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Lynn Conway has died

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#81

Post by renewiltord »

rdlw wrote: post #74
paulspl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's outraged that someone that frequents a tech forum regularly doesn't think to check what the "citation needed" was for and that their first instinct was to post outrage bait

Oh, that makes much more sense. I posted my comment before they elaborated on what they were saying, so the comment just said "Outrage bait, seriously: here's a screenshot.", which seemed like a direct response

Yeah, I thought it was obvious but it clearly wasn't (I asked an LLM and it reached the conclusion you did as well) so I elaborated.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#82

Post by ballooney »

lye wrote: post #34
barbazoo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! In case anyone knows, what's the best way to get this to be readable on an e-reader? Haven't found a PDF yet, probably exporting into a PDF is the easiest since it's only a couple dozen pages maybe?!

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 similar resurgence in enthusiasm about simple things like asking a question of someone and getting an above-and-beyond, going-out-of-their-way response to share their enthusiasm and knowledge about something with you. We must defend these pockets of human interaction. [brought to you after a boozy work lunch but the sentiment is genuine].

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#83

Post by sltkr »

adamomada wrote: post #65
amin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The tragedy of Wikipedia is that something like 3,000 people in the entire world are active editors (>100 edits)

The last time I tried to contribute to Wikipedia I spent more than an hour crafting an initial article about Makoto Matsumoto, inventor of the popular Mersenne Twister PRNG, mostly using sources from the sister article on the Japanese wiki.

Within moments, the article was deleted by a veteran editor who didn't consider the subject sufficiently notable. (This was apparently not an issue for the much smaller German, French and Japanese wikis.) My page was 1 of 5 pages he had deleted in the span of 15 minutes, which shows how much effort he personally spent on the decision to negate other contributor's work.

Needless to say, I doubt I will ever try to contribute to Wikipedia again.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#86

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

barbazoo wrote: post #17
mlsu wrote: post #13

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.

Thanks for sharing! In case anyone knows, what's the best way to get this to be readable on an e-reader? Haven't found a PDF yet, probably exporting into a PDF is the easiest since it's only a couple dozen pages maybe?!

If you've got a Kobo, Pocket seems to recognize it as an article (it often doesn't) and renders it well enough.

EDIT: Nevermind, Pocket only captures the preface (first four minutes, basically).

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#87

Post by hindsightbias »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #35

> Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[19] IBM apologized for this in 2020. Given that in 2012 there was an entire IEEE magazine issue dedicated to her career and contributions to the field which really brought awareness of all her contributions...it's disappointing it took IBM so long to apologize, especially given the…

Have worked with several trans folks at major legacy corps like IBM and while I'm sure there may have been rank-and-file issues, discrimination was not tolerated by mgmt in the latter 90s. My memory is IBM and HP added non-discrimination policies around that time.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#90

Post by indoordin0saur »

dexwiz wrote: post #14
wincy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly considering Lynn Conway’s Wikipedia profile mentions being a transgender activist and not knowing much about either of them, I thought maybe I’d just missed that John Conway had transitioned at some point, and had now died.

John Conway died over 4 years ago.

Yup. During the big initial wave of Covid. He was living in New Jersey at the time after retiring from a career at Princeton.
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