[flagged]
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649014.
I'm sure you didn't intend to post yet-another flamewar tangent but that's what this would lead to in the limit case.
Lynn Conway has died
261–270 of 429 posts
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#262lots of progress in transgender issues since then because of people like lynn conway. Because of people like her, fewer people will lose their careers (or have to rebuild) or kids just because they corrected their gender.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Save as HTML with images and run through Calibre: $ ebook-convert index.html book.epub Here are the files if you trust a rando on the internet. Since they're just ZIP archives, you can unpack and inspect both to make sure there's no JS there. .mobi looks fine on my Kindle. https://0x0.st/Xc8M.epub https://0x0.st/Xc8B.mobi
A comment when an upvote would do - this is the kind of small act of generosity that I wish to acknowledge and praise in prose - thank you for taking the couple of minutes to do this. I've been feeling a little bleak about the internet lately as the SNR plummets in the tidal wave of AI seo search results, AI comments, etc. Thank you for taking the trouble. I went to EMFCamp in the UK a couple of weeks ago and had a s…
A bit meta, but your response is part of boosting that SNR, in the best way possible.
We already saw the front-page discussion about "slop", but we don't have to let it wash over all of us, all of the time. Thank you (and GP) for doing your part!
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#264[dead]
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human rights are intimately woven into International Law and state sovereignty. The work of the TWAIL scholars is relevant, especially as regards how human rights are deployed to undermine the sovereignty of the global south following the rapid “decolonisation” of the mid 20th century. I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.
>I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights. It is, example? Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
> the US and Canada just ratified it
Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Pardon my ignorance but don't trans people just want to be identified by their apparent gender without a qualifier?
> Pardon my ignorance but don't trans people just want to be identified by their apparent gender without a qualifier?
Yes. And trans woman not transwoman when it matters.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for sharing those details, I didn't know that. I learned and grew so much by reading Lynn's autobiography, but there's so much in there and it's so deep and personal, that it's hard to get my head around how amazing and difficult a life she had, and details like that help. I was researching some of the names that Alan Kay mentioned in his classic paper about the history of Smalltalk and his 1993 interview w…
Without wishing to categorize all of these important woman into the same story, another key trans figure in early personal computing is Sophie Wilson[1], who co-designed the ARM instruction set (and, as important for many, designed the OS for the BBC Microcomputer, including the font). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
It's so cool how so many important women in computing are trans women.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#268I 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.
I appreciate her making the effort to tell her story. I struggle sometimes to understand what it means when people say they feel born in the wrong gender. They way she describes it - not just about wanting to do 'girl' things but wanting to be soft and round and feminine - is eye-opening for me.
I think that many struggle to understand because they think something like "how would it feel to want to be a woman", rather than flip it to their gender. So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc.
It's always hard to truly understand how another person views the world, but I've heard that approach work for others in the past.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without wishing to categorize all of these important woman into the same story, another key trans figure in early personal computing is Sophie Wilson[1], who co-designed the ARM instruction set (and, as important for many, designed the OS for the BBC Microcomputer, including the font). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
It's so cool how so many important women in computing are trans women.
Honestly, yeah -- it's not a cheat code, it's facing two sets of pressures from discrimination, not seeing many like you in your field, what you deal with outside of the workplace, etc. And it helped me to see how many people before me succeeded regardless of all that; learning about Lynn Conway ~15 years ago was really important to me.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#270Earlier 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)
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…
> these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence
This is very incorrect, and an indicator that you should broaden the sources you get information from. Your other comments corroborate this, you have skewed view of the world that is based on looking at a small slice. It's not that they're fabricating things, it's that they do not give you an accurate view of the magnitudes of the forces and movements in the world.