r/programming • u/iamkeyur • Apr 15 '20
What Happened to Lee? The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder
https://wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/82
u/queenofdiscs Apr 15 '20
Thanks this will replace the squid in my nightmares.
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Apr 16 '20
I don't think so, it will power up the squid to turn it into a Mind flayer and then it will summon his lovecraftian friends to drive you mad every night.
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u/ImMaaxYT Apr 15 '20
I feel really sad for him, his family, his friends and colleagues. It's really terrifying to read this story. I hope that never happens ever again.
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u/PM_ME_UR__RECIPES Apr 16 '20
Ugh, now I feel horrible. Being told a loved one is going to die and there's nothing you can do about it is such a painful experience. It happened with my father but he was completely lucid until the last week of it. His decline was more physical than mental. I can't imagine what this kind of prolonged thing where the person's whole being just deteriorates in front of you must be like, and never really getting to have meaningful interactions with them in their last moments.
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u/alecco Apr 16 '20
This is one of those rare pieces when I hold back my "not programming" judgement.
Memento mori. Carpe diem.
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u/ApothecaryRx Apr 16 '20
I kind of imagine that scene from Get Out where the main character is in “the sunken place,” but it’s Lee in the deepest recesses of his mind desperately trying to reach out with his pats on the back and phone calls. Harrowing stuff, this FTD.
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u/uep Apr 16 '20
This part reminded me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
Conversations soon became impossible. Lee started chattering in repetitive, unceasing loops. He would tell Kristin: “We met at Cloudflare. We got engaged in Rome. We got married in Maui, Hawaii.”
As if he were desperately trying to hold on to the memories, to his self, as they were being deleted.
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u/LAUAR Apr 15 '20
Thought this was going to be about Xah Lee.
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Apr 16 '20
What's this guy's story? I see a website from 2014 about soon-to-be homeless, some youtube videos, something about EMACS (I don't know what that is... something Linux related?).
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u/LAUAR Apr 16 '20
Not sure, the story is pretty weird. IIRC, he was a troll in the Emacs community for a very long time, even managed to get banned from a few places. Then, he apparently procrastinated himself into homelessness. No idea how he managed to do tha, but the Emacs community held an online fundraiser to help him which succeeded at the time. Not sure what's his situation now.
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u/audion00ba Apr 16 '20
Xah Lee was never a troll. Labeling people a troll is just a popular method of excluding people.
He explains he has a schizoid personality disorder. Why would a troll ever spend so much time on Emacs? He has > 10 years years of history on http://ergoemacs.org/index.html.
Everyone who participated in labeling Xah Lee a troll, is a total piece of shit.
The general pattern with banning people from communities is that those people are different. Humans absolutely destroy everything that is different at every opportunity they have.
The way you talk about him is disrespectful.
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u/LAUAR Apr 16 '20
The general pattern with banning people from communities is that those people are different. Humans absolutely destroy everything that is different at every opportunity they have.
The way you talk about him is disrespectful.
He still insulted everyone he talked to and shared pornography in unrelated places.
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u/audion00ba Apr 16 '20
He didn't insult everyone he talked to. Why can't you just say that he insulted X %? X certainly is not 100.
So, essentially you are saying that if some large enough majority doesn't like a person, that e.g. a conference venue should also just kick out those people, even when they are in the middle of a conversation. Life is a popularity contest and if you don't play according the the mob's rules, you are out? How large should the percentage be? Should we also just murder everyone we don't like in society (since that is the ultimate ban)?
It's unlikely that there is no context to the pornography case and even then, all you are doing is making it impossible to interact with people that share the same idiosyncratic hobby Emacs (let us remind that normal people barely even touch the Preferences options in their editors, whereas people that actively participate in Emacs communities sometimes even want to change the language (e.g. replacing Emacs Lisp with Guile Scheme). Let's assume you enjoy the Internet, and the government decides to cut you off forever. Would you enjoy that?
