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Diaspora Co-founder Dies At 22
phaedrus5001 writes "Tech Crunch is reporting that one of the co-founders of Diaspora, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, has passed away. He was only 22. At the moment, the cause of his death is unknown."
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My condolence.
I've heard that spore thing was an awesome game.
Spread his ashes to the wind.
YHLTG
HAND
Very sad news, not only because of his vision and the fact that he was a good geek but just because 22 is way too soon.
Any news on the causes yet?
-- no sig today
Doesn't Zuckerberg kill everything he eats with his own hands? Perhaps he was in the mood for something different. http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/26/6724708-mark-zuckerberg-kills-what-he-eats
Look at it from a different angle; maybe it was his own fault. Maybe he forgot to lock the door.
"His family asks that you respect their privacy at this difficult time"?
Not to be (deliberately) insensitive, but how will this affect the development of Diaspora?
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
To all young, horny, self-absorbed, invincible little gods of the internet: you're never too young. The cosmos cares not for you.
Value your health. Value your safety.
Accomplish something while you still can, just as Ilya did.
For those wondering. Doing a simple Twitter search of @zhitomirskiyi, brings this recent tweet directly mentioning him: https://twitter.com/#!/micahdaigle/status/135613279618871296 "@zhitomirskiyi, founder of @joindiaspora, has committed suicide. :("
about around 24 hours ago, long before it was announced on Techcrunch.
Then someone else mentioned suicide as well, but they delete their tweet, not before it was retweeted however:
https://twitter.com/justinherman/status/135619350538358784
"@amoration Found out colleague killed himself. Sending serenity in the passing of @zhitomirskiyi"
Sad to hear it.
R.I.P. Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
Thank you for your work.
u mean facebook, they allready trained the stalkers
warning pointless sig
...the blog sites can't decide if he was 21 or 22. Most copy blindly off each other - and that includes Zdnet who should know better. Given that his work was in social networking and thus communication, I can't help but feel that he has been let down by the poor quality of communication surrounding his death.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is sad, he had a bright future. I wonder what was bothering him enough to commit suicide assuming thats what actually happened.
TekGoblin
Please, guys, I know only a moron like myself doesn't know what this Diaspora project is, but couldn't you put a link or a two-word explanation? Yes, I know Google is my friend. Feel free to mod me down now.
Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it AC! Sheesh. Geez... I'm not even going to respond to you any further.
To Ilya: R.I.P
To Ilya's family, friends, colleagues and associates: I offer my condolences and wish you peace also and wish you the strength to get through this.
Regards
Craig
Sorry for replying again. But if you are sincerely sorry and regret your troll, man up and put your name to the apology. I accept that you may be sorry, but hiding behind the cloak of anonymity means your words and your somewhat cowardice[1] "apology" bear little weight IMO.
Cheers, Craig
[1] Cowardice because you can't even put your first name in the response as the most minimal gesture.
Lemmy's verdict? Killed by death,
Diaspora is probably the most relevant
Condolences to his family and friends.
How offensive! My entire life is just... ruined.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Oh please! if it was MSFT the hitmen would have spammed the place with bullets but not hit a damned thing. You think they can train their hitmen any better than they plan their product roadmap?
Now if it were Apple it would have been incredibly expensive, but with style and flair, such as taking him up in a Lear Jet and dressing him in a really nice suit and then dropping him onto the point at the top of the Empire State building, while having a note in his pocket written by an academy award winning screenwriter.
And if it were Linux they would have received plans for an elaborate machine gun (released under GPL V2 of course!) and a pile of pig iron and told to "Make it yourself, RTFM noob, its easy!".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No because Diaspora was going nowhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How offensive! My entire life is just... ruined.
Yup. The "Anonymous Coward" lives up to his name.
Wish i had mod points for this.
He was an asshat for refusing to work his stupid social network with IE*. Maybe it's been my reporting the diaspora invites as spam. He just couldn't cope.
*I don't use IE but fucking hell, you can't throw a hissy fit about allowable browsers when you're trying to start a social network.
