Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
"Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurturers, carers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep." - Tim Berners Lee.
Thank you for everything, Aaron.
--
Discussions at the time:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048820
Blog post in 2016 by Noah, Aaron's brother: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10881413
200 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadHe made so many kinds of contributions. He was the Erdos of his generation.
Cheers to everybody out there working on Internet freedom software. Thank you all for everything you do, next time you're at FOSDEM or browsing around some issues on github for your fav secure comms projects, let them know they are appreciated and they aren't doing this difficult work in a vacuum.
My .02 -Erik Cabetas-
- Aaron Swartz - Carl Sagan - Stephen Hawking - Paul Allen
It happened before (like Gary Webb), and sadly I'm afraid it will happen again. They (govt) seems more interested in big corp's needs than people's needs. This democracy-thing is a big lie, a facade.
RIP Aaron.
While I don't think Aaron Swartz should've been prosecuted (or at least not charged with everything they did), this statement in general is not the job of the prosecutors. If it were, then many charges would have to be dropped/reduced in the case of people with mental illness (where it's not considered part of the defense proper) or other medically compromised individuals. That's kind of an absurd position to take. If X suffers from clinical depression, but has committed (or is accused of committing) some serious crime, should the charges be reduced or the sentence reduced based on these circumstances? Or should they be charged and considered the same as anyone else would be for the same crimes?
This reeks of the same kind of abuse of prosecution as the affluenza case.
But having severe depression or being schizophrenic, on its own, is not a good justification for changing/reducing charges and consequences (sadly, consequences in the US are punishments as there's little focus on rehabilitation). If anything, it could reasonably affect the sentencing to account for the riskier consequences of placing a person with that mental condition into a medium or high security prison or general population, but not the selection of charges by the prosecutor.
Prison rape is part of the sentence, in that godforsaken country.
This is how aspies fare in the US prison system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_DeFriest
Maybe having one of the most powerful governments use its might to crush someone and make an example does that to people?
Normal people are scared of a manager, a college professor, or making a presentation; imagine how they'd feel if the U.S Government was on their case specifically.
Do you think a majority of the US opposes copyright and would not want the State to enforce it? I'm in that group, but it seems to me the overwhelming majority of people here support copyright laws and prosecutions.
But on topic: copyright that works for decades has been lobbied into existence, it's not something average people "want". So, no, I dont think most Americans want to pay for several decades of copyright enforcement. Same for software patents, or extended-length patents in general. Something like 10 years is more than enough "head start". Yay for a rich commons!!
Personally, I also find it difficult to believe that Aaron Swartz killed himself.
> Swartz’s lead defense attorney, Elliot Peters, said today that both he and Swartz rejected the plea deal offered by the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, and instead were pushing for a trial where federal prosecutors would have been forced to publicly justify their pursuit of Swartz.
First result on Google.
On the one hand, it's such a "no brainer" to take such a light sentence for what is legally such a "serious crime".
On the other hand, though, it feels ridiculous that Aaron would have been put in jail at all for what he did. I think it's fair to say he wasn't in a good place, but it's maybe a little tone deaf to say the grief of the trial and prosecution had no role in his suicide.
How is that not an effort to ruin someone’s life?
This here is really the insidious nature of what the plea bargain system has evolved into.
> On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines. During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison, if Swartz would plead guilty to 13 federal crimes. Swartz and his lead attorney rejected that deal, opting instead for a trial in which prosecutors would have been forced to justify their pursuit of Swartz
Let's be clear, this isn't "here's a slap on the wrist and we'll let it slide", this is "we're throwing the book at you on trumped up charges", and require him to plead guilty to 9 felonies to avoid a potential 50 year sentence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
They mean that if you take the maximum possible sentence that someone could get for each individual charge, and then added up all those individual maximums, you get their press release figure.
There are two big problems with that.
