40
Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year. In the time since his passing, Swartz's contributions to free software, internet standards, and the freedom to share knowledge have remain enormously important.
Aaron, after already a lifetime legacy of organizing information and inventing and promoting formats for interchange, was involved in an effort to download academic articles from a university network and ultimately prosecuted federally for it.
15 years later, the formatting he defined with John Gruber in Markdown is the lingua franca of LLM models trained by multi-billion dollar corporations through much more unscrupulous means, both in method and extent.
I honor Aaron's memory today by acknowledging that this echoes both the trends of the recent midterm election, Aaron's personal political beliefs and the universe's appetite for twisted connections.