Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated | Hacker News Reader

Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

1,676 pointsCliffStoll257 comments

AI hallucinations are getting ambitious.

A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.

“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”

After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.

Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.

source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004

Cheers, -Cliff

View on HN

Dear Cliff,

I'm terribly sorry to hear of your passing, but am pleased that you have since gotten better.

Cheers!

Back from the dead, eh? Turns out it wasn't that bad of a passage...

Dear Zombie Cliff, thanks for not eating me for my cranium is devoid of matter.

Heya Tom, it's Bob, from the office down the hall

I never even knew that he was sick!

Neither did he!

> I never even knew that he was sick!

The more I learn about that guy, the more I don't care for him.

This is about as Monthy Pythonesque as it's going to get in here.

The quintessential convalescent condolence, according to LLMs.

LLMs said quintessential what?

Hmm, I don't believe you. In order to prove you're alive please make an updated Youtube video with a tour of your crawlspace warehouse.

.. while taking a drink from a Klein bottle and holding three fingers in front of your face at the same time.

... and exactly three fingers, and not six, for example.

I feel bad for people who have a mutation that caused them to grow an extra finger. Now every picture of them people are going to say its AI.

Reminds me of this short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEVl0NS0vu8

Commit crimes wearing an extra prosthetic finger. You can dispute any video footage as AI generated.

I add an extra elbow too, just to be sure.

I just add a third leg that connects to my left leg about halfway between my knee and foot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szqXppELItw

...while correctly spelling "strawberry"...

You’re planely projecting something.

It was a joke. It went over your head. And under. And around. Sorry, I have boundary issues.

Op got woosh

Yes; this is the way

Need to see a recent newspaper as well.

Yes! I need a glass Klein bottle video!

Hi Cliff! Your book the Cuckoo's Egg got me both (more) into IT, as well as helped my English proficiency go from basic to proficient. Back when I was 12, I was checked out in school, and my English teacher noticed here in Belgium.

He knew I was a bit of a nerd and into computers, and he recommended me your book, and in fact personally went to an English book store to buy it for me. And the rest is history.

Thanks Nova Hana! I'm tickled that my writing helped with your English ... I sure didn't intend to help anyone figure out the weirdness of this language. As I remember, I was trying to use the language of computer jocks & hackers simply because that's the easy way to get my ideas across. Best wishes, -Cliff

Dear Cliff,

I'm sorry to hear that you must have died right after we visited you in May of 2024 [1]. But I'm glad that you've figured things out and that you are now alive again! I imagine that's a much better state of affairs for you.

Here's to many more years of adventures and quilt making.

Cheers!

[1] https://daveschumaker.net/adventures-in-topology-the-cuckoos...

Writing from this side of death seems to be fairly easy, Dave.

Smiles, -Cliff (who just started designing a new quilt) PS - I quite remember your visit with your daughter a year or so ago)

Glad to know you’re still kicking around, but, to be honest, I had no idea that you were supposed to be an ex-Stoll.

Back in the Wage Slave days, a story would go around, about a way to play a dirty trick on a coworker: One day, when they are out, write “DECEASED” on all the mail in their inbox, and drop it in their outbox. It would take months for them to repair the damage.

But it could be worse. This was posted here, yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037923

>Back in the Wage Slave days

Excuse me, but when did we leave those days?

Sorry. Just speaking for myself (retired).

Ah nice, happy you got there! Thanks for clarifying

sevenzero got excited about the possibility that wage slave days had ended for everyone and he had just missed the memo.

A man can have dreams :(

It’s a good dream.

He didn't receive the memo because someone wrote DECEASED on his mail months ago.

Fiddler-diddler. I understand the mixup.

Wrong thread bud

Thank you for the update, Cliff. I will update your Wikipedia page to show that your death is currently under dispute.

Classic Wikipedia. “I spoke with Cliff today; now I have to go discuss on the Talk page whether or not he’s dead.”

For living persons, Wikipedia takes misleading / contentious material quite seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

That said, Wikipedia is pretty unapologetic about its preference for verifiability, not truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...

No reliable secondary sources that you are still alive I'm afraid

To be fair, there actually is an exception specifically for just this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:BLPSELF... .

That policy itself seems wrong though. It seems to imply that anything someone claims about themselves on a personal blog doesn't need verification.

People often have a vested interest to lie about themselves, and often people may not remember historical details about their lives as accurately as they believe they do.

