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by e40 9 days ago
So many people who have big personalities on the internet are like that. My example is Erik Naggum. I spent a lot of time with him and the gulf between his in-person and on-line personas was vast.

Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
2 comments
bborud 9 days ago
I’m not sure what I expected the first time I met him, but I wasn’t too surprised that he was actually easy to get along with. Most intelligent people actually are in real life.

Yes, he could be harsh online, but he also had a sense of humor about the persona he had created for himself online. And it was a persona. That doesn’t mean he was tolerant of stupidity, or what he saw as stupidity, in real life, but face to face there was a passion and a sense of humor that got filtered away by having lots of infrastructure between you and him.

We disagreed on many things. Some of them, in retrospect, he was right about. And we had many heated discussions (mostly entirely in private - neither of us needed an audience to turn the heat up in a discussion). I remember him fondly, I miss talking to him and I was very sad when he passed. I still think about him.

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e40 5 days ago
Yeah, I miss him, too. I think about how he died alone. What a terrible thing.
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aidenn0 9 days ago
Had he acted in real life the way he did on c.l.l, I strongly suspect he would have been punched a lot more often. Certainly one eulogy I read of him led with the sentence: "Erik Naggum was the first person I killfiled in GNUS." On the other hand, I have heard only good things from people who interacted with him one-on-one though (whether in-person or electronically).

His technical content was almost always high-quality, but one would often need to first don one's Nomex suit to get to said content.

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e40 5 days ago
Around the time of his ascent in comp.lang.lisp is when I stopped reading it. It was just flame wars, and I think he had a good bit of the responsibility.

Seeing his dual personalities was the first time I experienced this. It didn't bode well, that's for sure.

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