1. Various federal crimes are grouped for sentencing. Roughly, if one single act could be charged with N different crimes, and you are convicted for all N the sentence is not sum of the sentences for each, it is max of the sentences for each. An indictment, say, of 5 charges each with a 20 year max but that all fall in the same group would be listed as 100 years in the press release, but would really only be 20.
I find it appalling that the DoJ does not take into account grouping when writing press releases. Unlike point #2 below, grouping doesn't have much of a subjective component that won't be resolved until trial. DoJ has everything needed when they write the press release to figure out what charges group.
2. The maximum listed for each charge is what someone who committed the worst imaginable instance of that crime could get. Someone who had all the various factors that can affect sentence length go against them.
Unless you are doing your crime for a lot of money, as part of something like a drug cartel or the mob, people got physical hurt or there was a good chance they could have, you caused huge economic loses, and you have a serious prior criminal record, you ain't getting anywhere near the max.
First time offender, not for monetary gain, no one physically hurt, not doing it as part of some larger criminal enterprise? Somewhere near the low end, with a decent chance of just a few years parole instead of jail time.
Here are some articles. The first covers federal sentencing in general. The second two cover it in the context of the Swartz case and also look at each charge.
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Short ver: DoJ: either make our prosecutorial life easy or we're going to harm you way beyond what is ethical.
Long ver: DoJ: You did A. Lobbyists have composed and purchased laws against A. Those lobbyists are pressuring their legislators to have us deploy high-profile Gov revenge on their behalf.
We want to charge you with B and have you accept that w/o resistance. To that end we are charging you with B,C,D,E,J,K,L,Q,R,S,T,V,Y and some Dr. Seuss letters we came across.
> law enforcement did not drive him to suicide
People can keep repeating this, and it will still be false. LEO and Prosecutor action was the proximate cause of his actions.
You can make moral arguments that, say, the prosecutor was Just Doing His Job, and I may even agree with you. But you and everyone else are simply wrong about cause and effect, and attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation.
To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
It's fairly clear that Swartz had a history of suicidal ideation, this wasn't of the DoJs making no matter how unfairly they may have treated him.
>To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
Obviously the cause was his preexisting mental issues, a healthy individual would not kill themselves in his situation.
I am part of a support group that is dominated by people who've attempted suicide.
The words trivial and temporary don't describe any part of their journey.
What is common, is how these people were harmed by the self-interested and misguided actions of others.
Whose fault was Epstein’s suicide?
Robin William’s?
R. Budd Dwyer?
> attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation
And right on cue, here comes someone who would rather talk about Eminem and Epstein to blur the situation than talk about the actual situation.
You all know what I'm going to say here.
As for the rest, it's a fine line. There are obviously individual variances in how much it would take to push someone over the edge, I can certainly see how nine felonies would be enough in the case of Aaron's example.
I'd say no. Most of such cases, like Swartz, had existing mental conditions that are primarily responsible for their decision to commit suicide. Loss of a job may have been the event that ultimately prompted the act, but the driving factors were mental conditions. Saying that these people were driven to suicide conflates these cases with like this where someone is actively driving someone else to suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Conrad_Roy
I think it is "fair" to describe action B as following from action A, when there is good reason to consider them related.
If you revise your observations of reality based on what you fear might happen later, you're not observing reality.
http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
>The alternative sentence to consider is what Swartz would have received if he had agreed to plead guilty. According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.
It either means the deal or the max sentence is wrong.
Sidestepping the issue of the severity of his crime, the concept of "plead guilty to X and waive your rights to a fair trial" or go to a trial which is made unfair by trumped up charges (thus increasing the corresponding sentence by orders of magnitude) almost as revenge for exercising your right to a trial doesn't sound like justice to me. Either someone is guilty and the state can prove it (and is willing to expend resources to do so) or he isn't - nobody should be forced to make such a choice.
Copyright violations rarely result in prison sentences, but copyright violators are rarely seeking to violate copyright on the same scale and with the same outspoken ideological justification as Swartz.