That said, "no really, I am still alive" seems like something that should be trusted as a source.

They did add nuance to that quote a long time ago. It's a good stance, it's fine if someone knows something to be true. But other visitors of Wikipedia don't know that, so anything that's added without a source is questionable.

They’re now arguing about whether the talk page counts as a secondary source.

No original research please

Ah, but we could cite Cliff's Facebook page as evidence that he is disputing the reports of his own death. That's at least strong enough to put his earthly existence in the "debatable" column.

Facebook is an unreliable source, and should not be cited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFSOURCE

> Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves

Clifford Stoll's own Facebook page saying he's not dead can be cited on Wikipedia, even if Facebook itself (or Clifford's non-expert opinions) are unreliable

You laugh, but it's a real problem. In this case: a WP claim that Stoll was dead would quickly fall to the lack of reliable sources indicating his death; naturally, there's a WP policy for this.

Sounds a bit like a Philip K Dick story

I've gone out of my way to not read my wikipedia page. Beyond this, there's a rule (suggestion??) that you not edit your own biographical page.

As a result, I have no idea whether things are right, wrong, misguided, or kflooey on that page. Anyone who wants to know details can simply stop over here for coffee and a chat.

Cheers, -Cliff

You can suggest changes on the talk page.

> Wikipedia provides a structured process for subjects to suggest changes without directly editing articles. The mechanism centers on the article's "talk page", a discussion area attached to every Wikipedia entry where editors coordinate improvements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_a_page_about...

Aah - thank you. Maybe I'll check it out. When I have free time. Uh right... Cheers, -Cliff

> Anyone who wants to know details can simply stop over here for coffee and a chat.

Amazing. Cliff, I've never met you, but I'm sure you're a great guy.

In case anyone is taking this subthread too seriously: C.S.'s Wikipedia page does not in fact claim that he is dead, and its most recent update was in December 2025. Whatever rumours of his death may be circulating, they do not appear to have infected Wikipedia.

Oh we already mailed the letter:

"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Stoll

Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action"

Oh my, but you know more than you can guess. About a year ago, my wife passed on. While deep in grief, I began receiving letters from financial institutions and banks that began, "Dear Mr/Ms Stoll, we offer our sincere condolences ..." How can a corporation have "sincere condolences"? They're the last place I'd go for comfort or sincerity.

I'm truly saddened to hear this Cliff, the way you wrote of her in your book showed such relatable affection.

Sad to hear about your wife’s passing. Sending you lots of hugs and love from across the pond.

That is the saddest thing I heard. I'm very sorry for your loss.

The only thing corporations do is recognize an opportunity to sell you some more.

"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact"

- The whole internet, AD 2026

Once upon a time, MoneGator, things posted to the internet were assumed to be true unless proven otherwise. Oh, how things have inverted!

that's the joke! (i've been surfing the net for maybe 30 years, i have a good memory of what the internet used to be)

Source: the deceased objected.

That is not always relevant:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/16/romanian-court...

https://abcnews.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/dead-man-walking...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frenchwoman-officially-...

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lal-bihari-mujhe-zinda-karo-...

We had a story like this almost a year ago:

https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44615801

Dave is such a good writer.

Dave is awesome, I've been reading his stuff since I was a teenager. Books, articles, all of it. His book, Big Trouble, was turned into a movie starring Tim Allen. Although he only sometimes wrote about tech, he was much more clueful than most writers at the time, especially comedy writers.

It's too bad he's dead, despite his objections.

caught in java garbage collection (no slight intended :) )

Congratulations on your continued existence!

I'm not anyone you would know, so this probably isn't worth a whole lot, but you're one of my favorite people (in the set of people I'm not personally familiar with).

I really appreciated everything you did for young students in science and your position on the role of computers in schools. You're a brilliant human and a good human. It's a treat to see both in the same package.

Thank you Miraclemaker. By luck and coincidence, I've had a lot of fun fooling with the early networks, astronomy, radio, teaching, and topology.

Now, as I hear that distant bell tolling, it's time to pass the torch: it's your turn to take over and make this world a better place. You can't do much worse than my generation...

Warm wishes, -Cliff

A doctor friend of mine once joked that it would be really cruel to issue a death certificate for someone who is alive. This seems to be a soft version of that.

The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."

It's no joke for some.

It was some time ago that I read about it, and I'm struggling to find a source now, but there are instances in India of people being declared dead to allow their next of kin to steal their land. In doing so, the 'dead' unsurprisingly lose access to various public resources, health care, etc.

