Lynn Conway was an icon rule

usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 148 points –
Lynn Conway - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
12

I had no idea of the story behind the name. Thanks.

Is it still worth reading as an introduction?

If you want to know some basic structures sure. I don't understand most of it. I got pretty good at reverse engineering circuit boards and thought I would like to try chips, but my health just isn't at the required level. So I'm probably not the most useful reference. It is all about processes that are a long way from edge nodes, but trailing edge stuff is still a thing. I guess it really depends on your use case. Watch Asianometry on YT then maybe Electron Update, and go from there. There are people talking about reverse engineering chips at deeper levels of you go digging, especially in vintage silicon and FPGA areas.

I'm sad to say I hadn't heard of her before now, what an amazing woman (and also fuck IBM).

Reading through her wiki I found her blog (journal?) and while I'm only halfway through part 1, I'd definitely say it's worth reading (browser tried to stop me going through saying site was unsafe, but I clicked through anyway and it seems perfectly fine to me).

It never matters how skilled or brilliant you are when they don't want you to even exist.

What are you saying? She was assassinated?

I think what the previous person was referring to was stuff like how IBM fired her in 1968 once she told her bosses she wanted to transition. That's despite the fact that she did major industry shaping work there

Got it, thanks for clarifying!

I was also thinking about how Turing was treated. Queer people were foundational to computer science, yet it's still rife with bigots that think people like us don't belong.