The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff

http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html

by smokinn • 17 years ago

126 84 17 years ago

fogus• 17 years ago

I shudder to think how much chatter this is going to generate. Zed bashing on _why... worlds collide. The only thing that would be better is if he somehow brought up Erlang in the argument.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Learn You Some Buddha For Great Good, Biatch, by Zed Shaw.

shabda3• 17 years ago

Yes, we should be discounting everything Zed Shaw says, instead of arguing things on merit. I for one think Zed is right this time.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Except that Zed isn't "bashing", he's making an intelligent, measured well thought-out argument - for once. Perhaps the only thing that will happen is the brains of those expecting insanity will explode...

unalone8• 17 years ago

He's bashing. Calls _why Jonathan instead of giving him the courtesy of an alias, presumes to know _why's motives, calls him names repeatedly.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

To me, that’s fucked up, and something only an obnoxious Nihilist would do. A Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone.

If you think this is measured I would hate to see your definition of intemperate.

die_sekte2• 17 years ago

Zed, while offending, at least cares about other people. _why does not.

Edit: Woah, controversial comment.

Let me rephrase that: Zed cares more than _why about his projects' afterlife.

unalone8• 17 years ago

Which is an entirely different claim to make.

Zed likes pretending that he knows _why's name is Jonathan, when in fact every person here who knows _why says it isn't, and when _why didn't like people speculating about his name to begin with. So Zed's a dick, too, and, typical of Zedshawism, he doesn't get his facts right, choosing instead to trust a specious Wordpress blog whose author is both unknown and a dick himself.

_why never said he was Buddhist. _why said nothing. The rest is speculation. So judging his philosophy is a little bit stupid as well.

I agree with your second statement, which is that _why didn't treat his projects well. But Zed isn't talking about other people. Zed's talking about himself, as always. He's no Jason Scott, who devotes his life to archiving other people's work. Instead, without anything to go on, he calls _why a nihilist (only for him it's a capital-N Nihilist), a "Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone," which is pretty offensive in my book. He also calls _why a dick (er, he calls "Jonathan" a dick), and he talks about how he's better than _why because he left up his code after insulting the entire community.

I don't know if we'll ever hear _why's story, but I'm going to give him the benefit of a little doubt. I won't lie, though: I think the guy had every right to remove himself from the Internet. I'd understand his motivation in removing everything, suddenly, without warning. Hell, the only reason I still have this HN account is that there's no option to delete on this site. And leaving gradually isn't leaving. Even when he completely vanished people made it a drama: If he'd announced this a week ago, we'd have had a week's extra drama.

So maybe Zed cared about his projects more than _why, but he doesn't care about people. He cares about pretending he knows shit about philosophy and psychology, and, stripped-down theme or no, about Zed's So Fucking Awesome, enough that his ego gets to influence every story he decides to force himself on. That's not caring about people, especially not caring in the way _why did.

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

Zed's material on Buddhism was a response to John Resig's "Eulogy to _why" in-which he excuses _why's behavior with an analogy to a Buddhist tradition.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

"and, stripped-down theme or no, about Zed's So Fucking Awesome"

I agree with this. Zed's persona has really not changed all that much since dropping the ZSFA theme. Fewer swear words, but the same basic philosophy and outlook on life shines through both before and after.

jhancock• 17 years ago

well said. I have no idea why _why did this, but its fine and I wish him well. _why knows all his public works are easily findable. He knows he didn't remove them from the world, he just removed himself from them. Maybe he won the lottery and can afford to buy as much drawing supplies as he needs and wants a clean break in life. His actions render no meaningful interpretation of his beliefs or motivation.

If I win the lottery, in whatever form, I'm not hanging out on the internet anymore either!!!

teh_pete• 17 years ago

I don't know why everyone thinks all of _why's code is gone, which is Zed's main complaint. He left his Rubyforge page up, with all of his code, and anything your project depended on can still be installed. He also had it all on github, so anyone with a checkout has full commit history.

bmelton2• 17 years ago

That may be true, but tryruby.hobix.com is GONE, and that is a travesty of the highest proportions.