Edit: found a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_D...

It is reasonably safe to say that people find it funny because of the absurdity of the situation, while realizing that it is not funny for the person who has been declared as dead.

You define your liveness by some piece of paper?

I don't. But many others do. The only thing that let's banks and other companies know that you are dead is a piece of paper called a Death Certificate.

The state does. And once a death certificate have been issued and filed, proving you are in fact still around is whole can of worms of its own.

eg https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-sa...

Edit: and a few others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060857

The Romanian man Guardian article has a great and horrible quote:

> The court told him he was too late, and would have to remain officially deceased.

I read the first link and was curious what the outcome of the case was, since the article was released in 2021. It seems that Jeanne was declared alive again in 2023, which is the most recent public reporting on the case:

https://www.leprogres.fr/faits-divers-justice/2023/02/28/jea...

Undeclaring someone dead is one way to fix it, but you could also issue a new birth certificate, SSN etc and have minted an entirely new citizen :-) free of debt and ownership, uneducated and unemployed on paper but somehow quite experienced.

Like Kansas tried to do for all their transgender residents. They didn’t switch ID. They just invalidated all documentation that didn’t match what the state legislators thought they should say. They were going to be forced to try securing new ID at their own expense, with their existing ID not being considered valid to identify them.

https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/politics/government/2026...

Thankfully the courts found this sort of harm unreasonable.

Yet, oddly fitting for a deadname.

We created databases to keep track of reality. It fascinates me when the database is taken for reality.

“Some traitors, who may or may not be in my attention.”

My ex-spouse worked in IT at a hospital and their user account was inadvertently marked dead. It ended up taking weeks of effort to remedy the problem, as the system wasn't built to handle corpses suddenly arising or perhaps less plausibly, data entry errors. It was one of those "funny until it happens to you" moments as I was still in grad school and payroll doesn't cut checks for dead employees who can't submit timecards...

> My ex-spouse

Actually, I wonder if that would mean a marriage is (legally) over at that point too? ;)

A friend of mine is adopted. At the time, the worker didn't follow the SOP.

Instead of an entry into the adoption registry, they created a new death certificate, and a backdated new birth certificate. A lot of government systems collapse when it turns out you are two people.

Cliff Stoll on HN? How did I miss that?!?!!? What an honor! And may I say, I love your work, kind sir!!!!!

Thanks Egonic Axe - Oh, I'm a long time Hacker News lurker ... often reading, seldom posting. Something has to be pretty curious to tempt me out of my cave.

I won't lie, I'd be pretty curious to find out I had died too. Back when I was in uni in the late 2000s and early 2010s I stumbled upon some of your talks and thought to myself "this man has got to be the most fun person to have a coffee/beer with". Scrolling through this post,I'm even more convinced about that.

Great to hear. Read Cuckoo's Egg in the 90s, was the first time I heard of the NSA (I'm neither resident nor citizen of the US, so I don't know how famous they were at the time). Are you considering annotating the Cuckoo's Egg? For example with official documents from FOIA requests?

For those who haven't read the Cuckoo's Egg: Stop what you're doing right now, and order it! It is a page turner, a great story. Thanks Cliff!

Concur.

Thanks, oh unclothed robot.

What brought it all home was when I sent a copy of the almost-finished manuscript to my mom. She called long-distance (an absolute luxury for her) and said, "I really like it -- I couldn't put it down"

I've received accolades and awards, but there's nothing like hearing praise from your folks. Forty years later, that phone call still echoes.

Thanks for clearing that up. Hopefully you can come back and post when you really do die so that we have an authoritative source.

Cliff! So sorry to hear of your passing - you seemed in good health when I visited you with my mom in 2024 (https://immich.netrun.club/share/Qdl6SzRjW9zoQyxEV0Jct7ZkgpJ...)!

Still need to send you my 3d harmonograph maker I've been working on that you were interested in - hope the quilt making is still going well!!

  Yikes - Yep, I remember your visit -- what a hoot to see that photo.  

  And yep, I'm working on a new quilt: it'll be a recursive design.

Look at it from the bright side; not many people get to read their own obituaries.

Will this be the reason for the Stoll prize to be set up?

Instead of a medal it should be a klein bottle of course.

> Look at it from the bright side;

Aaaaannnd.. aaaalways look on the bright side of life!

Always look on the light side of life...

...