I disagree. I'd say that Swartz's actions to try and make research freely available online (especially when said research is often funded by taxpayers and not by the copyright holders of the resulting paper) is more noble than for example pirates who publish entertainment material such as movies, music, etc.
That's a pretty extraordinary claim, as he had competent legal counsel (I think?) and they rejected it.
Frankly I don't think this situation delivers justice to neither the victim nor the defendant. If we assume the defendant is guilty, why should he be allowed to get off with a sentence that's 29 years lower than what it should be? If we assume that the defendant is not guilty, is it fair to force him to pick between a fair trial and potential 30 years of prison or 6 months without trial, given that even someone that's not guilty would most likely take the deal and this perverts the course of justice by essentially jailing people based on mere allegations without a trial?
Those people either don't know what they're talking about or are deliberately seeking to mislead.
>According to Swartz’s defense attorneys, prosecutors claimed that they thought the judge might impose a Guidelines sentence as much as 7 years if Swartz went to trial and was convicted. That’s consistent with a loss valuation in the range of millions of dollars. In contrast, Swartz’s lawyers thought that Swartz might get just probation, which is consistent with a loss calculation at or less than $10,000.
http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
>So, realistically, Swartz was facing anything from probation to a few years in jail if he went to trial — depending largely on how you value the loss he caused — and either a 4 months in jail or 0-6 months in jail if he pled guilty.
This is a memorial thread with a bias to grieving and celebrating Aaron. By making your points, others appear to assume you're criticizing him for taking his life (which is not your intent or how I perceive your stance).
If you haven't watched it, I'd recommend watching "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz". [1] It's a bit difficult to watch it more than once or twice. It'll leave you sad and angry.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy
Indeed.
I often wonder how he would feel, not just about censorship there, but about the direction the entire Internet has taken in regards to censoring of content. I can't - and wouldn't - speak for him, but I would be supremely interested in his thoughts.
Donald Trump was an incompetent, by almost any measure you want to use. However, he shifted the Overton Window dramatically. When the Republican version of Barack Obama bursts onto the scene - someone eloquent, competent, and thoroughly able to move effectively in the political sphere, there could be a very real problem for Democrats.
GOP has to somehow consolidate Trumpists with Never Trumpers, may be tricky to do. How will independents respond to GOP after Trump is finished? Will they forgive and forget?
So, in my view, both parties need to adapt or they will not achieve that much. Imagine if Dems had 49 senators, how little would get done in Biden's term, indeed that may be the case after midterms.
0: https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for supper. Several Federalist papers are dedicated exclusively to this idea and the problems of previous democracies. Defending minorities (specifically religious minorities) was the primary reason for going with a Constitutional Republic instead.
The Senate was a similar concession that smaller or less populous states deserved equal voice to larger states. I'd note that if slavery were the reason for the formation, then the Senate would have been a bad idea as it stripped power away from the Southern states (as that article points out, Virginia alone had more than 10% of the total House votes).
Its true that with the apportionment of House votes in the Constitution, the Senate (by comparison) had weaker representation of the South (30.8% in the Senate, 35.4% in the House), but, as with terms explicitly protecting slavery, the concern wasn’t for the immediate effect, but as insurance against trends that were already apparent with the expected internal and external expansion of the US and its political development.
With the first Congress seated after the apportionment due to the 1790 Census (which included Kentucky, admitted in 1792), the Senate already was slightly more favorable to the South than the House (the South had 38.4% of the Senate and 37.1% of the House). With the Congress seated after the 1800 apportionment, the South had 46.1% of the Senate, and 39.0% of the House.
The idea that the Senate would have been a “bad idea” in terms of political power in the South assumes that no one at the time of the Constitution had even considered the possibility of thinking a few years down the road.
