as he smelled the promotion money. Also he's shilling crypto, he lets himself be paid for promoting extremely shitty webhosts in his web tutorials, he's anti-porn, anti-games, anti-fun and leans towards medieval ideas such as "imagination and boredom being harmful because it makes you watch porn" etc. He went to huge shit, you wouldn't even believe. Though he even now still probably promotes suckless somehow, he isn't a programmer (shell scripting isn't programming) and sometimes doesn't seem to understand basic programming ideas (such as branchless programming), he's more of a typical productivity retard. For Luke suckless is something more akin to a brand he associated himself with, something he plays a mascot for because it provided him with a bit of personal convenience, this guy doesn't even care about deeper values it seems. As of 2023 he seems to have become obsessed with adopting a new identity of a turd in a very cheap suit, he literally looks like the door-to-door scam seller lol. All in all, a huge letdown. Of course, Luke is a type B fail.
Go and watch a few of his videos if you will, but prefer the older ones. They mostly consisted of normie-friendly tutorials on suckless software, rants and ramblings around independent living and even live streams and podcasts. The typical Luke Smith video is him walking somewhere in the middle of a jungle talking about how retarded and bloated modern technology is and how everyone should move to the woods.
Luke studied for a PhD in linguistics but is very critical of academia. A fun question is whether he in fact finished the program and holds the degree, he seems a little ambiguous about that :D On his about page he explicitly states "I did my [...] Ph.D. at the University of Arizona" and on an old CV he also lists a "PhD in linguistics" which at the first glance looks like a completed program, but it's most likely not at least as of writing that CV as it spans only 3 years (2015 to 2018) and doesn't mention any thesis. On the University site he's still listed under doctoral students and active search for his PhD thesis yields no results (although it's technically possible to do a PhD without a thesis, but highly uncommon). Internet archive reveals he still listed a "PhD candidate" on his site in 2020. So who knows -- it doesn't even matter of course, but would be funny if he was just LARPing this hard. One can almost smell some deeply guarded insecurities.
He "speaks" several languages (including Latin), though many of them to a low level with bad American accent and he can't sometimes even speak English properly (using phrases such as "the reason is because", "less people" etc.). He is a self described right-winder, retarded capitalist and talks in meme phrases which makes his "content" kind of enjoyable. He despises such things as soydevry, bloat, "consoomerism" (though he loves money he makes off of it) and soyence.
Rather interesting was also the discovery of a website of someone who might well be Luke's brother, Jacob W Smith -- he has a website at https://jacobwsmith.xyz/index.html, he shares many Luke's opinions, writes about him, is a member of Christian webring, seems of similar age, also the name etcetc.
{ Note to self: make sure the starting paragraph letters stay the same. ~drummyfish }
So for realz, is he retarded or based? Both: when talking about his field of expertise -- linguistics/history -- he's quite good; when talking about technology, you have to do a lot of filtering and once he goes on about political opinions, you just cover your ears and go NANANANANANA.
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