Thoughts on Mark “diveintomark” Pilgrim's and _why's infosuicides (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Mark “diveintomark” Pilgrim's and _why's infosuicides (2011)

hanselman.com

55 pointsCharlesW22 comments

Less well known might be the retraction of ~tuomov personal blog many years ago.

He is the original author of the ion window manager[1] and had what, in my opinion, were very strong and thought provoking opinions and attitudes on software development, interfaces ... and even mice and keyboards.

I was very sorry that he stopped his public writing and even more sorry that he took down the blog and all of his previous posts[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager)

[2] sort-of-archive: https://tuomov.bitcheese.net/

Ah good memories! I was a big fan of Ion window managers when I discovered them in school back around 99 or 2000. I gave up tabbed tiling window managers at some point, but I was so happy with Ion back.

His experiences on receiving bug reports from patched versions of Ion distributed by debian(?) was my first real exposure to the idea that distributions aren't just distributing software.

For me it was ja-dark[0], who had a lot of interesting ideas when it came to learning with Anki. There is a backup of their blog, but it's just not the same.

[0] https://btmbtm.github.io/jadarkbackup/

For me it was Taco the Wonder Dog, who pseudonymously published what I can only describe as "noise art Flash videos" in the early aughts. They were simultaneously intellectual and total nonsense and I loved every minute of every one of them; they kept me going through college. One day around 2010ish they disappeared entirely from the Internet, I couldn't even find them on archival sites.

Checking now -- I'm glad to see there've been efforts to collect Taco's work on YouTube -- You Are a Chef [1] is one of the most well known and accessible (which spawned a text adventure of the same name); Dorito Song [2] is one of my favorites.

Here [3] I found a compilation, which unfortunately and sadly states that the artist behind Taco, one Morgan Vogel, died by suicide a few years ago. RIP Morgan, Taco will forever hold a place in my psyche.

[1] https://youtu.be/4MmFqhMdx28

[2] https://youtu.be/BGtpPQUMXfQ

[3] https://youtu.be/eXplGG8O0a8

Some HN posts at the time on Mark's disappearance.

Ask HN: Anyone know where Mark Pilgrim went? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073798

Searching for Mark Pilgrim https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073842

IMHO Deleting everything invites drama. If you don't want it just post a one line "I'm on a break from Internet" message

Who are we to deny these people a moment of catharsis, people who gave us so much of themselves and who owe us nothing, as they perform an act as powerful as leaving forever?

No-one is denying anyone anything.

Why? People don’t owe people anything with the content they publish for free. I regularly wipe social media or blogs and change aliases because I feel like that part of my life is over and/or I just feel like a fresh start.

If they didn’t feel like having an online identity anymore then they’ve got every right to delete[0] themselves.

I think the whole “expectation” that free content is persistent forever and someone is supposed to keep it reliably hosted and/or keep pumping stuff out is another fucked up byproduct of the modern internet, so much expectations from people who aren’t contributing anything financially or materially. It’s why YouTubers have mental breakdowns, bloggers snap and wipe their blogs, open source contributors close their projects, etc etc. Having a public identity has massive pressures.

[0] Effectiveness of that based on archives/crawlers/etc is a whole other discussion.

> It’s why YouTubers have mental breakdowns, bloggers snap and wipe their blogs

Which was why people called the police. They thought he was potentially going to kill himself. Because this is the sort of thing people do before committing suicide.

Also this stuff was all in his own name and built up over years. Not a short-term alias he'd used for a few months.

> Why? People don’t owe people anything with the content they publish for free.

I don't understand the question. Do you think curiosity is based on entitlement?

Indeed. Some friendly advice is hardly a demand. Especially as it probably won't be read by the person anyway.

The internet is a strange place, where ceasing to care about being online occupies a performative space similar to caring about being online. The fact that instances such as Pilgrim's and _why's are referred to as a form of "death" itself is telling. Why even strike such a grave association to begin with?

The idea that these occasions violate some unwritten moral/social contract of the Web is strange to me also. I understand the inconvenience (which is proving to be short-lived with regard to the mirrors that appear afterward), but I greater empathize with the act of revolting against a medium that abstracts the social sciences beyond what humans were prepared for prior to its inception.

