My mother was diagnosed with bone cancer and died a week later. She had been living with it for some time and just dealt with the pain until my sister made her go to a doctor. I’m not sure what the lesson is here or even if there is one but yeah, it can all happen quickly.
This is something I have seen more frequently with older people: they just suck it up either because they don't want to be a burden on others or because they have seen a lot of hardship in their lives and on that scale some pain signals don't register high enough to make a fuss about.
If there is a lesson: keep an eye on older people and be sensitive to the stuff they tend to shrug off.
The two people that died recently near me: one a bad headache, the other a sight problem in only one eye. In both cases they went to a neurologist, the cancers were both the most aggressive kind and in both cases the time between initial diagnosis and the funeral was less than three months. Very harsh stuff.
My cousin was a ER doctor. Last year, after one shift, he had some abdominal pain. One colleague offered to perform an echography and bam, there it was: renal cells cancer, with a size comparable to the kidney itself. Further tests revealed that it was already metastasized, and five months later he left us. He was 53 years old, he knew everything that was going to happen to him, and happen it did. It was not a matter of insurance or receiving more or less care, his fate was written since that damning echography.
This reads like a horror story but that's the crudeness of life and death for us. Only thing to do is medical checkups from time to time and try to live a plenty life because you may not be there after the next corner.
Unfortunately, this is the nature of the most deadly cancers. What makes them deadly is that by the time they're catchable, they're already uncontrollable. Pancreatic is in the same category because your pancreas can take a lot of punishment before it starts to fail; most pancreatic cancers are first identified by the symptoms caused by the pancreatic cells metastasizing to something that can't take that punishment and presents a malfunction you can feel more quickly.
We've investigated the feasibility of regular cancer screening for this, and the problems compound; turns out when we do regular imaging of the human body, we find out various odd morphologies are developing and dissolving all the time, and only a handful of them will ever become something the body's own immune system doesn't get on top of before it becomes an endemic problem. So "Why don't we just do regular pancreatic cancer screenings?" turns out to be harder than we want it to be, even if we could discount the cost factor.
Can you describe the sight problem in only one eye? I've had one for a while now and it's getting worse. For example, did your friend have a redder-than-usual eye?
I've already seen an optometrist and he thinks its just worsening blepharitis which I've had in both eyes for over 5 years.
Eyes are complicated! Lots goes wrong with them! I had a problem with my right eye that got worse for about 4 months, until it got to the point where it actively interfered with my work and I went to the doctor. Turned out: dry eye.
Seriously, it's bananas how much silly stuff can mess with your eyes. You can have bad-quality tears! You have, for instance, an array of little glands that secrete an oil that needs to be in your tears for them to work right. And they malfunction all the time! (That was my diagnosis but wasn't ultimately what the real problem was, which was much dumber).
Go see a doctor but also don't freak out about it. You're not going to die next week.
You don't need an optometrist, you need an ophtalmologist here. If you are unsure, check more than one specialist but that's it. There are a lot of eye conditions that do not necessarily need to be anything to stress about.
Thank you. Still not over one of these. To the point that I recently reached for the phone to give that person a call and only after getting the 'number not available' signal it clicked again. Cognitively I've long ago accepted it but in times of half-attention it goes off the rails so easily.
I use it daily and this is a good reminder to be(come) more aware of who all the people are behind the FOSS stuff that I have come to rely on for just about everything.
It's curious to think that, for many of us, the most enduring legacy of our names will be as lines in CONTRIBUTORS.txt and ghostly email addresses buried deep in git histories.
I think about this occasionally too. When I hear about people dying surrounded by their loved ones I think about whether looking at my git history would give me the same comfort. I doubt it. I'm gonna go give my kids a hug.
Hello, a other victim of Scen Guckes here. I was harassed by him multiple times while stile underage. I heard of multiple other cases like this. After one incidence which was well observated by other Hackerspace visitors I talked to the club council and they banned them. Shocked to hear, that a vim version is being dedicated for him. :0
As a doctor I wouldn't exclude the possibility that his behaviour could be influenced by the growing tumor.
Some pathologically agressive individuals who had had a long history of antisocial and criminal behaviour were later found to be genetically determined by a kind of neurotransmitter mutation(s).
Yes, this crossed my mind as well. I've seen people with brain tumors do some pretty weird stuff, sometimes long before it became apparent they had a tumor. As in: years.
Well, I (& they) personally know people who are victims of Sven’s stalker like behaviour / issues / symptoms of a bigger problem
I see that a lot of the appreciation posts are also purely anecdotal. So are we contesting whose word has more value here or what anecdotal experience is valid/invalid or appropriate to share?
