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Tom Lord has died

berkeleydailyplanet.com

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Re: Tom Lord has died

#71

Post by pgeorgi »

kevinburke wrote: post #31

> speaking the truth about the climate emergency and treating it as an actual emergency. Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels,[1] and opposing changes that would help move things in the right direction climate-wise, such as building more in-fill housing in Berkeley, because some other action (say, convincing peo…

> I'm surprised to learn that he was a valued member of an open source community

He wasn't without controversy, even at a time when the free software culture was even less interested than today in being nice when you could be right[tm] instead.

But let's leave it at that here.

Re: Tom Lord has died

#72

Post by jeffbee »

harry8 wrote: post #56
ianai wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is the point of death the right point to these grievances? Like wait a day or month even. I get that some grievances don’t need to wait (Limbaugh) but it’s a high bar.

Separate issue but an interesting one, basically revolves around good manners. a) Don't recall someone's blemishes while their family is grieving because that would be and is (if they see/hear it) unpleasant for them at a difficult time. Especially if the passing was unusually more tragic than "died while still mentally sharp and enjoying things of extreme old age in bed surrounded by loving children and grandchildre…

FYI Tom Lord was indeed an official of the city of Berkeley, having been appointed to certain boards and commissions, from which he eventually had to be removed for violating the Brown Act and making various outbursts.

The reason it makes sense to discuss this aspect of his life is the article isn’t in some neutral news outlet, it is in the mouthpiece of the population-controlling degrowth philosophy that Lord advocated. He sincerely believed that building housing in Berkeley encourages population growth and that not building it could control the population. In this way he was a kind of useful idiot for the real estate investors who control the city.

Re: Tom Lord has died

#73

Post by jeffbee »

m0llusk wrote: post #44
worik wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

. [1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior That is not a source. That is a personal opinion reported. Politics. Bullshit. Together forever

By law these meetings have minutes recorded and made available to the public. If you really want to confirm the situation for yourself the messy details are likely missing from this record while the situation in general is reasonably well presented.

Some of the greatest hits are missing specifically because Lord was a repeat violator of the Brown Act, the "sunshine law" of California.

Re: Tom Lord has died

#74

Post by harry8 »

jeffbee wrote: post #72
harry8 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separate issue but an interesting one, basically revolves around good manners. a) Don't recall someone's blemishes while their family is grieving because that would be and is (if they see/hear it) unpleasant for them at a difficult time. Especially if the passing was unusually more tragic than "died while still mentally sharp and enjoying things of extreme old age in bed surrounded by loving children and grandchildre…

FYI Tom Lord was indeed an official of the city of Berkeley, having been appointed to certain boards and commissions, from which he eventually had to be removed for violating the Brown Act and making various outbursts. The reason it makes sense to discuss this aspect of his life is the article isn’t in some neutral news outlet, it is in the mouthpiece of the population-controlling degrowth philosophy that Lord advoca…

>>He seems knowledgeable, kind, humane, subtle, intelligent and has very interesting things to say.

>In this way he was a kind of useful idiot for the real estate investors who control the city.

This comment doesn't seem like it lives up to the quality of Tom's HN comments. I would object equally if you were described as a "useful idiot" to those who seek to benefit from property development or own land capable of being developed . Noting that I don't care if either or both of you are "wrong", as I don't care at all about Berkeley politics and planning.

If I did I would listen to Tom and his reasoning as I read his HN comments. That is with interest, more so that he has a very different point of view to mine. With that view well thought out and well expressed seemingly motivated by more than pure self-interest.

The same might well be true of yourself but that isn't obvious to me yet.

Re: Tom Lord has died

#75

Post by apgwoz »

pgeorgi wrote: post #70
vintermann wrote: post #67

I have a request for hacker news, in remembering Tom Lord: do you have any of his code lying around? It's hard to find. In addition to GNU arch, I know he once worked on these things: * a c library called hackerlab * a Scheme implementation called Pika Scheme * a regular expression library called rx (may have been renamed to rgx) * an embeddable VM called Furth * a graph reduction engine/functional language runtime o…

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://regexps.srparish.net/src... has a few versions of hackerlab and pika. hackerlab is also part of tla distributions (since the latter uses the former extensively) hackerlab contains (some version of) rx.

A few of those links lead to actual tarballs, but sadly, the pika one does not. :(
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