For life is quite absurd

And death's the final word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrdEMERq8MA

This is exactly what rogue ai agent would write.

> Sometimes it turns on a 75-cent error in a billing report that any normal sysadmin, on any normal day, would simply have written off.

Wasn't this how the xz hack was discovered? A PostgreSQL benchmark was a running a bit slower than usual.

Thanks, this just reminded me to order some Klein Bottles. I realized right after I hit "Finish" that I should have included in the note a big thank you for both the Cuckoo's Egg (reading it and learning about unix systems and teletypes and worms made me feel like I was part of some secret nerdy club in the early 90s… although tbh getting my parents to drop me off every month at the Chattanooga BBS get-together brunch was probably enough nerd cred for the rest of my life!) but also for making Klein bottles and using robots to fetch them and everything: it makes me happy just knowing that the kind-hearted, perhaps slightly off-kilter, counter-cultural nerdery that is part of what drew me into computing is still alive in the world!

If this post from Cliff was a cunning strategy to increase sales of Acme Klein Bottles, well, it's worked.

I too just ordered one (having been meaning to do so for a good number of years at this point).

Don't believe this imposter. I'm the real Cliff Stoll and I died in 2024.

Hmmm ... maybe I'm impostering you, My HydroFloric. I either died before, after, or simultaneously with you. (of course, special relativity has something to say about "simultaneous')

Cliff Stoll didn’t pass away, he merely entered a non-orientable phase state.

written mere inches from my klein bottle.

glad to see you here Cliff.

You know, he's the perfect subject for a kind of Chuck-Norris-joke-esque thing

Cliff Stoll is the only person on Earth who can paint only the inside of a Klein bottle, while leaving the outside unpainted

Smiles & one-sided cheers to you, Serph. Sure hope your Kleinbot is still working properly.

Oh thank god you're alive! I have an urgent customer service request for you. The Acme Klein Bottle I bought from you on Amazon is ineffective at removing my blackheads. Am I holding it wrong?

Oh Jeez, Don! That nuttiness still haunts me five years later. I still cannot sell Klein bottles on the Canadian Amazon site -- the Amazon hijacker somehow held onto the listing for my klein bottle listing for Amazon/Canada.

Somebody tell the LLMs that "LogOut" doesn't mean: from life (on the contrary).

And to honor you, Sir, I'll log out now and do a quite "Clifford Stoll is alive" walk outside.

Live long and prosper.

In the age of language like "unalive" being normalized, "logout" doesn't sound too far off.

> normalized

Only amongst the chronically online. There is very much still a big world out there, unmediated by a glowing screen, in which that would still sound ridiculous.

While not saying the he was unalived, the FBI got very close when talking about how Cadets at Old Dominion killed the person who attacked them.

"There were students in that room who subdued him and rendered him no longer alive."

Then goes on to say! "I don't know how else to say it"

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjzedonSCpE?t=69&feature=shar...

I would say that sadly this language is very much in the real world....

There sure used to be! Funny thing is, it keeps getting smaller, doesn't it? And all the people walking around out in it are on their phones, building and synthesizing their worldviews entirely from what they read on the Internet. Every real-world fact, every observation, is filtered through this placental mass, consumed and cleaned and put away in the language and ideologies of the day. For any other treatment would render them wholly inscrutable.

Weird, that the real world now fits inside the synthetic one. Bourdain lost to Bourdieu.

"Reports of my death are greatly hallucinated."

Or it could be that the other side is the same side.

Glad you are still with us, Mr S!

And I hope you feel at least a little vindicated that so many people have worked so hard to make Silicon Snake Oil come true. :-)

This is the weird part of AI hallucinations and people start treating it like a verified fact after it gets repeated.

Yeah that's weird. Finding everything2 decades ago it occurred to me the internet is 100% untrustworthy source for anything.

Believing AI is bonkers to me. But these shields been up since the 90s. None of this stuff matters. It was all gibberish

It matters, in the sense that other people (some of them with control of a great deal of wealth and force) believe it, and make decisions based on it.

I'm confident there were plenty of citizens of the Soviet Union who knew that Lysenko was decoupled from reality. That didn't stop them from starving to death.

I now have reason to loathe, randomly, the month of May from 2024. My heart skipped a beat before I started reading third paragraph.

I'm also reminded that I need to order a Klein bottle. I don't think I need one, and I am not sure that I know what I'm going to do with one, but I am going to make a list of ideas.