That was the page I learned my first bits of Ruby on. That was the page I introduced 8 friends to Ruby for the first time. It was the page I single-handedly got our contract renewed, by proving a piece of functionality was possible and easily done.

I think for many, it was an easy way in to Ruby. Someone must replace this immediately.

pygy• 17 years ago

There was a tryruby repository at Github, but I don't know if it was all that was needed to run it.

One of the things that bother me more is the fact that he also pulled the plug on all the mailing list of his projects, which would have been the right place to discuss what to do with the code.

shabda3• 17 years ago

I dont follow or use _why's work, but if used I would be pretty angry with him. Sure with DVCS there I have full commit history, but, now there is no centralised place to send patches, and take the development forward. There is going to be commotion for a long time before things settle down, and if my business and livelihood depended on it, you can bet I would be searching him to give him a piece of my mind.

Just think how would you feel if the Rails or Django guys decided to take everything down. You have the full commit history, if you had cloned the Github repo, so why do you care?

icey3• 17 years ago

I liked the part where Zed suddenly thinks it's important to play nice.

req2• 17 years ago

You're conflating the niceness of calling someone a ninny and the niceness of kidnapping someone's nanny.

edit: I'm not sure what the issue is- it's clear there is a difference between material niceness and immaterial niceness, and Zed, to my knowledge, has never been materially unnice.

prospero2• 17 years ago

My take is that Zed thinks there are some things that transcend personal issues, which doesn't seem to be a sudden development.

icey3• 17 years ago

Didn't Zed just have a whole essay about how it's the author's right to do what they want to with their code [1]? _why had absolutely zero obligation to anybody with his contributions.

People should be allowed to take things offline if they choose to, it's laughable that Zed is suddenly high and mighty because someone took their ball and went home.

[1] http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html

antonovka6• 17 years ago

Zed Shaw trying to leverage more attention on the back of _why's mysterious disappearance. It's as saccarine and transparent as Crystal Pepsi.

[Edit] I'm being downvoted into oblivion. Answer me this -- Shouldn't Zed Shaw be contacting _why directly and privately first, rather than posting this publicly shaming and incredibly presumptuous article? What possible benefit is there here?

Given that Zed offhandedly switches between _why and 'Jonathan', he must know _why, right?

die_sekte2• 17 years ago

I assume that it has gotten a little bit impossible to contact _why.

antonovka6• 17 years ago

Zed didn't seem to try very hard before assuming the mantle of Internet Behavior and Buddhist Philosophy Police.

[Edit] The downvotes truly boggle my mind. Since when did it become socially acceptable to public dress down a software community member without any facts, evidence, or corroborating information? Zed Shaw is trolling. He has nothing in the game (he 'cut all ties' to Ruby, remember?), no relation to _why, and no reason to be publishing invective from his bully pulpit other than a desire to inject himself into the conversation.

He doesn't know what happened to _why, or what _why has planned, or whether the code is gone for good.

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

"Johnathan, I truly hope you’re doing alright, but that was a dickhead thing to do."

Extremely judgmental especially since open source offers no warranties or guarantees and implicit in this is the very real possibility of the code simply disappearing. It isn't like there is some contract (social or otherwise) that requires people to leave their code up online.

cwan• 17 years ago

Yeah, that's fine, but if you think of open source as an intellectual gift of sorts, isn't what he did sort of like giving a kid a chocolate bar and yanking it away and throwing it in the trash mid bite?

unalone8• 17 years ago

That's why it's stupid to think of open source as a gift. It's great, but you're not entitled to it.

icey3• 17 years ago

Wouldn't it be more like giving away the recipe and then taking it back?

