Jake Seliger is Gone Now

Published: 2024-08-11

Tagged: news

Jake Seliger died a few days back. Cancer killed him.

He had been fighting for over a year. The frank tone and the intricate detail in his updates gave me hope. "Here's a guy that has hit shit together; biology will surely submit to his will," was more or less what I thought.

Alas, within the last month or two, it's as if the cancer woke up with a raging hangover headache and decided it had had enough of this Jake guy. He's gone now.

Who was he?

I don't really know. What I do know comes from spelunking through his blog. It seemed he was an intensely curious individual. Read a lot. Wrote beautifully. Cared about humans.

He existed as kind of a person-shaped outline in my mind. His brother's farewell piece mentions Jake loved to cook. That surprised me, although it shouldn't have. I imagine there's a lot of Jake I'll never get to know. I hope his close ones are doing OK.

Is it strange to mourn somebody I've never met?

Jake's outline feels more real than a lot of people I encounter, even in real life. There's a quality to his curiosity and insights, paradoxically ferocious and calm at the same time, that gives his character a palpable vitality. That he was able to broadcast it over copper wires and TCP/IP is no small feat.

I don't think I'm alone in this view. Alex Tabarrok posted about Jake's passing on MarginalRevolution. There's a thread about it too on r/slatestarcodex. There's a much bigger one over on hackernews--it has over 150 comments at the time of writing--and the site admins put up a black bar to mark the day.

Matt's Codecave