>>> Now if it were Apple it would have been incredibly expensive, but with style and flair, such as taking him up in a Lear Jet and dressing him in a really nice suit and then dropping him onto the point at the top of the Empire State building, while having a note in his pocket written by an academy award winning screenwriter.
I'm stunned Steve Jobs didn't choose to end it that way.
The Russian government likes to kill with panache, as in the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko by Polonium-210 in a cup of tea!
It sounds like this guy had a lot of potential... Condolences to his family and friends.
May not have been much of a movie, but it seems it got many predictions right.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
It's always terribly sad when somebody as young as this loses their life, whether naturally or by their own device.
Very very sad and my heart goes out to his family, friends and colleagues.
Melvin.
You're joking [right?] but there's good reason for this high level of paranoia. Governments love facebook and the like and a closed competitor that they can't monitor has got to stick in their craw. It wouldn't be the first time a fascist government murdered someone and disguised it as a suicide. Note that I am NOT repeat NOT making allegations, only stating that people being upset about suggestions like these need to reconsider that they are living in a real world with bad people in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And if it were Linux they would have received plans for an elaborate machine gun (released under GPL V2 of course!) and a pile of pig iron and told to "Make it yourself, RTFM noob, its easy!".
What's really sad is that that lame joke is probably older than this guy was.
sic transit gloria mundi
Zuckerburg?
Unless you found a stylized Z carved in the wall...
We grudgingly make code work with IE7 and later, but take IE6 users to a page that explains that they really need to update.
When you make a web page that conforms to standards, it is the browser's fault if it cannot render it correctly. Targeting specific browsers is: hard, ugly, mind blowing, and a wasted effort in the long run.
That's fine for your own personal blog. But when you're a company that lives and dies by getting as many users as possible to flock to your banner, you want your site to work in as many browsers as possible.
Surely you can seek help? I am not able to find you to help you, nor do I have the training. But please, please talk to someone close, or someone professional!
...Mark Zuckerberg tweets: "Suppose you've cut yourself badly with a kitchen knife and gotten blood all over your shirt, Vanish or Cilit Bang?"
I feel sorry for all you young people.
You are being left with a world that every moment teeters on the edge of destruction.
Old men, in closed rooms even now plot your death and plan more war and destruction.
This Age that is coming is one that will neither be filled with hope or blessing. But death and destruction, tyranny and no hope.
Technology will become a curse for your children and a sword for the elite to smite all who value liberty, freedom and the sovereign state.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
And I make no pretense to know what it is like to want to commit suicide.
But I've always wanted to say to someone who was considering taking their life: why not just take your "life" instead?
And what I mean by that is, your situation in life. It obviously is not working, so abandon it. Take a plane to a far flung location on the globe, without any money or means of support, change your name, dissolve all ties to your previous existence, preemptively sabotage any way anyone could trace you, and live off trash or stolen mangoes from a tree, until something better comes along.
And become another person. Someone who might be happy someday.
Effectively "kill" yourself: all the identities you have with your current existence, the sum of all your relationships that aren't working, the job that fills you with nothing but misery, all of the reality around you that cages you about how you think about yourself. "Kill" all of the signifiers about who you currently are and how you think about your place in life.
And maybe the challenge and novelty of that will put you in a new frame of mind. And then you can be happy someday.
Of course, I know, the fear is you carry the seed of your depression around inside you, and even in a new life, the despondency will return. But I think, for many people, it is a combination of nature and nurture, and you, who you are, had your life gone another path, you might not be so depressed. We all are depressed at times, we all carry the seed of depression, and major depression too, were the situations in our life and how we come to think about ourselves had evolved a different way. So write a new story. Yes, you carry a seed of it inside you. We all do, and we aren't committing suicide because our seed never grew. So cut down the tree your seed has grown into, and move to new soil where the seed can't grow.
So restart the story. A lot of people talk about reinventing themselves, in ways they consider major, but are really minor. Consider the most radical reinvention possible, instead of suicide.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't see Diaspora as anything close to a competitor of Facebook.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Amen. It's the 2nd /. post in two weeks where people forget that the first post regarding a death should always be sending condolences. Is netiquette immune to death?