When did all that happen to the person very dear to you? Here's me asking because I have a hard time imagining how a very frail person on crutches is gonna stalk someone.
There are more, see comment of sneak.
A lot of people knew, that he was a "problematic" guy. He was kicked out of a hackerspace in Berlin after he harassed a young girl. The fact that she is still affected by this incident after 10 years shows that this wasn't a minor issue.
> I don't know if it is appropriate to make a dedication to someone like this.
Sure, the quotes, how could I have been so oblivious... Then, what do you mean with "someone like this"? Why would it be inappropriate to make a dedication?
"I was just quoting someone else" is the classic cause for how misinformation/disinformation spreads on the internet.
I'm not saying you're wrong about him, I have no idea. But you're clearly amplifying and spreading the accusation. You have some responsibility to find out if it's true before doing so. Now that said, I don't want to let everyone else on here off the hook by blaming you. They also have a responsibility to take your statement with a grain of salt too. But we can only control our own behavior.
I'm not taking a position on whether we have free will or not. In fact I'm somewhat convinced that we don't ;-)
These tweets were posted today, but those of us that knew him well have known of these issues for years.
I have as a point of pride many "problematic" friends; my friendship with someone is not approval of every (or even any) action they undertake in life.
I do not approve of this dedication, as Sven was a good example of the kind of people who make the f/oss community worse, not better. We as a community can do much better than explicitly endorsing those who would cause our scene to be unsafe and unwelcoming to young women.
I don't know the first thing about him, but maybe we could honor his contributions while not giving a blanket approval of everything he ever said and did?
Or is that, like, too subtle and nuanced a concept nowadays.
One can also highlight both the good and the bad. Although my experiences with him were not as extreme as these examples, I did stop using Mutt a decade ago partially because of his behavior - he had been a liability to Mutt development for years at that point.
Obits are not meant to be honest. They are meant solely to make the people that are still alive feel better.
If we had to stop and think about death, we would have to consider our own mortality. If we had to stop and think about the poor life choices of a dead person, we would have to stop and think about our own poor life choices. We might have to consider whether we owe some kind of penance; whether our own misdeeds outweigh our good; whether someone might dig up our own past when we pass. And that's terrifying.
So obits must only say good things about the dead. We mustn't consider the true nature of a life filled with bad and good and in-between. We must instead shroud ourselves in the comforting blanket of pure nostalgia. This way we don't have to face pain, or truth, or conflict, and we can just feel a benign sad pleasure, to more easily slip back into comforting ignorance.
As an aside: Twitter is a hellscape of negativity. It could be that he also saved drowning toddlers from a river or some shit, but that isn't going to make it through the typical barrage of snide tweets. So just as much as we should consider the negative, we should consider that there's also positive. The fact that all humans are fundamentally flawed does not invalidate their good deeds, nor validate the bad. And if we try really hard, we might conclude that there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" person, but just "a person", the culmination of which cannot be put neatly into a box. Maybe then we could stop reacting so strongly to discovering that humans are indeed flawed, and that there is no shame in considering all of one's deeds, for that's where the truth of life lies.
Not condoning his behavior if these tweets are true but I think acknowledging his contributions to VIM is entirely orthogonal.
Some will think this is the same as "making it OK to be a harasser if you are l33t/important/rich/etc" but it's really not.
VIM is a community project that he dedicated significant time and effort to at his own expense. It's just like a rich donor to some hospital and getting a wing named after them, it doesn't erase their sins but it acknowledges the good that person has done in that act.
A person is more than their faults and trying to take everything good away from their memory after their death because of those faults doesn't sit right with me.
You have as a point of pride many problematic friends (which I think is great), but you shit on their memory online the day after they die?
I'm very much with you that just because someone has died doesn't mean we should whitewash their flaws and pretend they don't exist, but you've really caused me to face the full force of that opinion today :-)
If I am shitting on anything, it is the decision by people currently alive to explicitly endorse his presence in the f/oss community, which is a very poor decision in my view, given Sven's conduct within it.
Telling the truth is always appropriate.
TFA claims that "He was a good person." I do not believe that to be accurate.
I think we have diverging definitions of what the word 'friend' means.
It's possible to be someone's friend, acknowledge their wrongs and not draw attention to those wrongs in their obituary. It's one of those things that have historically been agreed upon as the proper way, in dutch we've formalized it in a proverb "Over de doden niets dan goeds.". "Nothing but good about the dead.". Simply because it is bad form to shit all over someone who isn't there to defend themselves (especially when you call them a friend) and because you never know who is going to read your writings, they might already be having a very hard day. I realize that this is too much to ask for some, but his friends should know better.