They fail to recall that this was actually a political route for Democrats. Democrats lost seats in the House when they were expected to gain. They eked out parity in the Senate that probably disappears in 2 years. More importantly, they lost almost all state government races.
Remember, Trump's biggest policy positions (bring our troops home, bring our jobs back, hard on china, the wall, etc) were all Democrat positions a mere 5-7 years ago. Now that the Republicans have taken over those more centrist ideas, they have gained a huge number of supporters.
The Democrats are fractured between centrists and progressives. That fracture is much worse than the Republicans because it is ideological while the Republican fracture is a cult of personality.
Trump will fade. Another person will replace him. They will have all of his populism and charm (yes, he's a natural entertainer). They won't have his rude abrasiveness. He'll then have the majority needed to censor the other side now that the Republicans have decided they agree with the progressives on that point.
>>Democrats seem to assume that those 75M people will suddenly change their beliefs
as long as 78M people continue to hold their beliefs, I really don't think the democrats care. A minority vote is a minority vote - whether its 4.9 percent or 49 percent. Personally, I think the dems will work more towards eliminating the EC and gerrymandering thats gone against them.
edit: change second '4.9' to '49'. I really need more coffee..
If you're anything but a very centrist Democrat, this should scare the crap out of you.
Though “you should be scared because what has been happening to the Left longer, and much more severely, than to the Right might happen to you” is a pretty common propaganda theme directed at the Left by the Right recently.
Unlike the Right, which has had an existence of extreme privilege where even the KKK got a pass on government scrutiny because it was valued loyal organization around the same time that the second big round of government institutionalized anti-Communist hysteria, the Left has been built around organizations to route around establishment suppression for over a century.
And most people to the left of center-right neoliberal Democrats are quite aware of that.
But yes, you're right that the left is the source of private censorship for a long time, which is why lemmy is developped by a lot of leftists, for example. If they're ready to ban a right wing president though, I can imagine how severe the crackdown on the left would be.
They have fewer voters.
Fewer people identify with them.
Fewer people support their policies.
If Democrats can continue to get voters out, like in GA, they will lose seats.
It might be interesting to re-evaluate whether representation by geography still makes sense. I'm more partial to the parliamentary approach, where parties get representation proportional to votes cast for them, so this way there could be a "rural interests party" which rural voters could vote for and receive representation proportional to their population. This might also do an end-run around the mind-bogglingly corrupt practice of gerrymandering?
Apparently this was a big 'issue' in the 80's, when the US government usage was "Utahan" or "Utahian," while the local usage was "Utahn." Webster's currently lists "Utahan" as the correct usage, as far as I can tell (their website is trash - searching for "Utahan" and "Utahn" just redirects to the "Utah" entry.
[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2016/pdf...
How will they be able to deplatform that? Are you endorsing deplatforming anyone to the right of Joe Biden?
Just remember back to how the media and establishment pulled together to stop Bernie during the primaries. Think this new tool won't be used the next time they're in danger of losing power to an outsider?
Y'all think "it's both sides" but, in America, this call to violence (straight up armed insurrection) is unique in right wing politics. And if it showed up in the Left I wouldn't tolerate it.
Show me someone on the right who was deplatformed who didn't preach hate.
What's that feminist lady who literally got banned for saying, "Men are not women."? I forget her name. I'm waiting for Joanne Rowling to get deplatformed for having the audacity to think that there's a portion of transgender men who are using certain aspects of the left's current moral panicking to infiltrate women's spaces.
How dare she have an opinion that's critical of ... shuffles cards... whatever group we feel the need to swoop in and save to assuage our guilt for being the world's most successful society!
As soon as you take the position that words can no longer be exchanged, the only other option you've left open is violence.
This isn't - or at least shouldn't - be hard to understand.
I experience linear time, how about you?
Donald Trump directed a mob to storm the Capitol while they were certifying election results, the ensuing riot led to at least five deaths.
