This is a bad puff piece article. Jeffrey C Mays the author is not technologically adept. She was a software engineer for a year. She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.
I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article, I challenge anyone to show me proof that she has done anything noteworthy technically. She jumped from management job to management job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter - Her wikipedia states she took 24 years (enrolled in 1987, graduated 2011) to graduate with her computer science degree, claiming "financial hardship", but she had already been a PM at many companies by then. I challenge anyone to show me technical depth or proficiency by her.
As most people who have worked in engineering at large companies can attest, there are entrenched dinosaurs who have worked themselves up the management chain due to inertia. This is such an example. They are almost always out of their depth technically, and are great at taking credit for the work of others. There are people in this comments section, and online claiming she invented Adobe Shockwave.
This article claims she invented Adobe Shockwave while holding the title of "Director of Program Management".
Even her Wikipedia page seems to have been edited by her #1 fan. It reads:
Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning.[3] Gelobter’s journey was full of resilience and dedication. She often took breaks off school due to financial challenges and she worked as a Teaching Assistant (TA) during school semesters, even when she wasn’t fully enrolled.
What in the world? That's not even remotely close to the tone that wiki articles are supposed to be.
We've all encountered people like this who are good at climbing the chain. Big oof.
The Director of Program Management may have had the initial, vague idea. Is that "invented"? It almost certainly wasn't "implemented the first working prototype"...
That may be a puff piece, but this comment reads like a slam? I don't know anything about her personally but the consensus among tech folks I follow and respect (and are politically aligned with...) are pretty universal in applauding the choice.
Disagreeing on politics is fine but let's not slam someone technically because we don't like them. Especially in a role where tech management is actually the way more relevant skill than hacking ability.
Which tech folks you respect are applauding the choice? (politically aligned) with is something you noted, which may be why they are applauding it. I am not slamming her technical ability, there is no representation of it online, and her roles are not technical at all and do not lend credence to the headline, or verbiage used in articles about her ability.
> She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.
Also called Project Manager or Product Manager. It's generally the position that developers who don't like programming or are bad at it move to.
> I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article
I remember when we weren't allowed to criticize the "authoritative source" here not too long ago. Is dang asleep at the wheel? I don't think the groundbreaking aspect has to do with her being a computer scientist. What about her or her attributes would make her groundbreaking in a nytimes article about her?
> It was at Netscape Communications where Gelobter first began working on the development of the GIF.
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
Looks like the GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987?
> CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression.
> In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop.
> To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB).
VS from the article:
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
So this person worked on looping the GIF at best, not the animation technology itself. This is a bad look taking credit away from the person who actually did the hard work behind GIF, Steve Wilhite & his team at Compuserve. Netscape certainly made GIF animations popular by introducing the loop - prior to that basically no one used the animated GIF for the prior 6 years before the loop.
The annoying part of the article is making it seem like a technical accomplishment instead of a UX / product / marketing one.
She was Director of Program Management, which is different from Product Management as well. You can google what a program manager usually does, and its usually not inventing things or technical work.
Can an American please help me comprehend how much power a mayor has? I am supposing a NYC mayor would be more influential than that of a less important city. But I still don't understand how that would make an appointment like this significant.
NYC's city budget is larger than every state apart from California, Texas, NY. At $115B, it equals Florida. By numbers alone, he's very influential.
Now NYC is a over-regulated mess that faces gridlock from both unions and the state representatives. In practice, it makes the NYC mayor a cog-in-the-machine. The real task for a NYC mayor is consensus building first, and allocation of funds second.
It varies by city. In some cities, mayor is barely more than a figurehead.
But regardless of power, what the NYC mayor does is widely reported and it's often a political stepping stone (if not always successful) to something greater.
Mamdani in particular is a celebrity right now, and with the reputation of the Democratic party in shambles, many eyes are on him.
> But regardless of power, what the NYC mayor does is widely reported and it's often a political stepping stone (if not always successful) to something greater.
The only "greater" things any recent NYC mayors have done are bankrolling presidential campaigns and failed coup attempts.
Looking back at it, the last NYC mayor who held a notable political position after their mayoral term was Robert Wagner.
In fact, the last mayor I can find who served in a superior political office after their mayoralty was John T Hoffman, who was mayor from 1866-1868 and then NY Governor from 1869-1872.
Obviously NYC is very big and very wealthy. But the powers of a Mayor depend on the city.
I'm not a New Yorker, but here's how I understand it: NYC mayor appoints a bunch of people who run various bureaucratic legs of the city government. The guys who manage taxes, zoning, and whatnot. But the Mayor has to get those people approved by the city council. The mayor can also veto policies written by the city council, but he can be overruled with a two-thirds vote by the council. The council writes the budget, and the Mayor can only approve it or veto it.
This all sounds pretty normal, but it actually varies a lot depending on the city. In Chicago, for example, the Mayor writes the budget, instead of the council. But, the Aldermen (a Chicago city council member is called an Alderman btw) have a lot more power downstream of the budget, since they control stuff like zoning within their respective wards. The Aldermen also redraw their own political boundaries every 10 years, with no input from the Mayor whatsoever. I guess I'd say Chicago's mayor has less "first-order" power but more "second-order" power compared to NYC's mayor. Chicago is weird.
What should you make of this? I'm not sure. Maybe Mayors in Europe or Asia have way more power than Mamdani does, I don't know. I reckon that NYC mayor has more power than most American mayors, even when you ignore the differences in scale.
This is state by state, city by city. In some places, a mayor has broad powers over agencies, taxes, etc. That isn't quite the case in NYC. It's up to the state to delegate these powers, just as the federal government delegates powers to the states.
NYC is explicitly restricted (relative to other cities in NY) by the state in terms of what it can do. It can't independently pass its own tax laws (in many cases, at least), which other cities can, for example. