Sad day.
Gizmodo’s post has a bunch of tributes that have been posted; it’s mostly tweets, for some godforsaken reason. Merriam-Webster tweeted broken hearts and a link to the definition of “ENGAGE”.
RIP Patrick. He had one hell of impact as an actor.
Not just an actor. He was one of the greatest human beings.
I will always remember him from Guardian organized sketch “what has European Convention on Human Rights ever done for us”.
my condolences u/The_Picard_Maneuver
Damn, what a terrible loss. I literally just got finished watching Green Room and he’s great in it. Sad day…
This is a sad one.
Damn. I knew he was old, but I didn’t know he was ill. Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia, apparently.
those don’t kill quick
assisted suicide maybe
Or 86. Which can kill surprisingly fast, although not when you think about it.
Damn. I knew he was old
Well, Star Trek NG first aired in 1987, and there he already looked fucking old!
a lesson for the kiddos. you can look old and still have a very long time left. it’s called mid-life for a reason =)
Picard looked so old the first time I watched TNG. The second time he was much younger than I remembered. Seems to appear younger to me every rewatch
Wee baby Seamus
As a middle-aged bald, I needed this.
He was only 47 when TNG first aired.
Something only someone in their 50s+ would say
As someone who just turned 47, he looked way older than I do and feel.
Not really, TV age and real-life age are different. Bald men who weren’t old were rare on TV, they still are really. 47 is also young to be that fully bald. So, that made it seem like he was 60+ on TNG. It has also meant that in the decades since then, he hasn’t really seemed to age much.
The article I read describes it as a “short battle,” so presumably he didn’t have it for long. Probably for the best for him not to have to drag it out, but still. Horrible news.
Eerily similar to Imurodic Syndrome which Captain Picard suffered from at the end of TNG.
I’ve seen speculation that he chose to go out on his own terms.
Assisted dying is legal in California.
Multiple places reporting he died to “live music” surrounded by family.
Sounds planned
I would be… less sad if this is the case. My only wish for him is that he was cognizant when he went.
I would hope you have to be for assisted dying
I mean death can be fairly predictable even without assisted dying.
He had the resources to have fully in-home hospice care and to have his family stay with him. The medical staff probably saw the monitors and gathered the family.
Of course this doesn’t prove it wasn’t assisted death, just an alternative possibility
It’s the same thing Robin Williams had, so I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m glad he could go peacefully.
Yep, watched my Nan go through vascular dementia.
I get the diagnosis, i’m off to switzerland
Talked to a Swiss guy the other day about this very topic, it’s pretty hard to access if you’re not Swiss or very wealthy
Off a bridge it is then.
Send someone who campaigned against my right to go out on my own terms to clean my brains off of the pavement
Hopefully you can find better options domestically if the time comes. More and more places are legalizing it.
I live in Oregon and it’s legal. We call it the “Death With Dignity Act”.
Where i am it’s illegal, but nitrogen is legal and I have access to duct tape.
I didn’t want to speculate out loud, but yeah I was wondering. I also live in a state that allows assisted dying. If the writing was on the wall and I knew I was about to start losing my faculties, I might choose that path to spare my loved ones having to watch me die one little piece at a time.
Fuck me I don’t even know how to mourn this one. RIP Captain.
I’m just kind of telling friends about it and staring into the void right now…
Feeling kind of empty from this…
Darmok on the ocean
Damn.
That should be a cup of Earl Grey (hot)
His role as Picard defined what a good leader and authority figure should be like for me.
I gave my team the explicit instruction to call me out if I ever did anything that they’d estimate would make Picard disappointed in my leadership.
Someone brought up some harry Potter fanfic which apparently and bizarrely motivating the philosophy of peter thiel and his ilk.
I read the synopsis, and (regardless of your feeling on generations) is essentially extolling the philosophy of the bad guy in that movie.
Picard, reflecting: “Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives, but I’d rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived. After all Number One, we’re only mortal.”
Speak for yourself, sir. I plan to live forever.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
If Thiel’s group is saying they’re in someway inspired by it, they hilariously misinterpreted the point of the story.
I don’t know what synopsis you read, but the story in no way is extolling the philosophy of Dr. Soran, given that any death is generally treated as a worst-case outcome, whereas Dr.Soran was willing to sacrifice 100s of millions of people to get what he personally wants.
I was introduced to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by the Behind the Bastards episodes on the Zizians. Or, I should say, reintroduced. I had previously been on a bit of a fanfic binge and stumbled across it. I got a little way through and stopped because (1) it was deeply boring and (2) it was deeply strange.
Just the Wikipedia one. I absolutely admit that not having read the source material (and that the synopsis is crowd sourced and easily could be written through the lens of someone seeing what they want to see) I can’t make a real assement.
But yes, death is the ultimate enemy… But, given the synopsis that appears to “rationally” entail that as such, any means justify the ends, and that if you accept the fantasy of a mechanic for resurrection then that gives broad latitude for moral justification for pretty much anything. Even one step further, a moral obligation to do pretty much anything.
I’d argue that Dr. Soran couldn’t delineate the fantasy afforded by the nexus from reality: whomever he killed could be conjured back by him in the nexus. The problematic actions could be “morally deferred”.
Regardless of any interpretation of the material, I (like Picard) reject the premise that death is the ultimate enemy. And, like Picard, I am very uneasy with any philosophy that claims to have simple derivable moral evaluations, especially if when you pull back the curtain the underlying mechanics boil down to “the ends justify the means”.
If these dont apply to the source, then it was a bad synopsis. Or It was a good synopsis and I’m bad at reading.
I just read the Wikipedia synopsis. It’s… accurate to the events but leaves out who is on-board with which decisions or what the characters know at the time of major events. Harry is horrified by Voldemort murdering Quirrel to give Hermione a Horcrux, for example. Harry is still the protagonist of the story and Voldemort is still the antagonist.