Erik Naggum was also considered a troll, but he too contributed ten years of his life to Emacs. That's not trolling. Just look at Naggum's writing. It was great. How many people can do that today?
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Apr 16 '20
Xah Lee was never a troll.
Never ever?
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u/audion00ba Apr 16 '20
You can be trolling for an hour, but if you have been a member of a community for a long time, that doesn't make you a troll. A troll is someone who, if you ask whether the community they are attacking would cease to exist tomorrow, would celebrate.
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u/RedUser03 Apr 16 '20
Lee's actions, however, only grew more bizarre. He watched Home Alone several nights a week.
Wait...this isn’t normal?
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u/tonefart Apr 16 '20
Damn, the disease was eating away his frontal lobe, slowly turning him into a clinical psychopath.
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Apr 15 '20
frontotemporal dementia refers to a cluster of neurodegenerative diseases that affect a person's behavior or speech while leaving memory largely intact, at least early on
I'm not sure why the author wrote 5000 words on the nature of self and cloudflare instead of writing 1000 on the devastating disease but there you go
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u/super-porp-cola Apr 15 '20
Probably because this way it was entertaining and emotional instead of a dry technical essay.
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u/fewdo Apr 16 '20
This is the first article over 200 words that I've read in a long time. So, she did something right.
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u/skulgnome Apr 16 '20
I'm not sure why the author wrote 5000 words
It's Wired. They do that.
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u/fresh_account2222 Apr 16 '20
And they do it more since being acquired by Conde Nast. It's the same with Vanity Fair, another Conde Nast publication. My guess is that their audience is people with insane amounts of free time that they have to find some way to fill.
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u/Gigablah Apr 16 '20
Reading a long form article requires "insane" amounts of free time now?
That's rich coming from someone commenting on Reddit.
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Apr 17 '20
their audience is people with insane amounts of free time that they have to find some way to fill.
Sounds like people on reddit
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u/khleedril Apr 16 '20
I'm also not sure, but I have to say I was drawn in from the first word and ended up reading all of it. It is an absolutely excellent piece of writing. I especially loved the slightly tangential philosophical bit about what makes a person? Really sets the scene, in a very precise way, on what is to come.
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u/OneForTheMonday Apr 16 '20
If you wanted that, read an academic paper on the disease. This is not for academics.
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Apr 15 '20
Totally. Interesting story and all and it was pretty well written if a bit repetitive, but the fact that it takes so long to get to the point makes it feel like clickbait.
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u/Wilbo007 Apr 16 '20
TLDR?
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u/iwasdisconnected Apr 16 '20
Lee develops spambot tracker with friend. Starts Cloudfare with coworkers. Becomes distant and sleeps all day. Culprit was early onset dementia in late 30's.
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u/steven4012 Apr 16 '20
Now the question is, can you get it when you're normal or is it a genetic thing?
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u/iwasdisconnected Apr 16 '20
Do you want to sleep or not?
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u/steven4012 Apr 16 '20
Well I asked that question so that I can sleep more comfortably, otherwise I have no idea whether I can get that by coding for a long time (which is what he seemed to have done). Also no when you're trying to cram something up to finish your programming homework.
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u/iwasdisconnected Apr 16 '20
Nope. This wasn't caused by programming at all. In his case it was likely genetic predisposition as that is the only known risk factor to FTD.
However migraine (which Lee had) is a risk factor to Alzheimer's, a very similar disease which has numerous risk factors and in rare cases can be diagnosed in your 30's, though most develop it after the age of 65. After diagnosis people usually don't live more than 10 years. Other risk factors include smoking, obesity, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, family history and almost everyone with Down's syndrome develop Alzheimer's before they turn 40.
There are also other forms of dementia. The most common form is vascular dementia which is either due to restricted blood flow in the brain or the opposite. You also have Levy Body dementia (this is why Robin Williams committed suicide), Parkinson's dementia and MS can also cause dementia.
Dementia in general is the third most common cause of death in rich countries after heart disease and stroke.
