Technology

Thanks for posting her faculty page, I hope anyone who feels conflicted about the obituary reads it! It sounds like the obituary author knew her well and wrote from a place of mutual understanding and respect.

There's some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/"Project Y" effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like ...20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.

There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There's a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP's link.

Wrong Conway.

Sometimes you have to develop defensive or offensive capabilities, and how they’re used are the responsibility of politicians. You’ll have to accept that some citizens support the actions of the politicians to use defensive or offensive capabilities.

If the non-war side has convincing arguments other than shaming based on assumed moral superiority, then they should suggest alternatives for dealing with aggressive sociopaths (Putin attacking Ukraine, for example) or any number of examples of violent extremism in history from [insert your ideological enemy].

Humans are still operating on a primitive model to kill opponents instead of alternative ways to deal with them, and blaming one scientist for that ill of society doesn’t make sense. Her contributions to science are separate from the sociopolitical issues under which they came about.

Man makes fire and farming. Is subsequently responsible for every death known to man.

How dare they!

If you're serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don't understand.

Going by Wikipedia here,

She was a huge part

Please define huge part. She was a "key architect" in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.

her entire work has to be viewed through that lens

Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn't stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.

is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children

This feels like such a huge leap, that I don't even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?

Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military's sake, fuck her. I can respect someone's achievements while also thinking they're trash as a person.

But I don't think that's the case here, and I'm lost as to what point, exactly, you're trying to make.

Some people see their pre-transition selves as being one gender, and only use their post-transition gender to inform their new pronouns later. It was written by a person that interviewed her and apparently held her in high respect. All we can see is that there is an abrupt change in the pronouns, where Lynn presumably could have considered herself to match the new pronouns. We don't know without asking her if she was misgendered by the article, and we are a bit late for that.