A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off.
Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant.
For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
I wonder how long that site will be up, given his death. Hope someone mirrors it.
It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 that he links on some of the pages (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and argues that the New Atheists should basically back off and stop being so mean.
While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site assets that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is.
In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read.
Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
> The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution.
A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.
I'm going to disagree here, slightly. If anything I think Manna is something closer to AGI; and its capabilities certainly imply that it's Turing Complete.
Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they couldn't anticipate from a prior fix.
This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing one set of oligarchs with another; skynet; or just anarchy if Manna started becoming very buggy.
On the otherhand, I don't think Vertebrane is Turing complete though I haven't given this a deep amount of thought; though I can't see how a bad actor couldn't coopt Vertebrane into a Manna.
The hairless apes that are in charge have a very long and consistent history of power abuse.
[spoiler alert]
Everyone has a remote kill switch in their spinal cord. Once the goverment decides to be evil, any rebel will get their legs instructed to walk to a pea facility for "reeducation".
Compared to this scenario, 1984 is almost as optimistic as Equilibrium.
They have some chips they insert into your spine to read your thoughts and other similar stuff.
But personally the “dystopia” to me feels very much like something we could end up with -it’s much more a warning. Meanwhile the fantastic nature of the utopia doesn’t really matter in contrast, because the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible.
It's possible if we believe human nature to be sufficiently malleable. Why can't we all just get along. Perhaps the mountains that need to be moved for such a thing are as daunting as some of the physical laws we try to hurdle instead
There are nations and societies very different from the United States. In the United States, we can see the distrust in our neighbors play out politically, contrasted with other societies trust. You can even see it play out across various states and regions. Perhaps they’re not mountains imposed by human nature, but our perception of society.
Other nations have socialized healthcare, where anyone can be treated. Other nations have calm safe and clean public transit. Other nation’s redistribute wealth and provide strong safety nets. Other nations don’t have mass violence. Other nations guarantee retirement and pensions. Other nations trust their governments.
The fantasy physics aren’t what’s holding people back.
I found it to be an extremely interesting and useful tool to understand and imagine the impact of wealth distribution and automation in society. Personally, I believe in strong redistribution in society, because (at least in America) we largely live in a world of abundance, and automation should make everyone’s lives easier and more leisurely.
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
Manna was fairly eye-opening ( and you can see some parallels to today's LLMs to me. I will admit that I read it without knowing much about the author way back when and being fairly amazed at well he knew human nature and likely course that invention would take.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period.
He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.
Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story:
My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.
I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually got me going about how HTML works.
I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a bit regarding the direction of society.
Do you have an approximate time point for that comment?
Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point, I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match your description.
The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have four children now in college..." seems closer.
I have to comment that the song about how bright the future was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson Snow Crash & the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles was exactly what I needed at that time to get started.
RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:
Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.
I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn’t translate to happiness.
The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works.
I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much found themselves in that place.
As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide".
If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).
I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite beliefs.
Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression.
A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off.
Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant.
For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
I wonder how long that site will be up, given his death. Hope someone mirrors it.
It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 that he links on some of the pages (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and argues that the New Atheists should basically back off and stop being so mean.
While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site assets that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
No higher power ever wrote anything though. That's all human writing, human promises, human propaganda.
Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is.
In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read.
Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution.
All the rest of it is a narrative about consequences.
Anyway, the AI there isn't like our LLMs either. It's an AGI capable of long term societal prediction.
> The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution.
A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.
I'm going to disagree here, slightly. If anything I think Manna is something closer to AGI; and its capabilities certainly imply that it's Turing Complete.
Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they couldn't anticipate from a prior fix.
This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing one set of oligarchs with another; skynet; or just anarchy if Manna started becoming very buggy.
On the otherhand, I don't think Vertebrane is Turing complete though I haven't given this a deep amount of thought; though I can't see how a bad actor couldn't coopt Vertebrane into a Manna.
Which utopia? I saw two dystopias. One the likely future of western society, another being one where your very thoughts are programmed
Do you think that this is not already the case? If not, what was the point of 15+ years of government education?
Red herring, I think. There are many goals for education outcomes, some noble and some base.
Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
The hairless apes that are in charge have a very long and consistent history of power abuse.
[spoiler alert]
Everyone has a remote kill switch in their spinal cord. Once the goverment decides to be evil, any rebel will get their legs instructed to walk to a pea facility for "reeducation".
Compared to this scenario, 1984 is almost as optimistic as Equilibrium.