I see this point often - and similar ones about entitlement - but my reaction at the time to both Mark and _why was one of concern: they were people whose work I absolutely appreciated, and who I therefore appreciated as people. When they vanished abruptly I was concerned for them on a personal level, and naturally I wanted to find out if they were OK.

The unfortunate consequence is that concerned checking in doesn't scale well, and is indistinguishable from mob action to the person being checked in on. (Which is how it played out, if I remember right). So even though the person certainly doesn't owe anyone an explanation, it can be in their own best interests to provide enough of one to curtail concern.

I understand and I agree with you for the most part. Most of what we're discussing exists in a grey area to me, one that can only be clarified if we differed to real-world norms at the expense of forfeiting some of our natural inclinations in a digital space. As much as it may be in a person's best interest to provide an explanation for their exit and expunge from an online community, I'd offer a similar argument, that it would be in the best interest for certain people to differ the responsibility of checking in on the person's well-being to those who are known to have an actual relationship with them (i.e. one that isn't predicated by the environment that the person is tearing themselves away from in drama-inducing fashion). I think that this where scale becomes an issue, like you said.

It's a shame you've been downvoted because I think you make great points.

>The fact that instances such as Pilgrim's and _why's are referred to as a form of "death" itself is telling. Why even strike such a grave association to begin with?

It's a pretty silly metaphor, in my opinion. Quitting my casual basketball team.. sportsuicide? It makes it difficult to take seriously any views that follow such excessive exaggeration.

This could invite a pretty philosophical angle re. whether one is obliged to contribute to humanity, but I just tend to think you're totally entitled to pack up and leave at any point. If anyone found your material useful, it was a privilege. IMHO it seems somewhat entitled to complain that no mirror/archive was provided.

I can well understand telling computers and their users to go fuck themselves. A bit of funemployment over the covid period helped that attitude.

What didn't help _why or mark pilgrim was the seemingly universal praise. Their work was too quirky to be very popular. e.g. Dive Into Python's choice of roman numeral conversion as an exercise. Also Mark must've felt like a fish out of water at IBM.

>Also Mark must've felt like a fish out of water at IBM.

Huh?

Dissapearenace aside, he is (or was) a programmer, writer and blogger, with quite regular opinions, not some quirky magical writer of whimsy.

I can understand _why_'s fox-ladden guide to Ruby to be considered "quirky" but there's nothing quirky about Dive Into Python, I can't even understand how one would get that idea (I'd consider the thought itself quirky!).

And how is the choice of "roman numeral conversion as an exercise" quirky in any way? As far as programming exercises go, it's quite standard and straightforward.

People are likely to know a little about roman numerals (if not from anything else, from movie and game titles using roman numerals), and there's a mapping with well defined rules between roman and decimal representations.

Oh, and Dive into Python was quite popular, and it was even put in print (both editions), iirc from Apress. Mark had also written a few books for O'Reilly, back when doing so was kind of a bigger deal.

New programmers want to write something visual; website or game maybe.

I bought a physical copy of Dive into Python. Gave it up after one or two chapters and just bought dabeaz's reference instead.

I'm not the only one with a negative reaction towards the choice of Roman numerals!

>New programmers want to write something visual; website or game maybe.

Don't know if you're a new programmer, but command line based examples, that are neither websites nor games nor visual, are the norm in almost every programming book, including almost all Python books.

This idea that Dive Into Python was somehow an exception or "quirky" because it didn't have examples of visual programs ("websites or games"), is entirely out of touch with programming books.

(And of course, dabeaz's reference is a different thing altogether, and even further away from "something visual; website or game maybe").

I guess not so much games/websites but something you can see yourself using.

Roman numeral conversion is not one of those. Neither, for example is SICP's example of Newton-Raphson.

I don't want to bang on about it. They're fine books. Just could have used an better editor or some other constructive advice to make it less niche and more relatable.

FWIW I also bought Learning Python which was meh, and Python Cookbook which is directly useful.

these are just examples of the fleeting nature of things, people included. here it seems different because _why and Mark Pilgrim are (most likely) still around somewhere.

enjoy them while you can. don't take them for granted. you never know when they'll be gone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com