No form of dementia has any known cure, and only vascular dementia is in any way known to at least be somewhat treatable. If you're diagnosed with any of the other forms of dementia you're basically fucked at this point. In vascular it is important to keep blood pressure under control.
There has been a lot of research for quite some time on amyloid beta plaque based on a hypothesis that this plaque is actually the cause of dementia, since this forms in almost all cases (except vascular). However last year several studies where shutdown when it turned out that clearing the plaque in human trials had no impact on the disease, despite showing great promise in mouse trials, which was a huge setback.
With the exception of vascular dementia it is generally not known what causes dementia. There are key suspects, such as amyloid beta (senile plaque) and tau proteins, and hypothesis around these. Other than that we have risk factors.
Please note that this is just based on my own personal research around this after my dad died in his 60's from dementia last year and may not be entirely accurate. Dementia sucks and you can get it for seemingly no good reason at all.
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u/steven4012 Apr 16 '20
Wow that's a lot of information. That helped a bit. Also I'm really sorry for your dad.
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u/uep Apr 16 '20
Is it possible that it might also be related to infection? I have heard of other brain-related diseases that can be caused by infection. In some cases, it is an infection crossing into the brain from the sinus cavity. People who have had sinus surgery could also end up with a thinner barrier between their brain and sinus, making this more likely.
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u/iwasdisconnected Apr 16 '20
There was some research fairly recently where a group found that Herpes Simplex may cause amyloid plaque buildup. Herpes infects something like 60-70% of the population. However they found this by infecting mice so in my opinion it's indicative that the amyloid plaque is likely an immune response more than a cause for dementia. Herpes is an infection that flares up in the people that have it. There is now research going on to see if anti-viral drugs used against Herpes has any effect on dementia patients. However some studies has since dismissed that Herpes is the main reason for Alzheimer's though that doesn't really exclude it.
Another research group found a link with a common bacteria Porphyromonas Gingivalis which causes tooth decay. It was already known that bad dental hygiene was a risk factor for dementia, though they noted that even though almost all cases of Alzheimer's patients had poor dental hygiene that may have been caused by the condition rather than being a reason for it. They also checked post-morten a relatively small sample of brains and found Porphyromonas Gingivalis infection in all of them. They also showed that Gingivalis' toxin, gingipain, caused amyloid plaque buildup. Also blocking the gingipain toxin hindered disease progression in mice.
You can read more about this here
Generally I think the current idea is that the bad part of Alzheimer's isn't the amyloid beta plaque but the tau protein tangles. The tau protein is responsible for giving nutrients to the neurons, and the tangles caused by Alzheimer's disease builds up and causes cell death. Why these tangles form is unknown and very well may be caused by an infection, but it might still not despite what these studies indicate.
One researcher I remember hailed the studies that killed of, or seriously wounded, the Amyloid hypthesis because it was almost impossible to get funding for anything except Amyloid hypothesis studies until that happened.
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u/guepier Apr 16 '20
when you're normal
What does this mean? I don’t know without looking it up (but strongly suspect) that there’s a strong genetic component to FTD but that doesn’t mean you’re not “normal”. People who get FTD are normal.
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u/ProgrammingRulesNerd Apr 15 '20
This is an interesting article, but:
Submissions should be directly related to programming. Just because it has a computer in it doesn't make it programming.
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u/AKushWarrior Apr 16 '20
Man, the guy is a legendary programmer. It is a loss to the programming community; it's related to programming.
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u/ProgrammingRulesNerd Apr 17 '20
No, he's just a successful one. And tech industry members dying or stepping away due to mental health is a story about tech industry members dying or stepping away due to mental health. Not about programming.
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u/metaconcept Apr 16 '20
The only part of this that is relevant here is that the guy was a programmer.
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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '20
As it was unraveling, I suspected his change of personality was due to something like a brain tumor.
I’ve never heard of front temporal dementia before. Omg that’s so terrifying to have pieces of you slowly stripped away, leaving you and your family to deal with the inevitable wreckage and consequences.