Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated
DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.
“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”
After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.
Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.
Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.
source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004
Cheers, -Cliff
Discussion (239 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'm terribly sorry to hear of your passing, but am pleased that you have since gotten better.
Cheers!
He knew I was a bit of a nerd and into computers, and he recommended me your book, and in fact personally went to an English book store to buy it for me. And the rest is history.
I'm sorry to hear that you must have died right after we visited you in May of 2024 [1]. But I'm glad that you've figured things out and that you are now alive again! I imagine that's a much better state of affairs for you.
Here's to many more years of adventures and quilt making.
Cheers!
[1] https://daveschumaker.net/adventures-in-topology-the-cuckoos...
Smiles, -Cliff (who just started designing a new quilt) PS - I quite remember your visit with your daughter a year or so ago)
As a result, I have no idea whether things are right, wrong, misguided, or kflooey on that page. Anyone who wants to know details can simply stop over here for coffee and a chat.
Cheers, -Cliff
That said, Wikipedia is pretty unapologetic about its preference for verifiability, not truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
Back in the Wage Slave days, a story would go around, about a way to play a dirty trick on a coworker: One day, when they are out, write “DECEASED” on all the mail in their inbox, and drop it in their outbox. It would take months for them to repair the damage.
But it could be worse. This was posted here, yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037923
Excuse me, but when did we leave those days?
"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Stoll
Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action"
I really appreciated everything you did for young students in science and your position on the role of computers in schools. You're a brilliant human and a good human. It's a treat to see both in the same package.
Now, as I hear that distant bell tolling, it's time to pass the torch: it's your turn to take over and make this world a better place. You can't do much worse than my generation...
Warm wishes, -Cliff
- The whole internet, AD 2026
Your book is one of my time favorites.
https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44615801
It's too bad he's dead, despite his objections.
Congratulations on your continued existence!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/16/romanian-court...
https://abcnews.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/dead-man-walking...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frenchwoman-officially-...
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lal-bihari-mujhe-zinda-karo-...
The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."
https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/politics/government/2026...
Thankfully the courts found this sort of harm unreasonable.
It was some time ago that I read about it, and I'm struggling to find a source now, but there are instances in India of people being declared dead to allow their next of kin to steal their land. In doing so, the 'dead' unsurprisingly lose access to various public resources, health care, etc.
Edit: found a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_D...
https://economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/02/27/the-uttar-...
eg https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-sa...
Edit: and a few others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060857
The Romanian man Guardian article has a great and horrible quote:
> The court told him he was too late, and would have to remain officially deceased.
https://www.leprogres.fr/faits-divers-justice/2023/02/28/jea...
Still need to send you my 3d harmonograph maker I've been working on that you were interested in - hope the quilt making is still going well!!
Instead of a medal it should be a klein bottle of course.
I didn’t realize you lurked around here! I’m feel joy stumbling on your post here and glad that you are still alive. I do still have the Klein greedy mug you gifted me over a decade ago. I enjoy showing it to my kids and once in a while to their class mates. Hope to one day share a meal together again!
Wasn't this how the xz hack was discovered? A PostgreSQL benchmark was a running a bit slower than usual.
https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai
It seems it's quite exhausting.
written mere inches from my klein bottle.
glad to see you here Cliff.
You captured my imagination as a teenager when I read The Cuckoo’s Egg. I’m so sorry to hear of these terrible news but I appreciate the update. Here’s hoping to a _prompt_ recovery!
Might want to mail the pope; maybe there’s some cross-advertising opportunity there. Their target audience is a bit different but they have enormous reach!
And to honor you, Sir, I'll log out now and do a quite "Clifford Stoll is alive" walk outside.
Live long and prosper.
Only amongst the chronically online. There is very much still a big world out there, unmediated by a glowing screen, in which that would still sound ridiculous.
"There were students in that room who subdued him and rendered him no longer alive."
Then goes on to say! "I don't know how else to say it"
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjzedonSCpE?t=69&feature=shar...
I would say that sadly this language is very much in the real world....
Note: Dave Barry is not dead. He is, in fact, alive.
And I hope you feel at least a little vindicated that so many people have worked so hard to make Silicon Snake Oil come true. :-)
Or it could be that the other side is the same side.