In that other post somebody said that his father just died and asked for best practices on how to securely disclose passwords for posterity. IIRC there were about 150 technical threads and I felt the urge in that 151st post to offer him my condolences.
I don't know whether I'm too old school or just too sensitive, but to me the primary definition of being human still remains to have empathy and be compassionate (especially in matters of life and death).
Therefore, RIP Ilya. Somehow I have the feeling that you never managed to convince your parents that computers were a good thing for you.
We find that customers who can't understand the need for a standards-compliant browser are typically difficult to work with and have a high rate of returned merch, so we just throw them at a page that explains why and how they can get a real browser. The ones that we can have a profitable relationship with, follow the instructions. The rest, we believe we are better off without. Fools cut into profits and pandering to fools is bad for employee morale.
If your product or service is not well known or not particularly desirable (or if you actually depend on swindling fools) I can see where you might want to cater to non-compliant browsers. But if what you're selling is something intelligent people already want to buy, you don't need the fools and tools. And if you're building a community, I can understand wanting to have a little "test" up front for the same reasons.
Ok, a little bit of attention to the stuff in bold above:
1. How did that apply to Diaspora? Self-fulfilling prophesy/wishful thinking? I mean, seriously, as far as quality went, the software sucked. Intelligent people saw the silliness of it a mile a way, and more intelligent people went "ewww" when they finally had a grasp on the software. Furthermore, the security holes in it are the types that are already document, examples of what-not-to-do. Where was the intelligence in it? Where was the intelligence of actually thinking you (by you I mean anyone who bought the Diasporan tripe) could actually take on FB with a half-cooked software that required a user to install a RoR base (operational requirements anyone)?I don't mean this as a disrespect to the deceased, but a question to the statement quoted above in bold.
2. How many successful business plans or projects, even those on the bleeding edge of innovation, have actually lived by that premise (the one quoted in bold)? That's not just wishful thinking, but wishful thinking manufactured to make an argument me thinks.
I don't see Diaspora as anything close to a competitor of Facebook.
Indeed. Diaspora is not a competitor of anything at all. It's just a make-believe solution looking for a poorly understood problem statement that rings the bell for a very small subset of those into online communities. The saddest part, and the greatest indictment, of movements such as this, is the amount of security holes present in a software that was supposed to provide a better, safer alternative to FB. And that went beyond misunderstanding the problem, but not even knowing how to code secure web software (despite the enormous literature and industrial common knowledge on the subject.) It's like, c'mon, this isn't 1998.
If you were a logical thinker, it seems really easy to kill yourself from a "things-to-do" perspective.
* Jump in front of a fast moving bus
* Get your head crushed by almost anything heavy
* Jump off a 4+ story roof, head first
* if you want to hang yourself, be certain there's a 5+ foot drop and that the rope and whatever you hang it from are strong enough.
We're looking for quick ways to die with as little pain as possible AND where you can't chicken out afterwards.
Failed ideas: .... without a parachute. Well, people have lived because they landed spread eagle. I don't like the idea of a 1+ minute drop either. Jumping from a building and landing spread eagle would be a bad idea to, if you really want to die.
* I thought offering electrocution in the bathroom, but EFI protection would probably prevent that.
* Jumping out of an airplane
* Killing yourself with a vehicle is getting harder and harder. It is also possible to harm someone else too easily. We don't want to physically harm anyone else, right?
If you have close family, killing yourself will hurt them too. Not a good idea.
I can't imagine that anything besides late stage illness could really be so hopeless. Definitely not anything that someone else does or about money. OTOH, I saw my father die slowly from cancer with more pain than I would have liked. "Putting him down" like I can do with my dog is illegal here. That's sad. The last 6 weeks of his life was ugly/painful for him and family and friends. He was at home with hospice care with lots of morphine. Seems there must be a better, more dignified, way.
Regardless, be certain to check your life insurance policy so whatever you do doesn't prevent a payout. A late night bus accident in the rain seems the best choice from that viewpoint.
Knowing that a BS in SE can't complete a task means I'd rather not have you working for me. Which school did you attend that let you fail projects?
