Tom Lord has died
berkeleydailyplanet.com
berkeleydailyplanet.com
He wrote very clear comments on lambda-the-ultimate and did great things with Guile. If anyone has references to work he published please leave a pointer to them.
Brutal reminder to contact people sooner rather than later.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1])
Hopefully we’ll fix it one day.
Read this, from someone who's thought about it a bit more deeply than Mr Yudkowsky.
Death is inevitable maybe, but whether it's necessary is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.
As for the necessity of death... Plenty of sibling and nephew/niece comments say it's essentially unavoidable and necessary, others say some set of human beings could do something brilliant that would pull us out of it one day. I'd actually say both perspectives capture something important. The pragmatic knowledge of our unavoidable expiration is worth living with, and the hope to overturn death and despair is worth living for.
One metaphor for how this life feels might be that we find ourselves in a testing chamber, being asked questions about the test we're writing, for which we could not study. The good news is, it's an open book test, and we've got many years to write our answers! ...But, then the textbooks contradict each other almost as often as they agree on some important point. Every once in a while it seems as if an invigilator calls someone off, and invites another person into their seat. Also, occasionally, fistfights break out over which textbook you ought to be reading from.
User tomlord seems to exist but no comments.
It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control
Not particularly popular though; that probably had something to do with Tom's dogmatism.
He was an interesting and entertaining writer though! I had various interactions with him on irc #arch and related mailing lists.
https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...
* a c library called hackerlab
* a Scheme implementation called Pika Scheme
* a regular expression library called rx (may have been renamed to rgx)
* an embeddable VM called Furth
* a graph reduction engine/functional language runtime of some sort
hackerlab is also part of tla distributions (since the latter uses the former extensively)
hackerlab contains (some version of) rx.
I remember him pitching me on Guile in a hot tub at a conference in the early 90s.
Edit: You captured the idea, I am able to determine what will be my next steps in life, but once my life has ended it will be written in stone. So what's time, what is the future and what is the past? I do not care if it's some quantum many-worlds interpretation, or a spacetime slice of bread that moves with the arrow of time! In this way I am already dead, and I am still newborn.
This question motivates a different follow-up question: how should we pay attention? Our senses can be deceived, so we should also use reason and conceptual understandings to literally enrich (de-noise perhaps) our raw senses?
But some philosophies (e.g. Buddhism, or at least some variants of it) emphasizes that ‘conceptual’ understandings can distract us from reality, which is always changing.
Almost every philosophy has paradoxes — some of which have convincing resolutions. I’m hoping to hear more points of view…
I mean it's obviously sensible. In the context of binary information in a computer, for instance, we (generally) don't care about exact voltages, we group it all together as 0 or 1. And talking about genetic information, we don't (usually) care about, say, if a slightly unusual isotope has snuck in in one of the usual nucleic acids, since that "information" isn't copied in the usual way.
It's very obvious, but it's also more profound than it looks. Even for something as seemingly purely mathematical as information, there's actually teleology, assumptions about what matters, baked in every time we apply it.
Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels,[1] and opposing changes that would help move things in the right direction climate-wise, such as building more in-fill housing in Berkeley, because some other action (say, convincing people to massively reduce their energy usage) was an even better strategy in his eyes. Tom was not convinced for example that Berkeley needed any more housing.
The source of this post is a good clue; Berkeley Daily Planet mostly publishes posts from NIMBY's who don't care about the climate and don't want anything that could possibly increase the number of people who live in Berkeley (Zelda Bronstein and Toni Mester are good examples).
Having interacted with Tom on Twitter, and reading through the comments here, I'm surprised to learn that he was a valued member of an open source community and published software that people used at one point.
[1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior
That is not a source. That is a personal opinion reported. Politics. Bullshit. Together forever
Leaving it unspecified so you can't reliably is the issue that does not exist here.
I get that some grievances don’t need to wait (Limbaugh) but it’s a high bar.
a) Don't recall someone's blemishes while their family is grieving because that would be and is (if they see/hear it) unpleasant for them at a difficult time. Especially if the passing was unusually more tragic than "died while still mentally sharp and enjoying things of extreme old age in bed surrounded by loving children and grandchildren." May we all be so lucky.
b) Don't paper over their blemishes, remember them fully and as humans. This is especially relevant for public figures where people try to use (a) to advance some political outcome. Eg X is dead so can't be criticised but was wildly in favour of increasing the military budget which we must now redouble efforts to do with no disparagement. This is obviously only a little hyperbolic.
I note that (b) can also be used. Eg X was a massive jerk so don't let X's death get added publicity for views about resource allocation that are to be opposed. Whether X really was a jerk or not.
I have sympathy for both (a) and (b). Will Tom's family see things here? Is Tom Lord a public figure? OP seems to think so. Are they indulging in a little (b)? I have no idea. I have minimal interest in Berkeley politics.
What I will note is that I've just spent half an hour reading Tom's old posts from 2012 her on HN and he reads very well. He seems knowledgeable, kind, humane, subtle, intelligent and has very interesting things to say. Agree or not he's worth reading. An ideal HN poster from those I read. From what I have seen I would certainly listen to his views on Berkeley politics if I cared about it in any way.
The reason it makes sense to discuss this aspect of his life is the article isn’t in some neutral news outlet, it is in the mouthpiece of the population-controlling degrowth philosophy that Lord advocated. He sincerely believed that building housing in Berkeley encourages population growth and that not building it could control the population. In this way he was a kind of useful idiot for the real estate investors who control the city.
>In this way he was a kind of useful idiot for the real estate investors who control the city.
This comment doesn't seem like it lives up to the quality of Tom's HN comments. I would object equally if you were described as a "useful idiot" to those who seek to benefit from property development or own land capable of being developed . Noting that I don't care if either or both of you are "wrong", as I don't care at all about Berkeley politics and planning.
If I did I would listen to Tom and his reasoning as I read his HN comments. That is with interest, more so that he has a very different point of view to mine. With that view well thought out and well expressed seemingly motivated by more than pure self-interest.
The same might well be true of yourself but that isn't obvious to me yet.
He did wait. Tom Lord died about a month ago.
If there is any city that should be scaling aggressively instead of “gracefully” it’s Berkeley.
Coddling the egos of these "authorities" should be low priority considering the dire nature of the situation. If they drive us off a cliff because the constituents weren't "nice", it's still their fault.
He was also removed from occasionally appearing on Berkeley Zoning and Advisory Board because he couldn't get along with the elected official for his district.
But he had a lot of skill to back it up with, too. I remember when QuickCheck first appeared, someone used it to test the correctness of various regexp libraries, and Tom Lord's was one of the very few which passed.
He wasn't without controversy, even at a time when the free software culture was even less interested than today in being nice when you could be right[tm] instead.
But let's leave it at that here.