| ▲ | mbrumlow 4 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||
I think somebody is trying to push a narrative. A now deleted post was pointing to this https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com... And I can see how maybe the author of the post this entire thread is about could see this and just roll with it. For the record the link I post seems to be entirely and completely wrong, and if I had such a post written so factually wrong about me, all while trying to take credit where none was owed, would be so embarrassing. But we live in a strange new world where we can just fabricate anything we want and back fill websites and probably pollute AI with nonsense just to push political agenda and gain favor in the masses who ether are ignorant or don’t care to ever know the truth. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | lkbm 3 hours ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
It's interesting to poke around and see how the game of telephone works. The first mentions I saw on Twitter were from February 2018[0]. Subsequent Black History Months[1] would reiterate how she invented GIFs or sometimes animated GIFs. You even get crazy things like how she invented the animated GIF while working with the Obama administration[2]. (That post references an article that talks about her working with the Obama administration that doesn't mention GIFs[3]. The author just merged the two things she's credited with.) In 2024, the story is that she invented the GIF at Netscape[4], which obviously makes little sense. It could be a reference to GIFs looping, but I see no evidence for that, especially since her LinkedIn[5] doesn't say she worked at Netscape. She worked at Macromedia, which involved work with Netscape, and I suspect the genesis is her work on Shockwave during that time (2005-2010), and that was taken to be a precursor to animated GIFs (obviously false, but an easy mistake for someone young and non-technical. Maybe it's a cultural precursor to modern animated GIF usage in people's minds?) Overall, though, this is a pretty dumb thing for them to claim, even if the claim is widespread across the Internet these days. She was roughly 17 when animated GIFs were first developed. As I said, it's interesting to see how the game of telephone plays out. I don't think anyone involved in this was intentionally spreading false information, and I don't really expect random Twitter users to fact-check carefully. I would like NYT to put some effort into it. As it is, we now have a NYT touting an obviously-false claim when she actually did a lot of really important and impressive stuff they could focus on instead. There's no need to spread fake accolades for her. Her actual contributions stand on their own. [0] https://x.com/Reel365/status/960288180447694848 [1] https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... / https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... / https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7034543821... [3] https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/08/18/computer-scientis... [4] https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com... [5] https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagelobter/details/experience/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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