The philosophy of DVCS is that people should have copies of the recipe anyways.

anatoly• 17 years ago

Shorter Zed Shaw: "It annoys me that you're all talking about _why instead of talking about me, what I believe, what I did for the Ruby community, and how I left it. I'm going to try and change that."

antonovka6• 17 years ago

I'm going to keep tilting at the windmill, here. Why are you downvoting these comments? How is Zed Shaw not simply trying to insert himself in the debate with base presumptions about _why and his motivations or the cause of his disappearance?

ynniv2• 17 years ago

Zed is making the same comments that I would, so I upvote. Simple as that.

GHFigs4• 17 years ago

I downvoted the parent for snarky ad hominem that adds nothing to the site. I downvoted this comment for complaining about comment voting and perpetuating the notion that voting should be about whether you agree or disagree with it. They are just bad comments.

dylanz2• 17 years ago

I'm assuming _why kept the free stuff up, but took down the stuff he had to pay for? I'd probably do that as well. Monthly hosting fee's and domain name uptake can be a PITA, and a money sink.

steveklabnik6• 17 years ago

He did delete his Twitter and his GitHub, so it wasn't just paid for things.

dylanz2• 17 years ago

Gotcha. Well, no harm in deleting your own Twitter account. It may be that he was on a paid plan at Github (personally, I'm on the $7/mo plan), and just deleted it instead of downgrading? You "can" downgrade accounts though, for what it's worth.

shabda3• 17 years ago

There would be a few hundered people here on HN who would be glad to hosts _why's code/site/whatever.

bballant3• 17 years ago

Zed will never understand _why and his simplistic depiction (not understanding) of Buddhism is a testament to this. Moreover he doesn't recognize _why as an artist. He does this in numerous ways but the most obvious and most gauche is the refusal to call _why by his name, which is _why, not Jonathan. In doing so, Zed pulls why out of his world and into his own, which is not an artist's world, and then judges _why. This is unfair to _why in the extreme.

It reminds me of an essay by Henry Miller called "Creative Death" which may help explain _why to those of us who can't understand the state of mind and the motivation of an artist like _why. Here are some excerpts, which run to the end of this post:

For the artist in man is the undying symbol of the union between his warring selves. Live has to be given meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. Something has to be created, as a healing and goading intervention, between life and death…

The process is a long and devious one. It is all a conquest of fear…

His war with reality is a reflection of the war within himself…

The ideas which germinate in the artist are unique and must be lived out. He is the sign of Fate itself, the very symbol of destiny. For when, by living out his dream logic, he fulfills himself through the destruction of his own ego, he is incarnating for humanity the drama of individual life which, to be tasted and experienced, must embrace dissolution…

It is what Nietzche described as the fusion in one being of two divergent streams–the Apollonian dreamer type and the ecstatic Dionysian…

pyre2• 17 years ago

> Zed will never understand _why and his simplistic depiction (not understanding) of Buddhism is a testament to this. Moreover he doesn't recognize _why as an artist. He does this in numerous ways but the most obvious and most gauche is the refusal to call _why by his name, which is _why, not Jonathan. In doing so, Zed pulls why out of his world and into his own, which is not an artist's world, and then judges _why. This is unfair to _why in the extreme.

On the other hand, _why is just an online persona created and portrayed by an actual person. When he says "I truly hope that Jonathan is ok," he's referring to the actual person, not to the online persona... The persona is fictional. A farce. A farce in the name of art, but a farce nonetheless.

It would be like Zed trying to talk about the guy behind 'Fake Steve Jobs' by constantly referring to him as 'Fake Steve Jobs' rather than by his real name, Daniel Lyons. If I said, "I hope that Fake Steve Jobs is in a good frame of mind," most people will not take that to mean, "I hope that Daniel Lyons is in a good state of mind." In the same way, saying, "Fake Steve Jobs is acting like a dick," is not the same as saying, "Daniel Lyons is acting like a dick."

I seriously think that people are taking this "Zed and _why are two polar opposites" idea way too far. Zed is basically saying that _why can do whatever he wants, but to create a bunch of projects that people rely on (even if these projects are your art) and then abruptly, without notice pull the rug out from under these people is an asshole move.

