Tangential: A few years ago a coworker of mine suddenly died in a tragic accident at way too young of an age. Every once and a while when I see his name pop up in a git blame from code written many years ago I'll click into his GitHub profile as it is frozen in time now. For the first year the worst part of this was watching the green contributions squares slowly retreat to the left until the wall was solid grey.
It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we're gone. Personal blogs/websites will go down and large companies like GitHub & social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. "All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
The terrifying (or maybe really consoling) thing is that it take A LOT to be remembered for a significant amount of time. Just think about it: How many people can you name off the top of your head that lived 100 years ago, or 500 years or a 1000? How long ago lived the oldest family member that you know anything about?
It also seems, that the best way to be remembered is either to write or to win battles. On the other hand, building long lasting monuments (like some contemporary billionaires) seems to be quite inefficient when it comes to remembrance of a person, historically speaking. The only exception I can think of is the Eiffel-Tower, dude made a wise decision naming it after himself.
Yeah, we had a colleague pass unusually young due to cancer. It was very sad. I saw his name in git blame or various JIRA tickets etc. for years. I'd always take the time to think about him and our time working together. It absolutely affected how I see work and how I value my time (especially since I later had a couple long-time friends die unusually young, too).
There's so much social media skepticism that burns what happens online, that sweepingly categorizes all the effort as bad or pointless or negative.
And yeah, so much is whatever.
But man, we each carry a little light. And these records, these pasts, they - to me - mean something. Code commits or comments; they are some kind of testament
I forget what it was but yesterday I think there was a nice submission where the author was saying even lack of evidence or failing is evidence. They were saying that just because theirnefforts didn't pan out as expected, doesn't mean they aren't informative pieces. Letting time in, letting us figure out long terms what values & lessons there are... I think that respectful & aweful ability to regard each other without moving to ill judgement is enormous.
When people are gone it just becomes so obvious how much the world loses from that active actor trailing off.
I joined a company in 2001 and left in 2010. A tool and library I wrote for debugging 3d geometry is still in active use.
In 2010 at a new company, I wrote another tool for visualizing a complicated tree structure. It has thousands of daily active users in the company.
My two biggest legacies are tools to help developers visualize their data. I'm pretty proud of that. Even if I don't get to maintain either piece of software, I'm glad to know they helped and continue to help.
Same situation, although the colleague in question had left the place I worked a few months before he died in an accident. I still see his name in the git blame lines most weeks and think of him.
I have never wanted kids, but I made a very small contribution to Django core, and after it was merged in, I realized that this is the most likely way that I could be remembered as a footnote in history, even if Django is retired from popular use.
A lot of people seek some kind of immortality through reproduction, but this is good enough for me!
I question why leaving behind a legacy is important.
Personally, if I leave nothing in my wake (as far as practicality allows) when I die I will be very happy. Leaving behind a legacy only inconveniences whoever it is who has to pick up the reins and clean up after me.
Because we are afraid of death, of the annihilation of our everything it brings. So leaving a legacy alleviates that a bit - we die but we are not dead-dead as long those memories are alive. For some it will be an immortality project, for others a silly endeavour, but I say as long it makes one happy (less scared) let them all have it.
Leaving a legacy (a good one anyway) kind of validates that you did something that outlived you in your time on earth.
To be sure we should try to take care of the loose ends if we can before we die — not knowing when that is means we should probably keep a tight ship as regularly as we can - especially more so as we get older. This thought crosses my mind fairly regularly when I look across the garage, in the storage room at all the crap I've accumulated. (Nevertheless, if the kids just want to toss everything, have an estate sale that's cool.)
>> I question why leaving behind a legacy is important.
Just leave things better than when you found them. Not for you, and not for those who follow, but for the thing itself. I suppose in this framing people are things too - help them to be better versions of themselves if you can. Other than that, have fun and enjoy the ride.
I struggle with this sometimes. There is a part of me that cares greatly about "legacy" and would really like to accomplish something significant in my lifetime... something that will be remembered, something that will matter.
But.
I am reminded that, over sufficiently long time scales, no one is remembered. There is no such thing as "legacy", really. As somebody pointed out once: how many people are remembered now from even, say, the last 2500 years? Alexander the Great, and, uh... maybe a handful more. But will even Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, or Albert Einstein, or Ramanujan, or Marie Curie, or $INSERT_CELEBRITY_HERE be remembered in another 2000 years? 10,000? 100,000? 2 million? 10 million? It seems likely (assuming the human race even persists that long) that we're all forgotten in the end.