Sorry if this seems a grim view. I'm a practical person.
Don't kill yourself. Just don't.
Throw away all your stuff, shave your head, leave your home and your hometown, and start walking, heading in one direction. Drop your job. Stand and pee on the desk of your Boss. Run away from school. Do whatever you must, but do *not* kill yourself. It's about the stupidest thing you can do.
My Grandpa who dug the whole Nazi-Wehrmacht thing back then and went on to invade and fight on the eastern front in WW2 as a Waffen-SS Officer (Kompanieführer) gave me this advice he took home after the war: If everything you believed in is gone, the 3rd Reich, the Wehrmacht, your hometown and half of your homeland burned and lost to the russians of which a few million are now rightfull super-pissed and heading straight your way, raping and killing their way through whatever is left of the eastern german population, if your entire Kompanie is dead (two assistants aside, which got captured a few days ago) if the beloved Führer is dead (*his* beloved Füher - not mine (emphasis mine!)), Berlin is falling and you're hearing the gunfire, the Stalinorgel and their bombshells crashing in near Zossen just a few Kilometers away, your injured and they are coming to get you and they will tear you to tiny bits and pieces, and the maggots are eating away at the festering wound in your leg, your career and your life and everything you've ever believed in is basically over and out with no stone on another in bombed out Berlin for Kilometers in each direction ... if all that has and just is happening before your very eyes right here and now ... you might aswell just crawl on a few more meters and see if something interesting happens instead of putting a gun to your head.
He crawled on, found a deserted Wehrmacht horse, crawled on to its back sideways. The horse eventually rode to a gathering-camp. The nurses picked him up and the russians didn't deport him because his injuries were to severe - the lucky bastard.
Long story short, he lives to this very day (age 97) to tell us this advice. Old Type-A nazi or not, that actually *is* a very valuable advice. If *he* in that situation decided *not* to kill himself, so can you.
Bottom line:
Don't kill yourself. It's that simple.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
did anyone considers the possibility of someone suiciding him?
What? Life didn't even get interesting until I was at least 22. The best years of life are in you 30s when you have money, friends who are more than just coincidental classmates. I pity your children.
Speak for yourself buddy. See, this is what is happening here with you:
If you are making that statement while you are still in your 30s, it means you have no basis with which to say that *that* doesn't apply when we are over the 30s. In other words, you are talking crap.
If you are above your 30's, and you are saying that based on your experiences after your 30s, then that's on you. How you live and experience life at a particular age bracket is primarily a function of your choices. Granted, life can throw a curl ball, but still, we are responsible for the outcomes in our lives. So if your best years were in the 30s, I'm not sure you are that qualified to tell others about quality of life.
== BTW, I'm speaking as someone in his 40s, with better, more solid friendships, a family, more money to pursue the things he wants, and more experience to pursue better careers than during his 30s ==
That your post was voted insightful paints a very disturbing picture of those who come to this website.
after 50, you'll find that things have gotton worse; employers are no longer willing to consider you, your peers (should you HAVE a job, still) consider you an 'old fogey' and the cost of med insurance (even if you are mostly healthy) skyrockets.
lots of 'stuff' ahead of you and most of it is not all good.
And therein lies the problem. You should have seen that when you were in your late 20s, early 30s. By the 50's you shouldn't be relying on someone giving you employment, but on selling yourself and having sufficient connections and specific skills in a well-thought, well-carved niche. I know and work with people in their 50's and even 60's who would disagree with you (and have the jobs, careers and lives to prove it.)
hate to break it to you (as one who is 50, now).
aging SUCKS and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Welcome to life dude (as someone in his 40s, with parents in their late 60's/early 70s, with parents-in-law in their 80s and with co-workers and friends in their 50's and 60's, all of which will disagree with you). Life sucks at any age, but for an adult, suckage is a function of the effort we put in life and career planning. Unless you are hit with a terrible eventuality, act of God, war, sickness or some other type of life changing catastrophe, you reap what you sow (and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.)
lol that movie was complete and utter garbage
Suicide is not chemical. Believing it is, is of course, a self-reinforcing fatalistic sense of helplessness and lack of control. The belief fits perfectly with the psychological condition.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
CNN Money, basically confirms suicide from Police:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/14/technology/diaspora_cofounder_died/
"In this case it appears to be a suicide," Esparza added. "However, the medical examiner's office will make the final decision" after conducting testing."