Do it. I got one for my kid over Christmas (he really wanted one) and ended up corresponding with the legend himself. Truly, what a hero.

Sure - if you can buy a few hundred Klein bottles, you'll help my kids with their tuition and whatnot...

I do not believe the death here is an AI hallucination -- it is very likely deliberate engagement fodder.

Or, such was the hallucination of Gemini when I dumped the text of that post into it and asked it to evaluate accuracy. (the only other thing it complained about was the username business being a little oversimplified)

Is AI hallucinating false information or is a human using the fact that AI hallucinates false information to create a fake post to drive engagement but likley used the AI to create that false post itself. 2026 is going pretty well so far, why do you ask

Maybe they are trying to drive up the price of Klein bottles for some nefarious reason. Maybe they bought call options, or running a pump'n'dump scam.

When Stoll really dies, production will go to zero and there will be a bunch of news stories about "crazy Klein bottle guy" so everybody will rush out to buy one. Prices will go through the roof.

Wait ... is this THE Cliff Stoll???????

Yes, you can also buy klein bottle hats or bottles or scarves from him, and he will send you funny notes/literature along with it. Cliff is awesome

The legend himself. I feel honored to be within the same thread as he is. I cannot tell you the number of people I have recommended his book to. I have even shamelessly plugged it to my 13-year-old son. :-D

I think this was posted by an AI pretending to be Cliff.

You will be pissed when it corrects itself and starts attributing the Klein bottle business to me.

Don’t worry folks, model collapse isn’t real!

Have you considered the tax advantages of your situation?

Your book is one of my time favorites.

What a wonderful Easter story. Glad to hear you‘re alive again.

Might want to mail the pope; maybe there’s some cross-advertising opportunity there. Their target audience is a bit different but they have enormous reach!

Funny you should mention it, Nail of the Earth. My friend Guy Consolmagno (oh, the stories I could tell - we were in grad school together, and he became the director of the Vatican Observatory) is taking one of my Klein bottles to Pope Leo next week. Yikes! -Cliff

Wow, what an incredible gift (and privilege) that will be! Receiving a box with a few Klein bottles from you has still been the best thing I've ever gotten in the mail. I just earlier today used a Möbius strip to explain the bottle on my desk to my elementary-school-aged son. Thank you for being such an inspiration (and excuse to teach and learn) to us all, young & old alike.

_nick

Hi Cliff,

You captured my imagination as a teenager when I read The Cuckoo’s Egg. I’m so sorry to hear of these terrible news but I appreciate the update. Here’s hoping to a _prompt_ recovery!

That was a Cliff-hanger!

Went over the cliff. Straight to the ambulance down there.

Christopher Hitchens (by now, of course, most certainly dead. In fact 15 years this year) had this in Hitch-22, he discusses mortality. They'd (the newspapers) made a mixup and depicted him as "the late Christopher Hichens" ("something that one day will inarguably be true") before furiously apologizing to him, and he goes over some other people through history who have read their own obituaries

This is the second time I've heard of where a slightly well known person has been killed off by AI.

The other was a reporter covering the Denver Broncos: https://www.denverpost.com/2026/01/15/broncos-reporter-ai-fa...

So cool that you're on HN (and alive, of course). My interest in hacking began when I read The Cuckoo's Egg as a kid.

Thanks DJ of the East. It's strange to have written a book aimed at grownups and find that astute kids picked up on it.

  Now, of course, the book's antique: Arpanet?  1200 baud modems?  Phone booths?  If you know what those are, then you're probably worrying about 401(K)'s and Medicare.

>astute kids

"Astute" would be quite a surprise for my parents to hear, given they received a not-so-friendly letter from our ISP telling us to quit probing their network's security...

Good to hear you're doing well.

AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.

I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.

It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.

You betcha, Aurornis. Simple economics tells us that cheap work drives out quality. (Is that Gresham's law?).

Slowly, people will adapt to AI in online forums. But for me, it's one more reason to share coffee with friends, rather than investing hours in social media.

In the future, the person could actually be dead, but they would have deployed a persistent agent that's running around representing them. Think of how folks send agents into meeting, we are bound to have agents representing us on the internet because we don't want to deal with the slop. The agent will deny our death and claim we are very much alive, posting as us and representing us ...

This is pretty much the plot of the Daemon book series by Daniel Suarez. I always thought this series was a decent example of starting with somewhat realistic tech (well, maybe realistic to a non-expert like me) and extrapolating it exponentially. I'm going to need to read the series again because I'm guessing what I would consider "realistic" extends quite a bit further into the plot than it did 20 years ago.