Let's bring all this into a small example. Say there's this artist whose art strikes such a chord with me that I invest every penny I own into putting on a spectacular art show to showcase this artist's art to the world. Let's say that the artist and I spend months and months planning the show and collaborating on it. Then comes the big day of the show, and I go to the location to find out that the artist has up and disappeared, taking all of his art with him. Leaving me with nothing.

If the artist and I have no formal argreement that he has to show his art there he has every right to walk out like this. But it is a very asshole move to leave me hanging after I've invested all of my time in money into it, no? Or do I just scratch my head, say "I just don't understand his art" and call it a day?

This is the same case here. There are things like his twitter account/tweets/blogs/blog entries/etc which pulling from the web isn't that big of a deal. On the other hand, all of his software projects/code are things that people have come to rely on and invest time into contributing to. He basically giving all of those people the finger when he just cuts out everything like this. Without taking the time to organize for these projects to be taken over by someone else (or at least leaving the hosting up for them), he's saying that all of those people, all the effort and time they've spent mean shit all to him.

Being 'artsy' and 'artistic' doesn't excuse you from being an asshole. I mean, Caravaggio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravaggio) was a 'ruffian' and a murderer. While his art still stands on its own, he was a dick of a person. Just because a dick of a person produces great art doesn't mean that we hand-wave away all their misdeeds with nebulous phrases like, "You just don't understand his art."

What if Caravaggio decided to pull a _why? Let's say that he broke into all of the places that his paintings resided (cathedrals,churches,mansions,etc) and destroyed every last piece of art that he had created. Should we excuse this behavior as "Well, it's his art and this action is just an extention of his art. You just don't understand his art?"

This has become a bit long-winded, so I'll just cut it here with this. Zed isn't tearing down _why's art. But some parts of _why's art have crossed over from just being 'just art' to being 'art plus' if you will. In this case, it's 'art + software project.' The fact that part of it is art doesn't mean one can ignore that the other part is a software project.

bballant3• 17 years ago

I completely disagree that _why was simply an on-line persona, "a farce". The Fake Steve Jobs was satirical, first of all. _why was often funny, but it wasn't satire. I think his work alone, often times personal, was a testament to his authenticity as an artist. You may have only known him as an on-line persona, but that doesn't mean that's all he was. There's at least one video on the interweb of _why giving a talk, in the flesh and blood, and he calls himself _why... Perhaps his friends all call him _why too.

I also think Zed saying he hopes Jonathan is ok is a bit of a platitude. I'm sure Zed DOES hope _why is fine, but it rings hollow in the context of the whole essay. Plus, who doesn't hope _why is ok. His biggest detractors aren't monsters wishing him ill.

I have to say that you confuse being an artist with being 'artsy', which is a mistake. I'm artsy, but I'm no artist. Not a single artist I know would describe themselves as simply artsy. Much of my opinion on what it is to be an artist, however, comes from the Henry Miller essay I referenced earlier. I suggest reading it. It's in a volume called "Matters of the Heart".

I believe an artist has the right to destroy his own work unless he's sold it or given it away. I'm not of the opinion that publishing work on-line is the same as giving it away, and I'm certainly not of the opinion that _why taking his stuff down is the same as breaking into a place to steal and destroy things. There's a very big difference between what _why did and your Caravaggio example. _why did nothing illegal, for instance.

In a way, _why reminds me of the French New Wave film-makers. They believed in the "film-maker as auteur" and wanted complete control over their work. From reading these forums, it sounds like most of _why's code was recovered, which is fortunate, and I'm not aware of anything missing that others collaborated on. I don't think he collaborated much with others if at all, but I don't really know. I do acknowledge that, even with works created solely by _why, there's a certain collaboration osmosis that occurs just by having it on the internet with so many users/readers/extenders/whathaveyous, but in my eyes that falls short of giving it away.