Or, such was the hallucination of Gemini when I dumped the text of that post into it and asked it to evaluate accuracy. (the only other thing it complained about was the username business being a little oversimplified)
When Stoll really dies, production will go to zero and there will be a bunch of news stories about "crazy Klein bottle guy" so everybody will rush out to buy one. Prices will go through the roof.
Believing AI is bonkers to me. But these shields been up since the 90s. None of this stuff matters. It was all gibberish
I'm confident there were plenty of citizens of the Soviet Union who knew that Lysenko was decoupled from reality. That didn't stop them from starving to death.
"I was. It didn't take".
Hat tip to you, Sir!
And glad to hear you are alive and kickin', and haven't lost your sense of humor.
"Astute" would be quite a surprise for my parents to hear, given they received a not-so-friendly letter from our ISP telling us to quit probing their network's security...
I'm also reminded that I need to order a Klein bottle. I don't think I need one, and I am not sure that I know what I'm going to do with one, but I am going to make a list of ideas.
What brought it all home was when I sent a copy of the almost-finished manuscript to my mom. She called long-distance (an absolute luxury for her) and said, "I really like it -- I couldn't put it down"
I've received accolades and awards, but there's nothing like hearing praise from your folks. Forty years later, that phone call still echoes.
Keep living the Good Life!
And yep, the dozen or so people who ordered Klein bottles this morning received photos showing that either I'm alive or someone's doing a good job of imitating a 75 year old hacker...
AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.
I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.
It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.
Slowly, people will adapt to AI in online forums. But for me, it's one more reason to share coffee with friends, rather than investing hours in social media.
Needless to say, this silly incident has a serious subtext for me.
The other was a reporter covering the Denver Broncos: https://www.denverpost.com/2026/01/15/broncos-reporter-ai-fa...
(but I ordered one of your bottles just in case)
I'm volunteering around the Bay Area (up at the Steam Trains at Tilden Park on Sunday afternoons), show up to the intro-classes at Berkeley Folk Dancing, and speak to schools and professional groups.
And, of course, I'm still operating this Klein bottle business. I have only one employee (who is a lazy, good for nothing sloth). Management is very thin and incompetent: there's only one boss (who is an oppressive taskmaster always trying to get me to do more work than I want to).
Who would have thought? :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA
Personally I'd prefer Death by Snu Snu.
(I'd link but I'm wary of directing traffic or attention to them and contributing to them becoming self perpetuating and most have been getting taken down)
I enjoyed your book greatly, back when you were alive.
Please give my condolences to your family.
Don’t be too sad about dying, Cliff - everyone has to go and you had a wonderful fulfilling life.
And remember, stay away from the light.
@dang can we have a black banner on HN for Cliff Stoll?
Having said that, it was just three weeks ago that I spoke at OpenAI in SF. Maybe they did a whole-body substitution. (counting my fingers again...) Cheers, -Cliff
Also, there are no em dashes.
Your bio is empty.
After his boss spotted a discrepancy, he understood that one person was using the computer that he managed without permission.
He was the only one who really cared.
He pushed and asked everybody for help (FBI, NSA, CIA, Air Force, etc).
That person was actually connecting from Germany.
The German police arrested the guy and released him.
It's a cool story because it puts you in the shoes of the 1980s phreaking and hacking scene but from the defense-side.
Now he is selling glass bottles that look like klein bottles (but are obviously not but it's still a cool object, and again don't want to spoil).
This is between the point where Tim invents his crap hypermedia system with the grand name (the "World Wide Web") and the point where you can get a billion dollar valuation for your idea to sell water on the Internet (the "dot com bubble").
I'm giving a talk this Thursday (May 14th at a San Francisco Computer Security group, SFISCA. They asked for a bio. Here's what I wrote:
OTOH, I can see how times truly have changed. If I was as relaxed as you wrt. my carrer I'd be living under a bridge, lol.
I read it in my early teens.
Now, at 75, I'm astonished at how much has changed online. When I first started fooling with the Arpanet in the early 1980's, I calculated that I probably knew around 0.01 percent of everyone on the net. (where "knew" meant something like "have heard of" or "saw at a meeting") ... that number impressed me with how big the network was.
Today, what percent of the network users does a person know? 1 / 10^-7 or so?
So how could I convince people that I'm alive and not some AI construct?
(do pass along my warm cheers to your nonorientable friend) -Cliff