Off Topic – So what does a web suicide note look like?: I missed this when it actually happened two years ago.
Chris McKinstry posted a suicide note to his own blog and to the Joel on Software off-topic discussion forum (since closed). He had taken a bunch of pills, and he conversed with people in the thread while they took effect. He eventually stops posting, and was found dead the next day. (Warning: Reading the thread is more than a little disturbing.)
He was apparently a big player in the field of artificial intelligence. He included this last swipe in his note:
Oh and BTW, the mind is a maximum hypersurface and thought a trajectory on it and the amygdala and hippocampus are Hopf maps of it. No one knew this before me, and it seems no one care. So be it. My time will come in a hundred or a thousand years when the idea again returns.
Wired had an article on it last week (on this situation, and another suicide of an AI researcher), which is what brought it up again.