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Lynn Conway has died
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#242RIP, Lynn Conway. For those had a doubt like me, it is different Conway than another computer scientist,John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) famous for "Conway's Game of Life".
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was one of the people who literally built the technical foundation of the world we know. That alone justifies all the upvotes. The fact that she did that on top of basically starting life over at 30 due to the constraints around transition at that time? That's winning a marathon with a cinder block chained to your ankle. As far as the concentration of trans people in computing, AFAIK there are two predominant the…
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#244If this is verified, I think a black band is 100% warranted. As I understand it, she was a real innovator in VLSI, which I think we all agree is somewhat important :) EDIT: GG, the black band appeared as I sent this
While her contributions to the VLSI design methodologies are the best known and the most influential, that is because at that time she worked in academia, in plain sight. She had another extremely important contribution much earlier, when working at IBM, at the Advanced Computer System project. She invented the first methods that could be used for designing a CPU that can initiate multiple instructions in the same cl…
Fascinating. It wasn't long ago I did a high performance computer architecture grad class. They covered Tomasulo but no mention of Conway's contributions. TIL.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think that reaction is natural, given the patterns and preferences of most of human society?
This has little to do with human society. Western society, maybe. Plenty of other societies don't assert a distinct binary for gender (which doesn't even exist in sex; intersex people exist at the same rates as people that are red-headed, and you wouldnt call red heads unnatural). Even if it was "natural" you're making the choice to treat someone like shit. You can backpedal onto what all your peers are doing all you…
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#246[flagged]
> Some saw the book as especially dangerous because it claimed to be based on rigorous science, was published by an imprint of the National Academy of Sciences, and argued that MTF sex changes are motivated primarily by erotic interests and not by the problem of having the gender identity common to one sex in the body of the other. Yeah, because at the age of 6 when I wanted to be more like mom, it was motivated by e…
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#247A woman of incredible courage - to be able to rebuild her career after being kicked out of IBM despite her achievements, is inspirational. And, given how even the implementation of superscalar processors confuses me, smarter than I’ll ever be for understanding that AND chip fabbing at the same time, one of humanity’s finest technical achievements.
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#248Earlier 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).
Open-source projects depend on their community and contributors, and community management is inherently political. No matter what "neutral" thing you do, some contributors will approve of that, and some will see it as a red flag. Even saying "no politics!" will be seen by some people a political stance — as an approval of the status quo (which may be unfavorable to some groups of people), or even as a denial that cer…
> Open-source projects depend on their community and contributors, and community management is inherently political. No matter what "neutral" thing you do, some contributors will approve of that, and some will see it as a red flag.
There's this saying some people have, "there's three things you don't talk about at work: sex, politics and religion". (I think an older version had "money" instead of "sex"–from the days when sex wasn't talked about so much that we didn't even talk about the fact that we didn't talk about it.)
And it isn't necessarily bad advice. Do we really want heated workplace arguments about Israel-and-Palestine, Biden-vs-Trump, etc? We have to work with people who have completely different views from us on big picture political issues. Sometimes it is better we just agree to disagree and focus on what we have in common – airing those disagreements in detail can just produce negative feelings and disruption.
But of course, every office, every open source project has politics. But that's the thing, people traditionally draw a distinction between "micropolitics" (the politics of our workplace) and "macropolitics" (national politics, geopolitics). You cannot escape micropolitics, it is everywhere, it is inevitable. But macropolitics, yes, we should avoid it at work whenever possible.
Of course, people will then bring up "the personal is the political", and it is true. Transgender issues, for example: a big political controversy, but obviously for transgender people a very personal one.
However, even there, I think there is a useful distinction. A transgender employee isn't breaking the "no macropolitics at work" rule by being transgender, or talking about their personal experiences, or so on. But, consider Lynn Conway's public campaigns against the psychologist J. Michael Bailey and the sexologist Ray Blanchard – even though that was obviously very personal for her, it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to carry it on at work. Well, she actually did use her UMich web page for those campaigns, but the norms about this are different in academia than in your average workplace.
And politics is personal for all kinds of people: I remember back in 2010 when the Israeli military intercepted the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", the team I was in at the time had some very heated discussion over it. Afterwards, a Jewish team member talked to me privately, and I could tell the whole discussion had made him feel rather uncomfortable, because it felt personal to him. And one of the other participants in the conversation was Palestinian, so it was obviously personal to him too. But still, in hindsight I wish the whole discussion had never happened, and I regret my own (rather peripheral) role in it. We broke the "no politics at work" rule, and it did pointless harm to our cohesion as a team.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#249[flagged]
I am pro trans rights, but this only looks like a ChatGPT response to be honest.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#250A woman of incredible courage - to be able to rebuild her career after being kicked out of IBM despite her achievements, is inspirational. And, given how even the implementation of superscalar processors confuses me, smarter than I’ll ever be for understanding that AND chip fabbing at the same time, one of humanity’s finest technical achievements.
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Pardon my ignorance but don't trans people just want to be identified by their apparent gender without a qualifier?