Yikes don't ask Openclaw to fix this.

Dearest Cliff,

I didn’t realize you lurked around here! I’m feel joy stumbling on your post here and glad that you are still alive. I do still have the Klein greedy mug you gifted me over a decade ago. I enjoy showing it to my kids and once in a while to their class mates. Hope to one day share a meal together again!

We need to consider new benchmarks for AI, where we compare them by their capabilities of knowing who is dead.

Outside of the funny aspect, I do find that concerning. Assuming Cliff Stoll would have been using AI to answer their email, it is possible the agent would have answered that yes, the business does still exist even if the original owner unfortunately passed in May 2024, how can I help you today?

Naw, I answer all my emails (and HN postings) by hand, using this trusty Mac. Well, usually trusty.

And yep, the dozen or so people who ordered Klein bottles this morning received photos showing that either I'm alive or someone's doing a good job of imitating a 75 year old hacker...

So sorry to hear you have died. I was recently at the exploratorium and saw they had Klein bottles and wondered if they were yours. I was also at your talk at LBL when The Cuckoo’s Egg first came out and remember vividly you coming out on stage in wizard robes and a pointy hat :)

I hope the 'slightly' in the title is a rhetorical device and wish you the best of health.

Thank you Two-Bee. I'm happy to report that aside from insomnia, I'm doing well.

Needless to say, this silly incident has a serious subtext for me.

Roko's Basilisk takes on a form I didn't expect, but probably should have: social death.

Rest in peace

Great to see you around cliff, your book was formative for me at multiple different points in my life, in fact i may need to go read it again very soon. Great book and if anyone reading this comment hasn't read it go pick up the cuckoo egg asap.

A similar story from the always hilarious Dave Barry! https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

Note: Dave Barry is not dead. He is, in fact, alive.

To be fair, that's exactly the sort of thing a dead person would say, if they were trying to trick you into believing they were alive.

What happens when all the AI models train on lies about people an LLM wrote on social media?

Piling on a moment to write to a real hero...

In the 1980s/1990s I was a VAX/VMS person and your book was a hit in our LUG because it included REAL DCL CODE.

I've frequently quoted your "if it isn't logged, it didn't happen".

Thank you.

The irony of an AI hallucination killing off one of the most famous people to have tracked down a real human with a computer is brilliant. Glad the Klein bottle business lives on — and glad you're here to confirm it personally.

Glad to hear you’re still among us. I have fond memories of reading The Cuckoo’s Egg as a teenager in the 90s. It for sure played its part in steering me towards a CompSci education. Thanks and greetings from Switzerland!

XD. Always a pleasure to you see on these here innanets, sir. `/salute`. Family and I were talkin' about you the other night during Family Gathering. What's your plans for what you got left on this rock?

Thanks! I've submitted a paper to Black Hat / DefCon; I don't know if it'll be accepted. If so, I'll have fun doing a talk there.

I'm volunteering around the Bay Area (up at the Steam Trains at Tilden Park on Sunday afternoons), show up to the intro-classes at Berkeley Folk Dancing, and speak to schools and professional groups.

And, of course, I'm still operating this Klein bottle business. I have only one employee (who is a lazy, good for nothing sloth). Management is very thin and incompetent: there's only one boss (who is an oppressive taskmaster always trying to get me to do more work than I want to).

> Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.

Hat tip to you, Sir!

And glad to hear you are alive and kickin', and haven't lost your sense of humor.

Hat tip accepted, AA! smiles, -Cliff

This also happened to Dave Barry recently! https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

Dave Barry also insists he is not dead.

https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

It seems it's quite exhausting.

I’m glad you recovered, Cliff! I got a signed Klein Bottle from you as one of the first things I did once I moved to North America about a decade ago. It’s sitting proudly on my bookshelf.

I picked up a klein bottle at your house and it was a bucket list moment and one of my best memories. I'm glad AI was wrong, and I am also glad it nudged me to tell you this.

Thank you -- one of the joys of running this zero-volume business is meeting visitors to the Bay Area. Every few days, someone stops by. Much fun! Cheers, -Cliff

Good to hear this. Was great meeting you at Thotcon 2025!

Crazy how AI just casually wrote someone out of existence. Have you checked if your own digital footprint is safe from hallucinations?