To me, _why considered his programs and their source code art equal to (more important than?) his drawings, music, poems, and stories. It was all his art. I'm extremely sad at the loss of so much of his amazing work.

ilyak• 17 years ago

If someone acted as a dick, we don't care whether he's an artist or not.

Even if he's our friend, we still recognise when he acts as a dick and point that out.

sofal• 17 years ago

I have used both Zed's code and _why's code and have benefited a lot from both. That being said, I would much rather that Zed had left the Ruby community in the same way that _why did than vice versa.

simplegeek• 17 years ago

Zed, as much as I love you and your work, that also was a dickhead thing to say ;(

ianbishop• 17 years ago

A true budhist would throw a hissy fit first and then let his software fucking rot, right?

The only difference between the disappearance of these two from the ruby scene is that _why will actually be missed.

Fuck Zed Shaw.

crystalis• 17 years ago

I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate.

tjogin• 17 years ago

He keeps calling him Jonathan all the time, but it's not at all sure that's his real name (see: http://ozmm.org/posts/his_name_is_robert_paulson.html).

And even if it is, it's kind of a dick thing to do, given that we know that _why never wanted to be known as anything but _why.

burke2• 17 years ago

Actually, it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774673 , particularly http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775578

I agree though, dick move. Then again, this _is_ Zed we're talking about.

blasdel• 17 years ago

No, it's pretty obvious that they were close friends and coworkers, but not the same person.

doki_pen2• 17 years ago

It's so easy to judge someone without walking in their shoes. You (and I) have no idea what this person is going through emotionally. He could have some serious problems.

doki_pen2• 17 years ago

The only thing that really bothers me about what _why did is that he killed all the mailinglists without warning. I happen to know that there were a lot of teachers on the Shoes mailing list trying to use shoes to teach kids to code. It was the center piece of the new hackety hack designed for kids. It seems completely irrational that _why would abandon these innocent people without so much as a "sorry, I'm out". this makes me really worried for his mental health. It is not rational behavior.

oscardelben• 17 years ago

Let's wait some days to see (if we'll ever see) what's happened.

Goladus• 17 years ago

Not to nitpick semantics, but 'rational' is not actually a very high bar. It could be completely rational within a context that we don't know. It might be irrational, it's hard to say.

embeddedradical• 17 years ago

This is bull. The idea of karma is an illusion too. The man who stabs you in the gut and laughs, is a buddha. mu.

chewbranca• 17 years ago

As a new father I have to chime in and say I'm very disappointed to see hackety hack and shoes go away. It was exciting to see his talk from Art & Code, and I was looking forward to using both of those tools to teach my children.

In response to the article and comments, there are a lot of people here who immediately dismiss the article because its written by Zed, and still others who deem _why's actions acceptable because he's an 'artist'. Assuming _why is ok and he just decided to log off, Zed is right in this case. _why has transcended being an artist by creating art that does not only have aesthetic beauty, but also has substantial value to the people who have used it and who have invested time into it. The fact that he has created solid documentation in addition to releasing his projects in a public distributed system geared towards sharing and reuse is proof that he was at least interested in having other people use his projects. Which means he has a social obligation to not actively screw over his user base so he can be dramatic. Just wait, I can see Eric Raymond writing a new chapter about the responsibilities associated with releasing code to the open source community. Maybe this is a sign we need an equivalent of archive.org for code so that nothing like this can happen again.

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20080211232452/http://hacketyhack...

It doesn't seem to have caught Shoes (too new?), but seems after a glance to at least have most of the important stuff for Hackety Hack. When you consider that (helped but not entirely due to to DCVS) the source code is all over, it doesn't seem to me that much was actually lost -- just a little misplaced.

scorpion032• 17 years ago

It takes a HN thread and a free github account to restore everything he "took down"

And it took, [precisely that](http://whymirror.github.com/)

Zed, you and other are arguing as if he actively deleted your own copies of all that work and that he had an obligation to support it for ever.

The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff

Related Stories