So I dunno. I still go back and forth in my own mind about whether or not "legacy" is even worth caring about or not.
Everything is temporary, a legacy makes it slightly less. Brings an element of continuity to our existence as people learn or are inspired by the impressions other people leave behind.
Sad. But nice that the dad was able to access a logged in session on the blog to make a post I guess. I ponder how so many of our digital lives (and thus lives in general) would be locked forever should something untimely happen as no one would have access to anything unless we left some sort of giant password log book or mechanism in place.
If you are an Apple user, make sure you set up a Legacy Contact for your iCloud account. You can also optionally choose to allow access to your computer with your iCloud credentials, which will give your next of kin access to it.
My wife and I used to keep all kinds of note about how to handle various accounts and communications if we died. Over time, we realized that what matters is our friends and family, not our online presence. My only note that is left is "Cancel my credit card - everything will get sorted out and deleted once bills aren't paid."
I'm not trying to diminish the importance of our online lives while we live. It is a big part of our lives. But after we are gone... different story.
To me, my online presence within certain communities is as much me as I am me with my friends and family in person and I care deeply about them. It's disturbing and worrying when someone that you talk to regularly suddenly stops coming online, and I generally spend most of my online time with people I care about.
Accounts like my shitposting twitter account and HN accounts - who cares. But I don't want to be another lost soul last seen online years ago after suddenly disappearing. I have too many people like that who I still think about.
I put a lot of though in this some time ago. So i made a python script, running on my server, that if something doesnt happen for at least 2 weeks automatic mails will go out to friends and family, each with some access to stuff they might be interested about and a final message.
I know this is a bit paranoic but its the best i can do. Also most of my passwords are on a kpdb file so with the master credentials someone could get all the access to everything (that would go to my VERY close family for example)
> if something doesnt happen for at least 2 weeks automatic mails will go out to friends and family, each with some access to stuff they might be interested about and a final message.
So that means if your server got hacked today, the hacker would have access to everything? Put differently, what I'm asking is: How exactly are you managing your credentials?
If you were worried about someone getting the password from your will before your death, you could use Shamir's secret sharing algorithm to spread a password among friends and relatives with instructions to not use it until after your death, so that some number of them have to agree to unlock it together.
BitWarden (and possibly other password managers) has a mechanism where you can specify people that can take over and view your credentials in the event of your untimely demise. Probably isn’t an immediate process or anything, but gives me a lot of peace of mind.
It's always heartbreaking to know parents had to deliver the news of a Childs passing. I hope they find peace and healing someday. Much love Jonathan (Zandar) Mott, you made the internet and the world better than you found it.
A bit off-topic - Reminds me of when I first stumbled upon Shamus Young's blog [1]. Someone on HN linked to it, and due to me being a gamer I was immediately hooked. For the next couple of days I read every article which sounded intriguing and was really happy to finally find a blog which interests me.
But during all of this browsing I never visited the front-page. When I did, I saw the announcement about his death. Turns out he died a month before I found his blog. So far that has been the most tragic death of a person I don't know personally, just because it was so abrupt and eerie.
I remember reading his blog article by article for hours as a kid. I had always wanted to do procgen and other game dev stuff, but never felt like it was accessible enough to approach until I found his step by step series detailing how he built his games and experiments. And all of the thoughts about what makes a game fun or what makes a game a game, the idea that games could be made better by taking a critical look at their stories and their systems and the way those interact, left a deep mark on me and the way I think about experiencing and making games too.
I haven't read his blog in years but to find out he's gone is crushing.
I often wonder how my online friends would find out if I died. In some guilds usually people will go missing for 2 years and then somehow someone hears from their family that they passed away and shares it with the community.
I guess I should compile a list of email addresses that my sister should have access to.
Something similar happened when an buddy of mine died. I think it was his mom who posted on his LiveJournal... hard to remember, that was a long time ago (considering what platform the post was on, haha) ... It was jarring to see what I thought was a post from him, which was uhhh.. well... not. Even more jarring as I read on. Sad stuff. I'm glad there was even such a way to hear about it though. There's no way his family would have gone through and emailed all his contacts or anything.
