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Marshall Brain has died

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Re: Marshall Brain has died

#41

Post by AlphaWeaver »

StephenSmith wrote: post #30

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.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#45

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

monocasa wrote: post #6

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 low…

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.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#46

Post by ilayn »

gothink wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#47

Post by las_balas_tres »

joemazerino wrote: post #32

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?

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#49

Post by BobbyTables2 »

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.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#50

Post by rachofsunshine »

yarg wrote: post #16

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 m…

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

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