Mod Anonymous Coward up!
Sincerely,
A.C.
And someone is claiming a suicide note was left, supposedly: http://oobly.com/2011/11/14/source-diaspora-co-founder-ilya-zhitomirskiy-left-a-detailed-suicide-note_530/
Good to know. Cultural references are always dicey.
Maybe I should have quoted Darth Vader instead. I don't think you can go wrong with a Star Wars reference. You don't know the power of the dark side!
Yeah, good luck being successful in business with that attitude.
Suicide isn't about what's happening to you, it's about what's happening inside you.
Changing everything won't stop suicidal people from killing themselves, just like non-suicidal people like you Grandfather won't kill themselves even when everything has changed for the worst.
That was the idea, but it never turned out, for whatever reason. And further, the idea was that you could run your own server and that you would get your network through federation, keeping control of your own data like friends lists. Never panned out though. I still think it could be done pretty well with Drupal, with relatively little code.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
LOL! This is a bunch of bullshit from someone who doesn't live and die off of getting as many users as possible.
But if what you're selling is something intelligent people already want to buy,
Yeah, exactly. You (if you really are someone who sells stuff, which I highly highly highly doubt) are not trying to get as many consumers as possible, you're apparently only after "intelligent people" or maybe better put "technologically savvy people", or in any case, a minority of people.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
It's a great idea, if only those people had been decent at writing halfway secure code.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well he was just a kid, after all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I understand that this guy has gone to commemorative dot com but I'm sure the networks will continue. Plug-ins are mindful, 'tors' are merely weblinks and the twil network will be a good party for the lot of them. If an RSS feed : http://feeds.wired.com/howtowiki can be used then all the better for manuals.im to be created aswell. As my friend Aaron Robinson in California says: " It's alright, people die and companies rarely do. The real test will be to see how the company weathers the coming years. It'll be interesting to see of they can avoid the pitfalls of the past when ya man wasn't at the helm. " END
Real people just die (once, and not habitually). /descriptivist idiocy in 3... 2... 1....
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/
Presumably it is very common among hard working programmers, and it can lead to immune dysfunctions, depression, and other difficulties.
Other health advice here:
http://www.changemakers.com/node/113512/comments
My heart goes out to his family and friends for his loss.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.changemakers.com/node/113512/comments
See also: http://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/bipolar-disorder-and-nutrition/
Good luck with it. Everyone has something...
Still, as I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"In the end, what I have learned about suicide is that it is ironically a hopeful act and a sign of great faith. It is hope things could get better, and faith that one's actions can make one's world a better place. Anyone even thinking of it has the seeds within themselves for something much more life-affirming. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'll copy it here:
By the way, here are some key useful health related links, and these are some of the issues I'd like to use such a system to discuss, refine, rebut, or promote.
On healthy diet:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Food-Revolution-Your-Diet-World/dp/1573244872
http://www.amazon.com/Diet-New-America-John-Robbins/dp/0915811812
Knife and blender skills for eating better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RhfAE6McrM
http://greensmoothierevolution.com/
On medically supervised fasting (both water and juice) and health:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrman-on-fasting....
http://www.healthpromoting.com/why-water-fasting
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/
And on getting enough vitamin D (in decreasing levels of recommended supplements):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d...
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
On vitamin D and pregnancy:
http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20100504/high-doses-of-vitamin-d-may-cut-...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions...
On autism and health care in general:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_...
Understanding about good and bad fats:
http://peakperformance.runnersworld.com/2011/05/may-9-the-great-fat-deba...
http://nutsci.org/2011/05/04/the-great-fat-debate/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21515108
Mental health:
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene
Treadmill workstations for computer users (but be sure to get vitamin D being indoors so much):
http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/08/the-treadmill-workstation/
http://www.squidoo.com/wal
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.