This article isn't an obit, though. Guckes is being elevated by a unique dedication for a prominent FOSS project, and such honors express the values of FOSS culture.
It serves as one because it communicates the fact of his death to a large number of people who probably were not aware of that, and I suspect this is the main reason it got posted here in the first place.
the truth is that Sven was a prolific foss contributor with a complicated history with regards to other people.
you can acknowledge both contributions & faults, erasing his history of foss contributions wouldn't be the truth -- much like labeling him as nothing more than a predator wouldn't be the truth, either.
I'm not sure what you're advocating in this memoriam thread, to be honest -- total erasure of person and non-response from the projects they were involved with?
Isn't that a similar kind of non-whole truth that you're railing against all together?
What do you mean, "I stop caring for people who do something like this?" Like literally you don't care that he died because someone on Twitter accused him of something gross? Or you don't care about his contributions to free software that improve the lives of millions of people? I'm not trying to challenge or straw-man you, I really want to understand what you mean.
I have no idea if he is guilty or not, but even still I think humans are much, much more complicated than that. If all of us are summed up and judged as "worth caring about" based on the worst things we've done (assuming he is guilty of the twitter accusation, which I have no reason to doubt but also don't accept purely on faith), I think most (all?) people will be judged worthless. I'm not trying to make the "but Hitler built the Autobahn" argument, I guess I'm more trying to understand why "hate the sin but love the sinner" has gone so out of fashion.
The phrase "something gross" is a wholly inadequate characterization of repeated written and physical sexual harassment (which is what is alleged). Minimizing it in such a way is illustrative of why the resentment is so fierce, that someone years after the fact, when they see their transgressor being honored and lionized, might be driven to stand up despite hurricane winds of opprobrium and speak out.
> I guess I'm more trying to understand why "hate the sin but love the sinner" has gone so out of fashion.
It's challenging for just about any victim to forgive their transgressor, and it's not necessarily even something we should expect and encourage. Should we insist that mugging victims hate the mugging but love the mugger? Even if the mugging dramatically changed the course of their life?
Besides, the institutional and social consequences for these "sins" are nowhere near adequate, to the extent that the environment around them greatly contributes to drumming women out of the tech industry.
It's a shame that a man's memory is being tarnished, but it will keep happening until the tech industry gets much much better at both punishing and preventing harassment — ideally stopping it before it starts.
Sven was always welcome in our hackerspace. We never had any reason to find fault with him.
Having known him, I can certainly imagine him hurting for companionship and being awkward about it.
Surprise, Sven was an imperfect human, just like everybody else.
Personally though I've NEVER observed him behaving in this way and being on the watch for such things, I would surely have talked to him about it.
Despite the problems he had to deal with (or choose to ignore ;->) (not talking about the stuff above), he dedicated his life to improve things around him the best way he could see fit.
If you had a problem with Sven and were happy enough to not speak up when he was alive,
why raise this issue only now that he is dead?
We are honouring Sven's contributions so others are inspired to be similarly helpful.
It truth this is somewhat independent of Sven as a whole. But by dragging the person he was through the mud,
you are not helping anybody or achieving anything for society.
He only harassed me inappropriately, via text and a few times physically, many years ago in #CCCB Glad that won't happen again.
Reply:
Sven Guckes was one of the great evangelists of the German open source scene. During his lifetime, there were good reasons why people wanted to dislike, shun or sometimes kick him out, but he really didn't deserve such a reaction to the obituary tweet. Take care, Sven.
Her reply:
but I deserved to be harassed as a woman, by a +20 years older guy in whom I NEVER showed interest...? To just sit on my legs at the movie Sunday, to force cuddling, although I had ignored [his] advances for months - BÄH how disgusting.
Let's not underestimate the impact that certain kinds of being "inappropriate" can have on people — the sense of powerlessness it instills, especially when the offense is dismissed and minimized by elements of the wider society. It's sad but not surprising to see this sort of response (EDIT: her response).
I'm at fault for a lack of clarity. This is a difficult and unfortunate discussion, and let's try to appreciate all of us as whole people today in the fullness of all our experiences and lives lived.
That's simply a lie. Her words support that she is happy about him not harassing anyone anymore, but not about his death per se. Which she explicitly emphasizes down the thread again.
Curious if the same people getting upset about her words were similarly upset when Richard Stallman said after hearing of Steve Job's death "I'm not glad he's dead but I'm glad he's gone".
