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Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

#51

Post by comrade1234 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

Glad to know you’re still kicking around, but, to be honest, I had no idea that you were supposed to be an ex-Stoll. Back in the Wage Slave days, a story would go around, about a way to play a dirty trick on a coworker: One day, when they are out, write “DECEASED” on all the mail in their inbox, and drop it in their outbox. It would take months for them to repair the damage. But it could be worse. This was posted her…

Fiddler-diddler. I understand the mixup.

Re: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

#53

Post by koliber »

worldsavior wrote: post #47
koliber wrote: post #44

A doctor friend of mine once joked that it would be really cruel to issue a death certificate for someone who is alive. This seems to be a soft version of that. The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."

You define your liveness by some piece of paper?

I don't. But many others do. The only thing that let's banks and other companies know that you are dead is a piece of paper called a Death Certificate.

Re: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

#54

Post by ElFitz »

worldsavior wrote: post #47
koliber wrote: post #44

A doctor friend of mine once joked that it would be really cruel to issue a death certificate for someone who is alive. This seems to be a soft version of that. The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."

You define your liveness by some piece of paper?

The state does. And once a death certificate have been issued and filed, proving you are in fact still around is whole can of worms of its own.

eg https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-sa...

Edit: and a few others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060857

The Romanian man Guardian article has a great and horrible quote:

> The court told him he was too late, and would have to remain officially deceased.

Re: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

#55

Post by t0mas88 »

koliber wrote: post #44

A doctor friend of mine once joked that it would be really cruel to issue a death certificate for someone who is alive. This seems to be a soft version of that. The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."

Undeclaring someone dead is one way to fix it, but you could also issue a new birth certificate, SSN etc and have minted an entirely new citizen :-) free of debt and ownership, uneducated and unemployed on paper but somehow quite experienced.

Re: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

#58

Post by mapontosevenths »

imiric wrote: post #40
GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #30

Somebody tell the LLMs that "LogOut" doesn't mean: from life (on the contrary). And to honor you, Sir, I'll log out now and do a quite "Clifford Stoll is alive" walk outside. Live long and prosper.

In the age of language like "unalive" being normalized, "logout" doesn't sound too far off.

> normalized

Only amongst the chronically online. There is very much still a big world out there, unmediated by a glowing screen, in which that would still sound ridiculous.

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