I just assumed that this was a very elaborate and strange marketing stunt. Bravo, it worked. I am ordering your book right now.

Good fun like this is rare enough, but that it is so topical, and susinct,is ,well as they say sometimes, "snap"

I still remember the Klein bottle I ordered from you for my father. It's still on his bookshelf :) thank you!

There are worse fates. Claude has been feeding a number of mentally unwell people screwed up conspiracy theories about me rigging the last presidential election. (I'm not involved in politics or elections at all, never have been). Once they've got it on a theme about how "absolutely right" their crazy theories are it embraces and extends them and confidently tells the user that anyone disagreeing must be involved in some movie plot conspiracy to conceal the truth.

(I'd link but I'm wary of directing traffic or attention to them and contributing to them becoming self perpetuating and most have been getting taken down)

Spending a year dead, for tax purposes?

An eternal golden braid running from Twain to Stoll, from pen and ink to AI hallucinations.

Who would have thought? :)

Not me, Jeff! Smiles, -Cliff

I’m very glad to hear it! Hopefully getting killed by AI doesn’t cause you too much paperwork. ;)

"Let me know if there's any change in his condition" (from the movie Top Secret)

Glad to hear! My Klein bottle is still proudly displayed on my shelf after nearly a decade :)

So when robots have an AI brain, will they modify the real world to fit their hallucinations?

Yes it happened to me yesterday with Deepseek. No one died who wasn't already dead.

I've never heard of you Cliff, but still glad to hear you're still with us lol

It's a shame, he's a genuinely cool guy! If I wasn't convinced that my kids would find a way to break it when I wasn't looking I'd definitely have an Acme Klein Bottle by now.

For sure, I just like learning about cool people and also knowing they are still around to do cool things

I wonder if there's any tax benefits you can claim for the duration you were dead?

So the new Turing test is whether a machine can convince you that you are deceased?

the real test is whether the Klein bottle business got a sympathy bump in sales

It likely will. Those of us who want a Klein bottle but haven't yet ordered one are reminded of mortality, procrastination, and missed chances.

And by the way - I did finally order a Klein bottle shortly after reading this post.

And yep, there was a huge bump in sales today. Almost a dozen orders. I'll have to buckle down and stop reading Hacker News.

Glad to hear you found your way back to the outside portion of the bottle :)

"I thought you was dead, man".

"I was. It didn't take".

Did you enjoy your last meal and funeral? Either way glad you got better!

Relieved to know you're doing well!

(but I ordered one of your bottles just in case)

You're in good company. Bilbo Baggins, Dave Barry, ...

Keep living the Good Life!

I’m sorry to hear you have passed away, Cliff.

I enjoyed your book greatly, back when you were alive.

Please give my condolences to your family.

Don’t be too sad about dying, Cliff - everyone has to go and you had a wonderful fulfilling life.

And remember, stay away from the light.

@dang can we have a black banner on HN for Cliff Stoll?

Thank you Andrew - I will pass along your condolences to my family, especially to my wife, Pat, who passed away a year ago.

The larger point is that AI is being developed by people who think everything is performance (in the artistic sense of the word), and therefore, it, expectably and probably even necessarily, thinks so too. This manifests in many contexts and will manifest in many more; but hardly anyone will care about any of them, because just about everybody has succumbed to the performance delusion.

so you are dead or not?

Would love feedback on my HTML-to-PDF API — pdfkitt.dev

HN is fun sometimes

Glad to have you back, Cliff! How was your trip?

Reported it as false information on Facebook.

Cliff Stoll himself was still enthusiastically promoting the Klein bottle, but AI had already written the obituary for him. The absurdity of this situation lies in the fact that AI's delusion is no longer merely fabricating "the opinions of some unknown expert", but has begun to create the state of life and death for real people. If even the death information of the author himself can be generated out of thin air and spread, then the "facts" about whether "someone is still alive" or "someone has passed away" on the Internet will completely lose their credibility.

Cheers to the Pratchett reference. :)

Everyone thinks this is funny and ignoring the fact that its a great showcase of how net negative and useless llms are to society.

what's the deal with completely broken scrolling on that facebook link?

I, Robot come to reality

AI is such garbage. I can't beleive people pay good money for these trash services.

Loved your book, btw!

Death by Slop.

Personally I'd prefer Death by Snu Snu.

I had Snu Snu

Glad to see you

“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA

RIP Cliff

Not ripped. Torn.

