Erik Naggum, R.I.P.
open.salon.com
open.salon.com
If you find yourself admiring Naggum's acerbic wit and online presence, that's fine. But please please look for ways to live your life so that when you die, the fact will be discovered not because some irc channel regulars notice your longer-than-usual absence.
Please try very hard to arrange that there are people in your life who you love and who love you, and with whom you're in daily contact. People whose fondest memory of you will be as a spouse, a parent or an intimate friend, and not having been cursed by you to hell and back in flawless and elegant English.
Many of us here can easily rationalize ourselves into writing a five-page missive on a technical topic that will utterly demolish the sack of shit our opponent is, at the same time making the merits of our cause blindingly obvious to anyone with a three-octal-digits IQ. Please balance the time investment for writing that five-page missive against the possibility of spending that time on your family, or, if you're single, and then it's vastly more important yet, on looking for a person of appropriate gender you'd really like to spend time with.
Also, don't be the kind of person who's polite with others in face-to-face conversation, and then appallingly rude to the same person in email or online forums of any kind. You'll find it's easy to rationalize such behavior to yourself by appealing to lofty principles. Don't.
The world is cold, and we'll all be dead in the long run. Please have someone to hug and be stupidly sentimental with, and share some happiness with.
Thanks for listening, and sorry for being an asshole.
Otherwise, +1.
This doesn't say outright that his death was discovered due to his absence on irc, but strongly suggests so. It also suggests that he had some family but wasn't in daily contact with them.
I agree with you that it's important that we live our lives in such a way as to create happiness; I think it's okay whether the happiness is for ourselves or for others.
But I think that the most effective way to do that is to carry forward the advancement of human knowledge, because ignorance is the source of unhappiness. It's worth depriving oneself of a bit of day-to-day pleasure if that's what it takes to develop your capacities to the point where you can make a real contribution. As usual, I want to point to Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research": http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
I see, and appreciate, your link to Hamming's article and raise you Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape in counterbalance: https://www.msu.edu/~sullivan/BeckettKrapp.html
The daily how-are-you emails can even be a bit Eliza-like, simulating a real human on the other end a little.
Why do some people assume that someone with large internet following doesn't have real life and real friends and real family?
Why? If I preferred to live my life alone, then it wouldn't really bother me if I died alone and noone knew about it because of the simple fact that I'd already be dead.
In the Naggum thread the other day I criticized him for polarizing and ultimately damaging the Lisp community. What I didn't say is that I almost always enjoyed reading him, even at his most noxious. He was a master not only of Common Lisp but of English, the latter to a degree surprising in a non-native speaker (Norwegians routinely excel at it but he was over the top). And through reading him I became fond of him, something that by no means always happens. I'm not surprised to hear people say that he was a nice person. People are contradictory.
Online communication is a limited medium that is prone to feedback loops of escalating misunderstanding. It's easy to slip into thinking that one is talking to a computer rather than another human being because, in a way, one is. At that point, why bother with anything other than the intellectual satisfaction of formulating what you have to say in the sharpest, most absolute way possible? Many of us are prone to this. Naggum took it to an extreme. I still think there's something to criticize here, but perhaps not in terms like nasty, cruel, etc. It has more to do with dissociation (as when the cognitive apparatus becomes disconnected from emotional or other information). Which is another something many of us are prone to.
One other point about Erik Naggum that deserves a little more attention than it's gotten: during much of the time he was writing this stuff he was suffering physically pretty badly. That's not an excuse, but it does change my picture of what was going on there.
Edit: I posted this because I am mostly unfamiliar with the man's life and work, and enjoyed reading about him.
"The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life. "
RIP
Truly great.
What will happen to our work when we die?
Is there a place for people already gone where we can go and see their work as they left it when they died? Kind of a graveyard but without the creepiness?
I would like to have access to all the work from [insert hacker name here], if he makes it available, or if he so wishes in his will.
I wish my site would be up (not that I have one) forever for everybody to see, and read, and copy, and do stuff with whatever I left.
Wishing somebody may finish whatever we left unfinished...
Web mausoleums? any links?
That's what I am talking about, not html files.
Maybe appspot from google is more of what I think.
Maybe, paradise.google.com would be a great place to start, where you can indicate in your will to move all your stuff to paradise when you die.
Also, sourceforge, github, any online repository. I guess we should consider more options as more of our lives moves online.
As the pioneering generation embarks in the next journey...
It seems like service like this doesn't exist, possibly because nearly everyone is lost in the current moment.
The serivce that I think of should be something like cryonics. Well, not exactly. Cryonics suspends human beings for indefinite period of time in hopes of time being in hopes for future resuscitation. Eternal hosting should keep site alive, just not updated by the author anymore. But the problem is similar in both cases: how to preserve something valuable for indefinite period of time with maximum probability, no breakage and no author's intervention, to the best of our estimates and technological ability.
Seems like our society doesn't have services designed for eternity.
"Services Overview
We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the "Rapture" of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system."
Except it emails a zipped copy of your online stuff to a trusted second party.
I call it "Ivecheckedout.com"
Ahahhahahaha I love the intarwebs.
You may have heard of "The Eternity Service"? Also see: Freenet, Usenet, Tahoe, and medieval scriptoria.
http://xach.livejournal.com/221433.html?thread=515833#t51583...