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Lynn Conway has died

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#281

Post by autoexec »

delecti wrote: post #268
nineplay wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, et…

> 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.

Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me, and the experience of having more body hair and muscle mass would be entirely foreign to me. If men flirting with me was off-putting I'd probably just assume I was gay, and I'm lucky enough to live in an environment where I don't have to buy into or perform traditional gender roles any more than I want to. It's probably easy for me to say, having never a experienced a mismatch, but any intrinsic sense of inner maleness that wasn't 'nurtured' into me ranks pretty low on the list of things that comprise my self-identity.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#283

Post by amysox »

bsaul wrote: post #275

Is it an impression , or are computer people overly represented amongst trans people ? Maybe working with computers provides a better environment for people with social-related issues ?

I wrote a Quora answer about this, based on some material I found from HN commenter "amyjess": https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-transgender-women-work-in-...

To summarize: It's a combination of the culture and the way that various overlapping subcultures are viewed by society.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#284

Post by duskwuff »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #233
DonHopkins wrote: post #3

Lynn Conway co-wrote "the book" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits, including James Clark (SGI) who made the Geometry Engine, and Guy L Steel (MIT) who made the Scheme Microprocessor. She invented superscalar architecture at IBM, just to be fired in 1968 aft…

I ended up teaching Carver Mead's course in its last year at Caltech, which was quite an experience. In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts. The real reason why this course was obsolete was that Mead and Conway so thoroughly won the argument on the idea of creating rigorous abstractions that peopl…

> It just seems so obvious today that you can create gates, you can create macros, you can create complex designs, and you can define the interface at every level so you can hook them up and they just work. That idea came out of Conway and the early pioneers of VLSI.

And you can see the opposite of this in many early microprocessor designs, like the (original, NMOS) 6502 and Z80. There's a lot of highly idiosyncratic designs for gates, heavily customized for the physical and electrical context that they're used in - and I won't deny that they're often very clever and space-efficient, but they were also extraordinarily time-intensive to design, and weren't reusable. It made some complex designs possible within the limitations of the time's fabrication technology, but it wasn't an approach which would have ever scaled to larger designs.

One great example of this is this bit of 6502 overflow logic:

http://www.righto.com/2013/01/a-small-part-of-6502-chip-expl...

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#285

Post by amysox »

Jerrrrry wrote: post #282
bsaul wrote: post #275

Is it an impression , or are computer people overly represented amongst trans people ? Maybe working with computers provides a better environment for people with social-related issues ?

[flagged]

And when you combine that with recent studies that show a correlation between autism and gender variance[1], that might provide some insight.

[1] See e.g. https://behavioral-innovations.com/blog/exploring-the-inters...>. "Research shows that people who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are anywhere from three to six times as likely to have autism spectrum disorder as compared to cisgender people – those who do identify with the sex they were assigned at birth."

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#286

Post by [deleted] »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #108
polairscience wrote: post #97

For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with politics. While I appreciate that it's a difficult line to walk, to have productive and relevant political discussion in a forum like this, politics and social acceptance are a part of every aspect of our lives. Brilliant, kind, impactful people are kept from…

I don't think it's feasible to separate technology from the people themselves. What we do, in some way or the other touches people, real people, people with feelings, dreams and aspirations. To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them. I recently stumbled on [1], > I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us ar…

[deleted]

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#287

Post by tills13 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #266
tills13 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ok so just a bigoted comment that I replied to originally

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#288

Post by meifun »

nicolas_t wrote: post #180
meifun wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree here. As a trans parent I have worried about what living an often non-socially acceptable lifestyle would do to them. But then I see the acceptance as my daughter proudly introduces me as her "mama" to her whole class. I'm a better parent alive living my truth than I am an "unalived" parent leaving a gap for those that loved me for me.

It's heartwarming to see this from your daughter. Never doubt that you're a better parent alive living your truth and that your daughter is grateful for you being there for her. Best of luck for continuing your transition.

Thank you friend!

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#289

Post by [deleted] »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #108
polairscience wrote: post #97

For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with politics. While I appreciate that it's a difficult line to walk, to have productive and relevant political discussion in a forum like this, politics and social acceptance are a part of every aspect of our lives. Brilliant, kind, impactful people are kept from…

I don't think it's feasible to separate technology from the people themselves. What we do, in some way or the other touches people, real people, people with feelings, dreams and aspirations. To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them. I recently stumbled on [1], > I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us ar…

[deleted]

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#290

Post by altairprime »

nvarsj wrote: post #244
adrian_b wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might also, then, appreciate her IEEE article introducing the Conway Effect: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2018/10/mco2018100...
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