Which is why there wasn't really a set of hairless apes that were in charge. They had a fully direct democracy.
They have some chips they insert into your spine to read your thoughts and other similar stuff.
But personally the “dystopia” to me feels very much like something we could end up with -it’s much more a warning. Meanwhile the fantastic nature of the utopia doesn’t really matter in contrast, because the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible.
> the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible
It is possible. If we stopped at the invention of fire we'd all have equality by now. The problem is that people keep inventing new stuff.
Why is innovation and sharing mutually exclusive?
It's possible if we believe human nature to be sufficiently malleable. Why can't we all just get along. Perhaps the mountains that need to be moved for such a thing are as daunting as some of the physical laws we try to hurdle instead
There are nations and societies very different from the United States. In the United States, we can see the distrust in our neighbors play out politically, contrasted with other societies trust. You can even see it play out across various states and regions. Perhaps they’re not mountains imposed by human nature, but our perception of society.
Other nations have socialized healthcare, where anyone can be treated. Other nations have calm safe and clean public transit. Other nation’s redistribute wealth and provide strong safety nets. Other nations don’t have mass violence. Other nations guarantee retirement and pensions. Other nations trust their governments.
The fantasy physics aren’t what’s holding people back.
Well for starters having the technology for prefect recycling.
I interpreted it had perfect enough for their goals rather than breaking any thermodynamic laws or something.
Accelerando
I found it to be an extremely interesting and useful tool to understand and imagine the impact of wealth distribution and automation in society. Personally, I believe in strong redistribution in society, because (at least in America) we largely live in a world of abundance, and automation should make everyone’s lives easier and more leisurely.
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
Manna was fairly eye-opening ( and you can see some parallels to today's LLMs to me. I will admit that I read it without knowing much about the author way back when and being fairly amazed at well he knew human nature and likely course that invention would take.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
Loved that website. Its intro to C programming was how I got into programming.
Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period.
He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.
Same! I owe so much to him. Heartbreaking and forever grateful for the time we got to spend together.
He was 63 and wrote this a few years ago, “You’ve Had Your Turn –The Case for Euthanizing Everyone at Age 65” https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-e...
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
RIP Marshall. You were loved.
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.
He will be dearly missed.
He was also the author of https://marshallbrain.com/manna, a sci-fi story that has stuck with me for years.
Very relevant in the age of smart glasses for workers.
I was think about the software some companies use to “monitor productivity”
Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story:
My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.
I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
Marshall Brain also wrote many programming books in the 90s era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually got me going about how HTML works.
I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
This makes me nostalgic for the small internet.
Can’t help but feel he got screwed when the HowStuffWorks website was sold for 250x what he got just a few years earlier.
Aside from his futuristic works, his Win32 API book was extremely good and my first introduction to Windows programming.
It’s our loss to loose such a talented human being.
Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a bit regarding the direction of society.
I noticed that. He made several subreddits, here's a (likely incomplete) list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224139
His commentary near the end of this interview is also telling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
An optimist in (increasingly) a cynic's world. Be at peace, Marshall Brain.
Do you have an approximate time point for that comment?
Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point, I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match your description.
The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have four children now in college..." seems closer.
I have to comment that the song about how bright the future was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson Snow Crash & the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles was exactly what I needed at that time to get started.
RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
Duplicate (different submitted link, however): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387
Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.
Spent hours in highschool printing stuff out of howstuffworks.com because dialup at home was too slow until we got dsl :(
May he rest in peace.
If it weren’t for howstuffworks, I suspect I wouldn’t be an engineer. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rip Marshall.
Oh, this is very sad. I was really inspired by his essays and stories when I was 17.
I wonder what was happening with him.
> Marshall Brain died inside his office Wednesday on N.C. State’s centennial campus.
>While the university would not confirm any details related to his death, sources close to Brain said he died by suicide.
:(
Marshall was a frequent poster in subreddits such as /r/collapse.
https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/
I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
I wondered. How dark.
What happens with domains, content, etc now? Is there a systematic way of preparing and securing online services for death?
archive.org|.ph
Hey that's how I learned C
RIP
Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn’t translate to happiness.
The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works.
I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
"success doesn’t translate to happiness."
I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
This is so sad, I loved this man. I wonder if the current dystopian road the US is going down had anything to do with it. Rest in peace, Marshall.
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
What guard rails could anyone with an unrestrained high IQ possibly have?
Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much found themselves in that place.
Dang - deserves a black bar?
As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide".
If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).
I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite beliefs.
Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032