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Title: Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave
Taht

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/05/0292...

Wikipedia remembers Dave T�ht as "an American network engineer, musician,
lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the
chief executive officer of TekLibre." But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him
"one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I
will miss very badly." Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was
Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of
everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical
TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other
applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services
might still be plagued by glitches and stutters. Also on X, legendary game
developer John Carmack remembered that T�ht "did a great service for online
gamers with his long campaign against bufferbloat in routers and access
points. There is a very good chance your packets flow through some code he
wrote." (Carmack also says he and T�ht "corresponded for years".) Raymond
remembered first meeting T�ht in 2001 "near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy
years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and
crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the
central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over
his shoulder..." Raymond said T�ht "lived for the work he did" and "bore
deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and
was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis." He barely let it slow him down.
Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on
programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out
of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems
lesser men would have considered intractable... Dave should have been famous,
and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he
generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of
Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about
wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking... In the
invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best
of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more
selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave. Weeks before his death T�ht was
still active on X.com, retweeting LWN's article about "The AI scraperbot
scourge", an announcement from Texas Instruments, and even a Slashdot
headline. T�ht was also Slashdot reader #603,670, submitting stories about
network latency, leaving comments about AI, and making announcements about
the Bufferbloat project.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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