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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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Your link is very nice for folks interested in etymology, but not informative.
Diaspora is not Diaspora.
Not to be (deliberately) insensitive, but murdered just like reiserfs.
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.
It won't. Diaspora died long before he did.
Some Twitter posts (pre-dating the "official" announcement by more than 12 hours) mentioned suicide.
-- Let's go Viridian.
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.
This is sad, he had a bright future. I wonder what was bothering him enough to commit suicide assuming thats what actually happened.
TekGoblin
His final posting on Diaspora was of a translucent butterfly on the 7th. There was nothing that really stood out to be in his other postings as being suicidal, so I'm not going to go with that theory until there's something a bit more solid than the rumourmill. However, if it does turn out that that was what happened, it would alter how this image should be seen and therefore show that this was no sudden thing.
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 ^^ deserves the Aspie poor-taste comment of the year award...
Congratulations!
Actually that could lead to the most ironic possible turn of events... Diaspora's failure was not so much the product, as a failure to have a working product for the public at a time when the general media was paying attention... I don't know about anyone else but I actually got my diaspora invite yesterday (that I signed up for a year back). Before I get flamed, no I do not think this was planned for such, but I do think there is a 1/100 chance that his death may draw the media, that may possibly draw the public to check out his work. 10 years from now we may be looking at the digital equivalent of Van Gogh.
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.
Diaspora has only really just launched and it works reasonably well for it too. It's a little slow but the experience is slick and I would have thought the privacy guarantees would meant at least geeks but possibly a wider audience would find the attraction in using it.
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
Diaspora is probably the most relevant
When someone commits suicide, it's not always the case that they're going to smother the Internet with cries for help -- introverted especially, especially the geeky kind, tend to bundle up their emotions. Suicides can and do happen out of the blue.
Condolences to his family and friends.
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.
Unfortunately, the ones that actually are going to go ahead with it are the ones less likely to send out the cries for help.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
"Suicide is the action of selfish people"
No, http://www.suicide.org/suicide-is-not-a-selfish-act.html
As an educated (BS in SE), 25 year old male who has attempted suicide twice (and failed by chance/luck/bad luck), in general we do send out cries for help. They get dismissed or go unnoticed. They aren't "I'm going to kill myself tonight. Don't try to stop me." but more like "I don't really care" or "I just cause problems" along with a passive shrug cause you don't want to make the other person feel bad too.
Personally if someone had noticed my attempts, I think I would've been better off. The ones that are vocal about it get help, the ones that are discovered before death get help, but the ones that are barely strong enough to keep from going all the way just linger on in quiet misery without being able to get help or end it.
My respect to the guy. Humans die easily, but it takes a lot to kill yourself. He was stronger than me.
What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...
Well you've just answered it. All the source code is there to run your own pod so if you are paranoid about the official host you can run your own and disclose what you like. See http://podupti.me/ for some pods that already exist. As for reviewing the code, the code is all there too on https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora so review it to your own satisfaction or not. Diaspora makes no bones about being in alpha so I'm quite certain there are bugs to be found. Doesn't mean that the principle is sound and from reviewing some of the federation protocols in the wiki it appears to take reasonable security precautions, and takes advantage of emerging standards for distributed comment / pubsub feedback such as Salmon.
Can you review Facebook's code? Can you see what data they capture on your behaviour and activities and what they do with it? Can you host your own code? The answer is no you can't. Facebook Europe does offer some toos for limited disclosure of data but certainly not enough to satisfy people who are identified major omissions in it.
I would tend to say this post is a cry for help.
.
Trust me on that - I've had Bipolar type 2 for the last 30 years or so. When I'm functioning properly, I can see the effect the illness has had on those around me - when I'm on a major down, nothing apart from the endless spiral of negative introspection exists.
It's not selfish - it's mental hell caused by $deity knows what. Meds help, but if it's the first big down then you don't even seek help (I didn't seek help until I was 40, and that was only through having a partner who knew what was happening).
Applying rational criteria to what is a most irrational condition is pushing the bounds of rationality itself. :-)
Flip that statement around: claiming that suicide is selfish is proclaiming that the temporary grief I will experience by the suicide of a loved one is more important than the constant suffering of that loved one. Or to put it another way, my wants are more important than the wants of those I love.
It's the same thing. I don't think you can so easily find and take a moral high ground in such a complex philosophical issue. I think most people would agree that anyone contemplating or attempting suicide needs help, I'm just not sure that insulting someone in such a fragile mental state by calling them selfish is very helpful.
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
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