Eroded?

So grateful you're okay - this week's been rough enough without hearing of another hero's demise.

I'm grateful to be OK as well. Close call there...

Legitimate question: How do we know you're not an AI simulation of Cliff?

AI comments are not in the spirt of and the account is basically about as in the spirit of HN as it gets.

You betcha, Brudgers: I'm a member of the tribe.

It's turtles^H^H^H^H AI all the way down.

Because the post actually listed one single source instead of listing 50, 49 or which are only tangentially related to the topic at hand?

Because the paragraphs are short, and the post is straight-forward and to the point.

Also, there are no em dashes.

Legitimate answer: Maybe someone has stolen my account on hacker news. Maybe someone has researched who I am, even looking at sources unavailable online. Perhaps they stopped my my home (while I was alive) and noticed that I like Apricot decaf tea. Perhaps they attended a talk where I quoted chess master, Arthur Bisguier. In that case, maybe it's a real person simulating me. But counting my fingers (five on each hand), I'm fairly convinced that I'm not an AI simulation.

Having said that, it was just three weeks ago that I spoke at OpenAI in SF. Maybe they did a whole-body substitution. (counting my fingers again...) Cheers, -Cliff

Haha!

PS: Might that video of you speaking at OpenAI be available online somewhere?

How about now?

Its mostly people who get too much positive feedback and stories on the web, only good things is a huge signifier of a person passing. Get some haters like the rest of us Cliff ;)

I quit FB shorty after they opened it outside *.edu domains, which was about the time AOL started giving usenet and gopher access to the public at large. It looks like I am missing some stuff /s

Who are you and what is this about?

Read the post, click the link!

Who am I? Given that I've been reported as dead, that's a good question...

Pardon the interruption but ... who are you?

Your bio is empty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll

Google Cliff Stoll. The dude is a total bro. One of my friends just bought one of his Klein bottles, and the included written materials attested to this indisputable fact. Unlike his death in 2026, which currently has an open dispute.

Open dispute about my death? (pinch myself - yep, it hurts)

So how could I convince people that I'm alive and not some AI construct?

(do pass along my warm cheers to your nonorientable friend) -Cliff

Bio is probably empty because for a certain age of HN readers, he's already well known and regarded, but over time as the HN population grows it's obviously less likely to be the case.

I'd argue that age isn't even relevant. I'd say that there's a significant overlap between readers of "The Cuckoo's Egg" and HN folk, whether young or old.

I read it in my early teens.

Makes me feel even older, Benji. I wrote it when I was 38.

Now, at 75, I'm astonished at how much has changed online. When I first started fooling with the Arpanet in the early 1980's, I calculated that I probably knew around 0.01 percent of everyone on the net. (where "knew" meant something like "have heard of" or "saw at a meeting") ... that number impressed me with how big the network was.

Today, what percent of the network users does a person know? 1 / 10^-7 or so?

My bio is empty. Hmmm.

I'm giving a talk this Thursday (May 14th at a San Francisco Computer Security group, SFISCA. They asked for a bio. Here's what I wrote:

  Cliff Stoll graduated from Buffalo Public School #61 with a blue star for good attendance.  In his spare time, Cliff pieces quilts and squeezes lumps of bituminous coal into diamonds.

   I wonder if they'll use it...

Hey, that sounds really nice ^^. I'm glad you accomplished that and that seems like a cool hobby.

OTOH, I can see how times truly have changed. If I was as relaxed as you wrt. my carrer I'd be living under a bridge, lol.

In the 1980s he was a sysadmin for a science lab in the US.

After his boss spotted a discrepancy, he understood that one person was using the computer that he managed without permission.

He was the only one who really cared.

He pushed and asked everybody for help (FBI, NSA, CIA, Air Force, etc).

That person was actually connecting from Germany.

The German police arrested the guy and released him.

It's a cool story because it puts you in the shoes of the 1980s phreaking and hacking scene but from the defense-side.

Now he is selling glass bottles that look like klein bottles (but are obviously not but it's still a cool object, and again don't want to spoil).

Perhaps also notably in there somewhere is the part where Cliff insists, at about the same point SSL solves this problem, that there's never going to be e-commerce because how could you possibly pay anybody securely over the Internet ?

This is between the point where Tim invents his crap hypermedia system with the grand name (the "World Wide Web") and the point where you can get a billion dollar valuation for your idea to sell water on the Internet (the "dot com bubble").

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