He is being deplatformed because of the impending threat of violence he presents. This isn't a hypothetical situation - he held a rally, incited a riot, and people died.
This is about a TOOL. You don't have to use a tool the same way every time.
Is that really the case with Facebook, Twitter, et al.? Didn't Facebook and Twitter have favorable standing with Trump's administration (vis a vis keeping Trump on the platform despite his violating their ToS repeatedly)?
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+twitter+violations+%22...
"When the looting starts, the shooting starts" came to mind (you have to go to archive.org to view it, which is kinda sad in a way... are videos of the 3rd Reich next to go?):
https://web.archive.org/web/20200701003329/https://www.latim...
Can anyone come up with one?
The supreme irony of this is that Aaron's role as a co-founder has long been censored from Reddit's founders page [0], despite agreements to the contrary [1].
More generally, Aaron had strong views on censorship [2]:
> I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug – that we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent, we should fight back – both politically through protest and technologically through software like Tor...
> How is compromising [by a technology company on censorship] supposed to bring greater freedom in the long run? That’s like saying “I’m going to beat you up now so that you don’t have to be hit as much in the long run.” The right answer is to stop beating people up.
But I do think that physical violence resulting in part from the amplification of voices by algorithm would have been hard to foresee. I too would be curious if his thinking would have evolved. Sadly, we'll never know.
[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...
[2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html
PG's opinion: "Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders. The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company."
Something that always seems to be accepted without question in these conversations is that censoring violent language will reduce violent behaviour.
Are we sure this is the case? For example, if you believed the election was stolen and all the platforms which would allow you discuss this civilly have banned you and those who think like you - what do you do?
Sometimes I wonder if restricting peoples ability to express themselves freely (and also talking about them like they are scum for holding certain view points) might actually motative some number of people to make their voices heard through acts of violence.
I also dislike how I've been pushed on to what I'd consider extremist platforms in recent months because a few people I follow have been banned from platforms like Twitter and YouTube. I think I'm strong minded enough to resist the constant bombardment of anti-semitic and racist content I am now exposed to, but I suspect some people are likely to be radicalised by this.
----
To your point though, I often wonder how Aaron would have felt about the internet today. I've seen many people's opinions on free speech change over the years (including my own). Tech platforms when they were the underdogs were overwhelming in favour of free speech - I know early on Reddit and Twitter explicitely expressed their support of freespeech. But in recent years they have become far more powerful and it would seem their opinion on what they will allow us to say has now changed. Ironically they've moved so far on this that if Twitter, Facebook or YouTube were started today they would probably be shut down because of how much extremist content they platform - I remember there was a time when Reddit was full of child porn and even allowed a subreddit dedicated to it to operate.
I guess we'll never know how Aaron would have felt about all of this, but I know if there was anyone would could have proposed a workable solution it would have been him. It's a great shame he's no longer around to contribute to the future of the internet in the same way he did the internet of the past.
I don’t know if any research has been done on this, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that a normalization effect happens so that more exposure to certain modes of discourse change how you think about them. Our minds are not under our conscious control, even if we would prefer that they are.
I suspect that our president’s mode of discourse has dramatically shifted what is seen as acceptable in a lot of people, for instance.
Why isn't that a rational response? Many of Trump's actions were wrong. However, he got away with them, and acceptable and normal are about what you can get away with, not what's right.
People do not get banned simply for being a member of a political party, people get banned for spreading hate and inciting violence. Maybe you should reconsider who you follow if the people you follow wallow in hate and bigotry?
Why doesn't the party of individual responsibility doesn't seem to understand you can just stop following the hate? Seek out and follow reasonable voices. But I'm afraid the whole appeal is more emotional resonance more than reason.
Tolerating hateful violent rhetoric will not de radicalize anyone.
There are a LOT of facets to an answer to that, but one that is entirely enabled by the technology industry is the concept of an algorithmic news feed promoting unsolicited content from not-yet-followed sources, especially when that algorithm is based on a function of "all of your activity over an extended period of time" and "the activity of people you interact with but whose views you never explicitly endorsed."