Dr. Soran is an absolute madman given he doesn’t know or understand how the Nexus works. Even if we assume that the Nexus can actually bring everyone back perfectly, he’s still a madman because his plan could fail. There’s no world in which you could have enough certainty of the outcome to enact his plan.
On death: while I don’t know if I would want to live forever, I’d like to have control over when I die.
Weirdly enough, the philosophy behind HPMoR doesn’t claim to have any moral evaluations at all, since that’s not in its domain. It’s more of a framework for thinking about plans of action to take towards a desired outcome.
That’s a fascinating observation about the synopsis, seems to lend credence to my musing that Wikipedia editors may drop or include key points which betray their own reading. Probably not a malicious act, but evidence that varied weighting of events can result in divergent interpretations.
That being said, a framwork for evaluating actions in the absence of moral evaluation is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. The explicit absence speaks just as loudly as any prescription. And I do think Picard would have my back on that one.
Which, I stress isn’t a condemnation of the source itself: it’s a warning that such a source can be hijacked for nefarious purposes; intentionally or otherwise.
Correct.
However, I want to point out that the framework just explores and evaluates actions based on how optimal they are for getting to the goal. It’s up to your moral framework to determine which paths are unacceptable.
I find that full exploration of possible solutions is very helpful when dealing with other people, because they might be willing to pick a solution that you wouldn’t. It can help to predict sociopathic actions so they can be preemptively countered.
Thiel named his security agency Palantir and calls everyone who criticizes him the antichrist, his group misses the point constantly.
The philosophy of HPMoR is genuinely contemptible though, even if it’s not quite as bad as the Dark Enlightenment dorks
I did like certain elements, and I am still amused to this day that the guy managed to crowdsource his ending to a group of “critical thinkers” without any of them catching on.
That’s not a missed point, that’s contempt.
I couldn’t get through HPMoR. Did that story really inspire Peter Thiel? I didn’t sense anything fascist-coded in it, but again, it was a cringe-worthy read and I stopped right around the end of the first chapter because Harry’s barely-veiled smarmy attitude was too noxious for me to tolerate.
I don’t know that inspire is the right word, influenced him and the other proto-fascists he hangs out with, sure.
The beginning of the story was definitely stronger than the rest of it, partially just due to the world of Harry Potter being not-well-thought-out. It’s fun to poke holes in the poor world-building. As for the ending, I think a lot of web serials are written that way (taking ideas from the comments), and I’m pretty sure he was open about doing it. Right? Am I misremembering that?
What about the philosophy of HPMoR is contemptible? I’m genuinely curious as to what you find repugnant.
Most fanfiction/webnovel authors don’t run the comment section like they’re enlightening the savages with their grasp and explanation of basic game theory. Yudkowsky, however, seemed to think he was passing down wisdom as the golden god of rational thought.
As for the contempt I hold for his personal philosophy, I’m not interested in pulling out quotes from HPMoR in 2026 but I’ll say that his current thoughts on how a true AI will inevitably kill all humans for not contributing to its goals says a lot more about his personal worldview than any interesting speculation on how an artificial consciousness will see the world.
I’ll give him some credit for rejecting full bore naive utilitarianism though, even if all his other thoughts on the matter bely his true opinions on the matter.
Oh yeah, Yudkowsky is a super weird dude. I haven’t looked into what he’s been doing over the past few years, but I assume he’s gotten… more eccentric.
Roko’s basilisk? That’s not in the story, but one of the ‘great’ outputs from the forum that the author created.
No, he’s got his own ideas about it. For what it’s worth he thought Roko’s Basilisk and the whole time war-esque torture cube of it all was a silly extreme of his completely original thought that AI might kill us because it has different values.
Last I paid attention he was mostly interested in methods to make sure that doesn’t happen by making sure any AI shares those values at least in part.
He was my childhood hero.
For me it was Optimus Prime first.
Oh Captain! My Captain.
I can’t…
I had to put together a deck for work and they said “add some personal themes”. Mine was all Trek. He was leading every slide.
My stomach hurts. My heart hurts. I’m literally in tears.
I grew up with TNG. I used to watch it every evening with my dad. I’m not a big Trek fan but I absolutely loved that show when it was on. It’s what got me interested as a kid in science fiction and space.
I’m actually kind of gutted right now.
My stomach hurts.
Hi Chidi!
This article reads like an advance obituary written ten years ago—it doesn’t mention anything he’s done since 2015, or anything about the circumstances of his death.
Every famous person over the age of 40 has an advance obituary on record somewhere. Sometimes they get published too soon and someone gets fired. Happened last summer in my country. Regrettably, this is not such a time.
if they are going to write the obituary in advance, they should have a version for every possible form of death
Reminds me of SNL’s pre-taped obituary bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tX6jdoruH8
it was my inspiration, i wanted to say mauled by a circus lion in a convenience store, but was afraid most wouldn’t get it
Yeah, and roll dice to pick the one to print!
Oh NO!
No more! Just stop!
one of the many things I hate about getting older is childhood heroes start leaving. This past year alone it felt like I’ve lost them all.
We have to be the heros now.
And you just know that Ian McClellan is going to follow soon because spouses always tend to follow soon after. Damn.
? Patrick Stewards wife/widow is a young musician.
It’s a joke about how close they are/were. Their friendship was one of the most wholesome things to exist in this world and now Sir Patrick is gone. I hope someone is checking on Sir Ian.
Thank you for the explanation! The downvotes were like… not really helpful. g
Ian’s message is heartbreaking
Don’t put that evil on us, Ricky…
If Ian goes, I go. Been feeding that man my life force for years. Im not ready for Gandalf to go
