Vim 9 will be dedicated to Sven Guckes
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> Our friend Sven Guckes died in Berlin on February 20, 2022.
> He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in December 2021.
This is something I have seen more frequently with older people: they just suck it up either because they don't want to be a burden on others or because they have seen a lot of hardship in their lives and on that scale some pain signals don't register high enough to make a fuss about.
If there is a lesson: keep an eye on older people and be sensitive to the stuff they tend to shrug off.
I imagine it depends on which cells are impacted. Glial cells not giving much option.
This reads like a horror story but that's the crudeness of life and death for us. Only thing to do is medical checkups from time to time and try to live a plenty life because you may not be there after the next corner.
We've investigated the feasibility of regular cancer screening for this, and the problems compound; turns out when we do regular imaging of the human body, we find out various odd morphologies are developing and dissolving all the time, and only a handful of them will ever become something the body's own immune system doesn't get on top of before it becomes an endemic problem. So "Why don't we just do regular pancreatic cancer screenings?" turns out to be harder than we want it to be, even if we could discount the cost factor.
I've already seen an optometrist and he thinks its just worsening blepharitis which I've had in both eyes for over 5 years.
Seriously, it's bananas how much silly stuff can mess with your eyes. You can have bad-quality tears! You have, for instance, an array of little glands that secrete an oil that needs to be in your tears for them to work right. And they malfunction all the time! (That was my diagnosis but wasn't ultimately what the real problem was, which was much dumber).
Go see a doctor but also don't freak out about it. You're not going to die next week.
I'm sorry for your losses.
Some pathologically agressive individuals who had had a long history of antisocial and criminal behaviour were later found to be genetically determined by a kind of neurotransmitter mutation(s).
Having Vim 9 dedicated to his memory is wonderful. Thank you, Sven
A life interrupted
It’s okay to express your opinion about the person being discussed and add more information to it in general.
If VIM is being dedicated to an alleged sexual harasser, I as an interested person is happy to know about this.
I see that a lot of the appreciation posts are also purely anecdotal. So are we contesting whose word has more value here or what anecdotal experience is valid/invalid or appropriate to share?
But he was also known as "sexual predator" who harassed young, underaged girls, see https://twitter.com/twena/status/1495537875651371012
I don't know if it is appropriate to make a dedication to someone like this.
How is it possible that you catalog a person as a "sexual predator" without any proof?
Sure, the quotes, how could I have been so oblivious... Then, what do you mean with "someone like this"? Why would it be inappropriate to make a dedication?
I'm not saying you're wrong about him, I have no idea. But you're clearly amplifying and spreading the accusation. You have some responsibility to find out if it's true before doing so. Now that said, I don't want to let everyone else on here off the hook by blaming you. They also have a responsibility to take your statement with a grain of salt too. But we can only control our own behavior.
I'm not taking a position on whether we have free will or not. In fact I'm somewhat convinced that we don't ;-)
I don't think we should be honoring him, though, because he was, despite being my friend, not a very good person:
https://twitter.com/deborianerin/status/1495636848722513920
https://twitter.com/deborianerin/status/1495645190832463872
https://twitter.com/twena/status/1495537875651371012
https://twitter.com/deborianerin/status/1495673397296218113
These tweets were posted today, but those of us that knew him well have known of these issues for years.
I have as a point of pride many "problematic" friends; my friendship with someone is not approval of every (or even any) action they undertake in life.
I do not approve of this dedication, as Sven was a good example of the kind of people who make the f/oss community worse, not better. We as a community can do much better than explicitly endorsing those who would cause our scene to be unsafe and unwelcoming to young women.
Or is that, like, too subtle and nuanced a concept nowadays.
Or rather, is it actually too nuanced to think the ends don’t justify the means?
If we had to stop and think about death, we would have to consider our own mortality. If we had to stop and think about the poor life choices of a dead person, we would have to stop and think about our own poor life choices. We might have to consider whether we owe some kind of penance; whether our own misdeeds outweigh our good; whether someone might dig up our own past when we pass. And that's terrifying.