You cannot simply "just stop following the hate" when the hate is repeatedly shoved down your throat daily in conspicuous "join this group" ads in Facebook. And this is far, far more prominent than we had believed, per https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-platforms-must-pay-for-t... :
> Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it. Facebook has also acknowledged that pages and groups associated with QAnon extremism had at least 3 million members, meaning Facebook helped radicalize 2 million people.
The frustrating thing about conversations about censorship on platforms is that you're not starting from a baseline of neutrality, because the algorithm itself is picking winners even if it wasn't coded that way. Any algorithm that takes engagement-after-clicking-a-promotion as an input will start to take advantage of people who are more susceptible to extremist content. Knowing what we know now, does the continued deployment of those algorithms constitute intentional corporate speech that emphasizes extremism? And in that case, would the removal or manual tuning of said corporate speech really be the censorship we're worried about?
Are we sure this is the case?
Yes, there have been studies on the correlation and causative links between the two. Ethical experimentation to prove causation definitively is difficult to say the least, but there have been various "natural experiments" that can be learned from.
At the very least, an extreme skeptic would still have to grudgingly acknowledge that violent speech is a leading indicator for violent behavior, and that interventions that reduce violent speech also reduce violent behavior, but the evidence is strong that the link goes beyond mere correlation. Here is one recent study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2013.85...
A quote from the abstract: "Across all three experiments, mild violent metaphors multiply support for political violence among aggressive citizens, especially among young adults."
Not really a surprising result, but those who wish to employ violent speech for their own ends are of course quite resistant to the notion that there is a cause and effect link to be found.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com
Well, yeah, but he had perfectly valid external reasons to be extremely stressed and sad. He succumbed to the FBI ruining his life because they're mostly corrupt authoritarian assholes with their own agenda that has nothing to do with "justice" or even what the "wronged" in this case wanted.
I see that "anyone" to you is "any leftist". The internet has sent a very clear and unmistakable signal this past week that the voices of anyone else are not welcome.
Please, if you’re feeling anything along those lines, at least try some antidepressants. What have you got to lose? You have your whole life to gain.
I miss Aaron. I ended up using some code by him a couple months ago, which made me smile. It’s still the best library for the job, nearly a decade later.
https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i65
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353604/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Antidepres...
Eli Lilly notoriously buried the evidence of this from their own trials.
Not really sure how to proceed knowing it can make the situation worse for some people though. Perhaps I’ll cite your comment in the future; thanks.
It's a sticky situation for sure. Maybe it's unethical to tell people this, knowing it will worsen their clinical outcomes? I think HN can handle it, but I probably wouldn't tell this to somebody irl who is struggling with mental health issues and considering antidepressants.
Paradoxically, starting an antidepressant regimen can increase the odds of suicide for some people. The mechanism seems to be something like "doesn't completely cure your depression, but makes you un-depressed enough to actually act on suicidal ideation."
This is why any competent psychiatrist will pair getting started on antidepressants with an increase in vigilance of the patient.
One of those rare, brilliant lights in the world who left way, way, way too soon.
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2A6HM9B19FOPW/
So, concluding my train of thought, this insight about the intersection of technical beings with highly political, motivated by high morals... it is, indeed, very rare and fascinating.
https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=the%20internet%20own%2...
This was unfortunately one of the many casualties in the war the Obama DoJ raged on the country. It's unconscionable.
RIP Aaron. You will be missed forever and it is a loss for humanity.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
Such a sad loss.
The thing which shocked me equally was Reddit removing him from the official "about us"[1] as a co founder. As if he never existed in Reddit's history.
1: https://www.redditinc.com/#section-4
I didn't know it then, but didn't have as big of a role in founding reddit as people usually think, and his activism was so obviously illegal.