161–170 of 429 posts
I was told earlier today that my best friend in this world has died. We haven't talked for the past 4-5 days (we usually catch up on the weekends - but this past weekend he had a packed concert-going-schedule - we live in different countries so I couldn't join).
What sucks the most is that we use(d) Signal, and we have autodestruct every 2 days so apart from some really old emails, I got nothing left from him, and our frequent "correspondence".
I am using the "Henry Bemis" moniker because he was making fun of me and my reading and I was making fun of him and his frequent cinema-going (and we both loved THAT episode of the Twilight Zone - Time enough at last)(great episode btw!!)
And now I got into HN and I saw the black banner on top and I thought "WTF is going on today with the deaths!" and my stomach got a bit tighter.
It sucks when people we love die. It's what Keanu said to Colbert "those who love us will miss us".
My friend also "..would like to live five lives in the course of one life", but alas, he managed to live half of it.
Farewell to those who fade/reincarnate/cross the river Styx/go to hell/go to paradise.. we will miss them.
I don't maintain a blog, so I'll be keeping this bookmarked. Apologies for the 'spam', I wanted to get this out of my system.
Anyway, sorry to hear Lynn Conway has died, looked technology just lost a great contributor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody who conflates human rights as "politics" are someone I simply cannot respect A persons right to exist is not political (This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
> A persons right to exist is not political I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.
The Alan Turing comparison springs to mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> any work you do is intertwined with politics. That simply is not true. Apolitical topics do exist, and it is incredibly annoying when people try to force politics into an apolitical topic (looking at you, Rust community).
Can you give an example of an apolitical topic? EDIT: unfortunately I can’t reply to the comments as I have been banned EDIT 2: I have been banned to reply to the commenter, dang told me EDIT 3: dang has now wiped all the upvotes on this message and given me 2 extra downvotes and suddenly another comment I made mentioning him in a totally different thread has been mass downvoted
> When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication That kind of makes it sound like Smotherman was poking around trying to find Conway's secrets. What was actually happening is that he was trying to research an early IBM supercomputer project, but was not having much luck…
I was researching some of the names that Alan Kay mentioned in his classic paper about the history of Smalltalk and his 1993 interview with Yoot Saito, and discovered another amazingly accomplished trans woman at Xerox PARC, Diana Merry-Shapiro, who co-invented BitBlt, and wrote one of the first systems for overlapping windows for Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk code editor.
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Diana Merry-Shapiro (Xerox PARC):
A member of the Learning Research Group, she significantly contributed to the development, testing, and application of the Smalltalk system, focusing on educational technology and learning methodologies. Her involvement was pivotal in integrating and refining the BitBLT graphics operation, enhancing the system's capabilities in graphical manipulation and display.
Diana Merry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Merry
SMALLTALK AT 50
https://computerhistory.org/blog/smalltalk-at-50/
>The second half of the reunion event reunited members of Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group. After a brief introductory video featuring Diana Merry-Shapiro and her memories of what she worked on at PARC, Dave Robson hosted a discussion with Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, and Glenn Krasner.
Oral History of Diana Merry Shapiro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTUaO3PNkQ
Casa Susanna:
https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/casa-susanna/
Review: ‘Casa Susanna,’ starring Katherine Cummings, Diana Merry-Shapiro, Betsy Wollheim and Gregory Bagarozy:
https://culturemixonline.com/review-casa-susanna-starring-ka...
Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg is another amazing successful trans woman programmer in the Smalltalk world who's done all kinds of groundbreaking work with Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Squeak, SqueakJS, Viewpoints Research, Croquet, Harc, OLPC, and is quite open and extremely happy about her transition in 2020.
https://www.freudenbergs.de/bert/
Here’s Yoot Saito’s 1993 interview with Alan Kay, when he was visiting Japan with Douglass Engelbart, and Yoot was working for MacWorld Japan. He also has interviews with Douglass Engelbart, Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Atkinson that I hope to dig up and publish, since they were only published decades ago in Japan.
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Here's Alan Kay's history of Smalltalk paper that Brett Victor put online in html, and I'm working on transcribing and formatting the appendices that are missing from that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> seeing real progress happen on trans acceptance, only to then see a blowback coming, right at the end of your life. Yes It is surreal I do not understand why people care so much. Your gender is none of my concern It is so hard, it seems, to take people as you find them
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody who conflates human rights as "politics" are someone I simply cannot respect A persons right to exist is not political (This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
> A persons right to exist is not political I don't think anyone disagrees with that, I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way". That's not the only soluti…
Just going to keep pointing out that human beings have very little sexual dimorphism compared to the other great apes, and that any difference is any sport that does not actually employ the genitals is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.
I recommend reading Lynn's story, written in her own words: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.
Incredible "The fact that I started a new career all over again, at the bottom of the ladder, after being fired by IBM and rejected by family and friends . . . may also give hope to others trapped in similar situations."
What also struck me about that snippet of the story, is that the context for what a career meant might have been a bit different than now. A career at one single company seems like quite a rarity these days, and we wouldn't necessarily consider it to be a career restart if you're just going to another company, unless you're perhaps of a certain generation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think an important distinction people are looking for is: It's not the mere existence of a person that's an issue, but rather the coercive, punishing activism that takes place around a false idea that human rights are at risk, while these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence. The same activism requires full acceptance by paren…
While I agree that institutions and corporations are more actively participating in human rights issues in the recent past, something I think is a really good thing, I don't see the aspects of that coverage that are coercive or punishing. Your argument disingenuous on two points: 1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or pa…