Readit News
It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we're gone. Personal blogs/websites will go down and large companies like GitHub & social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. "All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
A person dies twice. The first time is when they die. The second time is when the last person who remembers them dies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_(2017_film)
It also seems, that the best way to be remembered is either to write or to win battles. On the other hand, building long lasting monuments (like some contemporary billionaires) seems to be quite inefficient when it comes to remembrance of a person, historically speaking. The only exception I can think of is the Eiffel-Tower, dude made a wise decision naming it after himself.
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It'll be great. Too bad I won't be around for it.
I'd love to see updates from my friends who passed, even if I know it's all theater by a secret impersonator.
And yeah, so much is whatever.
But man, we each carry a little light. And these records, these pasts, they - to me - mean something. Code commits or comments; they are some kind of testament
I forget what it was but yesterday I think there was a nice submission where the author was saying even lack of evidence or failing is evidence. They were saying that just because theirnefforts didn't pan out as expected, doesn't mean they aren't informative pieces. Letting time in, letting us figure out long terms what values & lessons there are... I think that respectful & aweful ability to regard each other without moving to ill judgement is enormous.
When people are gone it just becomes so obvious how much the world loses from that active actor trailing off.
I joined a company in 2001 and left in 2010. A tool and library I wrote for debugging 3d geometry is still in active use.
In 2010 at a new company, I wrote another tool for visualizing a complicated tree structure. It has thousands of daily active users in the company.
My two biggest legacies are tools to help developers visualize their data. I'm pretty proud of that. Even if I don't get to maintain either piece of software, I'm glad to know they helped and continue to help.
https://www.softwareheritage.org/
ArchiveTeam saves things to archive.org too:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
A lot of people seek some kind of immortality through reproduction, but this is good enough for me!
Personally, if I leave nothing in my wake (as far as practicality allows) when I die I will be very happy. Leaving behind a legacy only inconveniences whoever it is who has to pick up the reins and clean up after me.
To be sure we should try to take care of the loose ends if we can before we die — not knowing when that is means we should probably keep a tight ship as regularly as we can - especially more so as we get older. This thought crosses my mind fairly regularly when I look across the garage, in the storage room at all the crap I've accumulated. (Nevertheless, if the kids just want to toss everything, have an estate sale that's cool.)
Just leave things better than when you found them. Not for you, and not for those who follow, but for the thing itself. I suppose in this framing people are things too - help them to be better versions of themselves if you can. Other than that, have fun and enjoy the ride.
But.
I am reminded that, over sufficiently long time scales, no one is remembered. There is no such thing as "legacy", really. As somebody pointed out once: how many people are remembered now from even, say, the last 2500 years? Alexander the Great, and, uh... maybe a handful more. But will even Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, or Albert Einstein, or Ramanujan, or Marie Curie, or $INSERT_CELEBRITY_HERE be remembered in another 2000 years? 10,000? 100,000? 2 million? 10 million? It seems likely (assuming the human race even persists that long) that we're all forgotten in the end.
So I dunno. I still go back and forth in my own mind about whether or not "legacy" is even worth caring about or not.
If you're not a replicant, it's never to late to create habits to increment your TTL counter. :)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212360
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
I'm not trying to diminish the importance of our online lives while we live. It is a big part of our lives. But after we are gone... different story.
Accounts like my shitposting twitter account and HN accounts - who cares. But I don't want to be another lost soul last seen online years ago after suddenly disappearing. I have too many people like that who I still think about.
I know this is a bit paranoic but its the best i can do. Also most of my passwords are on a kpdb file so with the master credentials someone could get all the access to everything (that would go to my VERY close family for example)
So that means if your server got hacked today, the hacker would have access to everything? Put differently, what I'm asking is: How exactly are you managing your credentials?
That's really the only mechanism we have to reliability transmit information post death yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=119346
Deleted Comment
But during all of this browsing I never visited the front-page. When I did, I saw the announcement about his death. Turns out he died a month before I found his blog. So far that has been the most tragic death of a person I don't know personally, just because it was so abrupt and eerie.
RIP Jon, and Shamus.
[1] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/
I haven't read his blog in years but to find out he's gone is crushing.
[1] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=54513 [2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/finally-news-85529959
I guess I should compile a list of email addresses that my sister should have access to.
https://vbfbearcats.wixsite.com/memorial
Also a reminder to not write down your passwords if you don’t want your family members to be able to access your devices.
Perhaps just have one device for family photos, and one device for Japanese tentacle porn.
That'd drive him nuts.