So obits must only say good things about the dead. We mustn't consider the true nature of a life filled with bad and good and in-between. We must instead shroud ourselves in the comforting blanket of pure nostalgia. This way we don't have to face pain, or truth, or conflict, and we can just feel a benign sad pleasure, to more easily slip back into comforting ignorance.
As an aside: Twitter is a hellscape of negativity. It could be that he also saved drowning toddlers from a river or some shit, but that isn't going to make it through the typical barrage of snide tweets. So just as much as we should consider the negative, we should consider that there's also positive. The fact that all humans are fundamentally flawed does not invalidate their good deeds, nor validate the bad. And if we try really hard, we might conclude that there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" person, but just "a person", the culmination of which cannot be put neatly into a box. Maybe then we could stop reacting so strongly to discovering that humans are indeed flawed, and that there is no shame in considering all of one's deeds, for that's where the truth of life lies.
Some will think this is the same as "making it OK to be a harasser if you are l33t/important/rich/etc" but it's really not.
VIM is a community project that he dedicated significant time and effort to at his own expense. It's just like a rich donor to some hospital and getting a wing named after them, it doesn't erase their sins but it acknowledges the good that person has done in that act.
A person is more than their faults and trying to take everything good away from their memory after their death because of those faults doesn't sit right with me.
I'm very much with you that just because someone has died doesn't mean we should whitewash their flaws and pretend they don't exist, but you've really caused me to face the full force of that opinion today :-)
Telling the truth is always appropriate.
TFA claims that "He was a good person." I do not believe that to be accurate.
It's possible to be someone's friend, acknowledge their wrongs and not draw attention to those wrongs in their obituary. It's one of those things that have historically been agreed upon as the proper way, in dutch we've formalized it in a proverb "Over de doden niets dan goeds.". "Nothing but good about the dead.". Simply because it is bad form to shit all over someone who isn't there to defend themselves (especially when you call them a friend) and because you never know who is going to read your writings, they might already be having a very hard day. I realize that this is too much to ask for some, but his friends should know better.
the truth is that Sven was a prolific foss contributor with a complicated history with regards to other people.
you can acknowledge both contributions & faults, erasing his history of foss contributions wouldn't be the truth -- much like labeling him as nothing more than a predator wouldn't be the truth, either.
I'm not sure what you're advocating in this memoriam thread, to be honest -- total erasure of person and non-response from the projects they were involved with?
Isn't that a similar kind of non-whole truth that you're railing against all together?
It's a compromise, attention for the suffering of the victims, no consequences for the perpetrator.
Having known him, I can certainly imagine him hurting for companionship and being awkward about it. Surprise, Sven was an imperfect human, just like everybody else.
Personally though I've NEVER observed him behaving in this way and being on the watch for such things, I would surely have talked to him about it.
Despite the problems he had to deal with (or choose to ignore ;->) (not talking about the stuff above), he dedicated his life to improve things around him the best way he could see fit.
If you had a problem with Sven and were happy enough to not speak up when he was alive, why raise this issue only now that he is dead? We are honouring Sven's contributions so others are inspired to be similarly helpful. It truth this is somewhat independent of Sven as a whole. But by dragging the person he was through the mud, you are not helping anybody or achieving anything for society.
He only harassed me inappropriately, via text and a few times physically, many years ago in #CCCB Glad that won't happen again.
Reply:
Sven Guckes was one of the great evangelists of the German open source scene. During his lifetime, there were good reasons why people wanted to dislike, shun or sometimes kick him out, but he really didn't deserve such a reaction to the obituary tweet. Take care, Sven.
Her reply:
but I deserved to be harassed as a woman, by a +20 years older guy in whom I NEVER showed interest...? To just sit on my legs at the movie Sunday, to force cuddling, although I had ignored [his] advances for months - BÄH how disgusting.
You are a wonderful friend.