Tom Lord has died
berkeleydailyplanet.comDamn. I've been meaning to contact him about some old scheme proposals for a couple of years now. He wanted to rebase the language on a smaller core.
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.
Seems to have been on HN, but inactive since 2013:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1])
There’s something sad about reading old comments and emails, knowing the mind behind them is gone.
Shouldn't be any more sad then reading old books and letters of great minds past. Death is necessary part of life. Also keeps the living from idling or (arguably) should at least ;-}
> Death is necessary part of life.
Death is inevitable maybe, but whether it's necessary is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.
Nope. It is necessary.
I like the allegory of the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
Ok then.
I'll try to justify that it's more sad to us than the death of the great minds past because we shared this beautiful world with a contemporary, and now we don't anymore. The most obvious possibility for direct contact is now gone.
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.
It is today, but doesn’t have to be: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...
Hopefully we’ll fix it one day.
Be careful what you wish for.
Read this, from someone who's thought about it a bit more deeply than Mr Yudkowsky.
Even if the wildest dreams of transhumanists come true, that would not be the permanent abolition of death, merely postponing the inevitable. With every passing millennia, the odds of dying by accident or homicide would only grow. Even supposing mind uploading works - that strategy might keep you safe from accidents, but eventually you’ll die in the heat death of the universe. Schemes proposed to beat that are so extremely speculative-they are no more believable than religious afterlife claims (maybe even less so). Entropy always wins in the end-with the possible exception of unimaginably long timescales-eventually, maybe, we’ll all be resurrected as Boltzmann brains, or endure this exact life repeating an infinite number of times without change (Nietzsche, meet Poincaré). But odds are you’ll die long before that. Or our simulators will get bored with us, and turn this universe off.
He was also very active on twitter https://twitter.com/thomas_lord, but I do not know if any of it is technology related (as opposed to arguing about communism vs capitalism in housing, which is where I know him from).
Yeah his participation in local politics was very polarizing, to be polite.
technocrat.net is where I remember him posting.
I'm pretty sure he had a username on HN previous to dasht. Perhaps he burnt a bridge or two?
User tomlord seems to exist but no comments.
Is it this Tom Lord: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ ?
It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.
Yes apparently: https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/
TLA was one of my first too, if not the first foray outside CVS.
I worked on a POC porting it to Windows and had to port GNU tar to support large file names. TLA was truly revolutionary!
Similarly, I managed a Solaris build of arch for a while. arch/larch/arx/tla/baz was pretty cool. But Tom was in denial about its short comings. Particularly speed.
Unfortunately yes. That was interesting system before git…
Dang. I'd run into Tom now and again in Berkeley city politics circles, never put it together that he was _that_ Tom Lord. I hate to know that he's passed like this, all of a sudden. What a unique and interesting man he was.
Imagine how angry tlord would have been to find out they put 'open source' in his obituary.
My his memory be a blessing. Tom's post tracking page at Lambda the Ultimate:
arch has a legitimate claim to have been the first ever distributed version control system.
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.
an editorial about his passing:
https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...
I have a request for hacker news, in remembering Tom Lord: do you have any of his code lying around? It's hard to find. In addition to GNU arch, I know he once worked on these things:
* 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
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://regexps.srparish.net/src... has a few versions of hackerlab and pika.
hackerlab is also part of tla distributions (since the latter uses the former extensively)
hackerlab contains (some version of) rx.
A few of those links lead to actual tarballs, but sadly, the pika one does not. :(
Free software lost a good one. I remember him as the principal hacker in the 90s on Guile, which goes with everything.
Oh Tom, too young.
I remember him pitching me on Guile in a hot tub at a conference in the early 90s.
he was not very old. how unfortunate
He was five years my senior. I never expected to be immortal but at my age one starts becoming aware that you have more weeks behind your back than in front of you. I like to think that living is just untangling a web that somehow fate has already set for you. So in the end what counts is living each and every moment as if it was the most important one, and loving and caring about the people that love and care about you.
While I like the sound of a mentality that suggests paying attention to every moment, it does raise the question: pay attention at what level? Count the leaves on every tree?
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…
Good question, and good point. I read a definition of information a while ago (actually it was Judea Pearl's), which defined it in the usual log-negative way, but in terms of the probability of states that you care to distinguish.
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.
This is a great question, but I'd answer that paying _some_ attention is better than paying _no_ attention at all. Some people study and train for years and reportedly they achieve full happiness, but certainly that is not my case and, to be honest, it's hard. ymmv.
Interesting philosophy, I like it. It seems to reconcile self-determinism with fate. Do you believe that life ends when you successfully untangle this web?
Yes. I will be back to where I was before I was born: not being.
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.
I don't know anything about Tom's situation, and I apologize if this in poor taste: a major preventable cause of brain hemorrhage is hypertension. If you have high blood pressure, it's not a joke. Get treatment.
And the damage is cumulative so the best time to start taking any necessary high blood pressure medication is now.
Url changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/, which points to this.
> speaking the truth about the climate emergency and treating it as an actual emergency.
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
I don't doubt or dispute any of your points, but it would have been far nicer to wait and air them at a different time and in a different venue -- step back for now and give people a chance to grieve and pay their respects to someone who just died unexpectedly.
Tom Lord was, like other GNU pioneers, well known for being very opinionated and not being especially easy to work with. GNU arch was forked how many times?
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.
> I'm surprised to learn that he was a valued member of an open source community
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.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
To be fair, it's highly unclear if Berkeley would benefit from population growth, or lose its character as it tries to scale.
It's already lost so many black families that defined its character up through the 1970's and 1980's.
"Losing its character" is not a climate impact.
Lots of culture will be lost one way or the other due to climate change. Addressing climate change the soonest possible is how to keep as much of what we know as normalcy into the future.
And there’s the heart of NIMBYism. All projects must scale gracefully as they grow or face technical and political debt, and cities are no exception.
Berkeley has basically the same population as it did in 1950. It is home to the best public university in the state, which outdates any residents by a century. Students and low income workers sleep in cars, in tents near Highway 80 or commute from Antioch for lack of housing.
If there is any city that should be scaling aggressively instead of “gracefully” it’s Berkeley.
> Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels
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 rude to legislators on constituent calls in a way that made them not want to support the bills that he was supposed to be advocating for. Fortunately, since those bills would not have helped reduce climate change, this was probably a good thing on net.
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.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is if we all go off the cliff. You can work better with coddled egos then with people in an antagonistic position.
. [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
That absolutely is a source from which you can form an opinion on the content which indeed you have.
Leaving it unspecified so you can't reliably is the issue that does not exist here.
But is the point of death the right point to these grievances? Like wait a day or month even.
I get that some grievances don’t need to wait (Limbaugh) but it’s a high bar.
Separate issue but an interesting one, basically revolves around good manners.
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.
FYI Tom Lord was indeed an official of the city of Berkeley, having been appointed to certain boards and commissions, from which he eventually had to be removed for violating the Brown Act and making various outbursts.
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.
>>He seems knowledgeable, kind, humane, subtle, intelligent and has very interesting things to say.
>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.
> Like wait a day or month even.
He did wait. Tom Lord died about a month ago.
By law these meetings have minutes recorded and made available to the public. If you really want to confirm the situation for yourself the messy details are likely missing from this record while the situation in general is reasonably well presented.
Some of the greatest hits are missing specifically because Lord was a repeat violator of the Brown Act, the "sunshine law" of California.
In this scenario I’m making up lies about a person who died last month.
t. no idea how books and articles are written