8 ms·

Tom Lord has died

156 points by pcdavid 4y ago

throw0101a 4y ago
Seems to have been on HN, but inactive since 2013: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1]) * https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile
- gonehome 4y ago
  There’s something sad about reading old comments and emails, knowing the mind behind them is gone.
  - guenthert 4y ago
    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 ;-}
    - gonehome 4y ago
      It is today, but doesn’t have to be: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see... Hopefully we’ll fix it one day.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - skissane 4y ago
        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.
      - lproven 4y ago
        Be careful what you wish for. Read this, from someone who's thought about it a bit more deeply than Mr Yudkowsky. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
    - falcrist 4y ago
      > Death is necessary part of life. Death is inevitable maybe, but whether it's necessary is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.
      - ngetchell 4y ago
        Nope. It is necessary.
        heyoni 4y ago
        Ok then.
        ericpruitt 4y ago
        I like the allegory of the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
    - JetAlone 4y ago
      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.
- yonran 4y ago
  He was also very active on twitter https://twitter.com/thomas_lord 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).
  - shuckles 4y ago
    Yeah his participation in local politics was very polarizing, to be polite.
  - femto 4y ago
    technocrat.net is where I remember him posting.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  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.
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/ https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/, which points to this.
jeffbee 4y ago
Imagine how angry tlord would have been to find out they put 'open source' in his obituary.
kristopolous 4y ago
he was not very old. how unfortunate
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pantulis 4y ago
  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.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    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?
    - pantulis 4y ago
      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.
  - xpe 4y ago
    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…
JonChesterfield 4y ago
Damn. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tra3 4y ago
Is it this Tom Lord: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ ? It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.
- pcdavid 4y ago
  Yes apparently: https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/ https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/
- trelane 4y ago
  TLA was one of my first too, if not the first foray outside CVS.
- alexott 4y ago
  Unfortunately yes. That was interesting system before git…
- 0xdky 4y ago
  I worked on a POC porting it to Windows and had to port GNU tar to support large file names. TLA was truly revolutionary!
  - emmelaich 4y ago
    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.
em-bee 4y ago
an editorial about his passing: https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article/49843?headline=Berkeley-s-Loss--Becky-O-Malley https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...
troutwine 4y ago
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.
bitwize 4y ago
Free software lost a good one. I remember him as the principal hacker in the 90s on Guile, which goes with everything.
kevinburke 4y ago
> 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
- worik 4y ago
  . [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
  - harry8 4y ago
    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.
    - ianai 4y ago
      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.
      - harry8 4y ago
asah 4y ago
Oh Tom, too young. I remember him pitching me on Guile in a hot tub at a conference in the early 90s.
jdougan 4y ago
My his memory be a blessing. Tom's post tracking page at Lambda the Ultimate: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/3938/track/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/3938/track/
emmelaich 4y ago
arch has a legitimate claim to have been the first ever distributed version control system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control 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.
vintermann 4y ago
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
- pgeorgi 4y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://regexps.srparish.net/src/ 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.
  - apgwoz 4y ago
    A few of those links lead to actual tarballs, but sadly, the pika one does not. :(

156 points by pcdavid 4y ago

Seems to have been on HN, but inactive since 2013: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1]) * https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile

gonehome 4y ago
There’s something sad about reading old comments and emails, knowing the mind behind them is gone.
- guenthert 4y ago
  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 ;-}
  - gonehome 4y ago
    It is today, but doesn’t have to be: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see... Hopefully we’ll fix it one day.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - skissane 4y ago
      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.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Be careful what you wish for. Read this, from someone who's thought about it a bit more deeply than Mr Yudkowsky. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
  - falcrist 4y ago
    > Death is necessary part of life. Death is inevitable maybe, but whether it's necessary is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.
    - ngetchell 4y ago
      Nope. It is necessary.
      - heyoni 4y ago
        Ok then.
      - ericpruitt 4y ago
        I like the allegory of the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    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.
yonran 4y ago
He was also very active on twitter https://twitter.com/thomas_lord 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).
- shuckles 4y ago
  Yeah his participation in local politics was very polarizing, to be polite.
- femto 4y ago
  technocrat.net is where I remember him posting.
emmelaich 4y ago
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.

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/ https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/, which points to this.

jeffbee 4y ago

Imagine how angry tlord would have been to find out they put 'open source' in his obituary.

kristopolous 4y ago

he was not very old. how unfortunate

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pantulis 4y ago
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.
- mulmen 4y ago
  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?
  - pantulis 4y ago
    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.
- xpe 4y ago
  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…

JonChesterfield 4y ago

Damn. 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tra3 4y ago

Is it this Tom Lord: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ ? It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.

pcdavid 4y ago
Yes apparently: https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/ https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/
trelane 4y ago
TLA was one of my first too, if not the first foray outside CVS.
alexott 4y ago
Unfortunately yes. That was interesting system before git…
0xdky 4y ago
I worked on a POC porting it to Windows and had to port GNU tar to support large file names. TLA was truly revolutionary!
- emmelaich 4y ago
  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.

em-bee 4y ago

an editorial about his passing: https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article/49843?headline=Berkeley-s-Loss--Becky-O-Malley https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...

troutwine 4y ago

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.

bitwize 4y ago

Free software lost a good one. I remember him as the principal hacker in the 90s on Guile, which goes with everything.

kevinburke 4y ago

> 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

worik 4y ago
. [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
- harry8 4y ago
  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.
  - ianai 4y ago
    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.
    - harry8 4y ago

asah 4y ago

Oh Tom, too young. I remember him pitching me on Guile in a hot tub at a conference in the early 90s.

jdougan 4y ago

My his memory be a blessing. Tom's post tracking page at Lambda the Ultimate: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/3938/track/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/3938/track/

emmelaich 4y ago

arch has a legitimate claim to have been the first ever distributed version control system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control 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.

vintermann 4y ago

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

pgeorgi 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://regexps.srparish.net/src/ 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.
- apgwoz 4y ago
  A few of those links lead to actual tarballs, but sadly, the pika one does not. :(