Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social), page 2

5/ Frustratingly, they just kinda' clammed up, going into "trade secret" mode, like I was competition. I knew it couldn't have been written in BASIC, but they wouldn't even tell me whether they'd written it in Pascal or Assembly (the only other things that seemed plausible). ↵

8/ And that's how the penny dropped: why they hadn't been willing to answer any questions, tell me which language, give me any sense of how to store the strings—anything else. They just let me believe they'd written it, and its trade secrets were just too great to divulge. •

7/ I went to school and spent some time working through everything in that clone word processor. Then I edited the actual WordStar binary. And … it was a perfect match. I showed my friends "my" WordBlah (whatever it was called). ↵

6/ Many months later, I had learned to read DOS's .COM format. A dumb-ass prank we'd play was to take a binary and change all the strings to something else that was no longer than the original. And then, from somewhere deep in my consciousness came an idea. ↵

@tealeg To be fair, all the software I grew up around in India was pirated, because nobody could afford a license for anything. But at least we didn't change the names and call them our own!

Professors giving instructions: I shall tell my students exactly what to do and they had better do it.

Professors following instructions: hahaha, nice try, but why don't I just make up my own and sow chaos.

I'm not referring to any Dagstuhl event, of course.

Imagine designing a feature so awful and unwanted that random doctor's offices are getting yelled at and are having to put in defensive "please don't blame us" messages.

6/ Eventually she made her way to the Bronx, and now lives in Providence. She's strong of body and mind. The "1000 Year" Reich lasted ~13 years; that 7yo escapee has now lived ~13 times as long. The best possible response to pure evil. •

3.2/ His bravery was of course not rewarded, and he paid for it in many ways. He didn't ask for credit, either. He was only recognized near the very end of his life. He is apparently the only Japanese person recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations. ↵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara

3.1/ How did they get out? A Japanese diplomat in Lithuania saw what was happening. He put humanity ahead of the fact that he worked for an Axis power, handing out as many visas as he could. Thousands of Lithuanians, Poles and *Slavs owed their lives to him. ↵

2/ She grew up in Poland. They escaped in late 1939, fleeing mainly the Russians. Wait, Russians?!? That's right, today I met with a living witness to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. (Link if you don't know what that is.) ↵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact

5/ In Shanghai, they were herded into a ghetto. Yes, there was a Jewish ghetto *in Shanghai* (read here). The Germans tried to get the Jews deported, but the Japanese wouldn't. She still speaks with great admiration for the Japanese. ↵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Ghetto

4/ Anyway, the family got a visa in Lithuania. They made the dangerous passage across Siberia by train. From Vladivostok they took a boat to Japan. After a year there, Japan shipped them to Shanghai (remember, they occupied chunks of China). ↵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War

1/ Over the weekend there was a block party a short distance from my place for a lady who turned 90. That's notable enough, but in her case it's special because she's a Holocaust survivor. I chatted with her today and looked up some things. Remarkable story! Buckle in: ↵

One of the best airport announcements I've heard in a long time, at IAD airport today: "To passengers coming from Richmond at gate A2, if you left behind your … *doesn't manage to completely suppress chuckle* … wheelchair, please return to the gate."

@GreenSkyOverMe At least once every four years, that should be easy?

It was π-day, so I participated in a Pie-Your-Professor to raise funds for charity. Before-and-after. I'm next to the legendary, brilliant Thomas Goodwillie [Calculus of Functors, etc.].

(Non-Americans must rue that April has only 30 days, so their approximation is much worse.)

In the new BLR int'l terminal (of whose "bamboo" vibe I've seen little). I notice that I go "to" many places, but when it's BLR, I unconsciously say I'm going "back". So: I'm back! Though when my FA asked if I was back *home*, I smiled and said it's complicated. (-: #India24

2/ She does a good job of telling the long and unsuccessful history of facial recognition (I didn't realize Woody Bledsoe, who I always associated with theorem provers, was a pioneer), and how the availability of data and ML changed that. ↵

1/ For some years now, @kashhill has been a leading journalist on privacy and technology. Here she mainly tells the human story behind the facial recognition company Clearview (whom she brought to national attention). But there's much more to the book. ↵
#BookReview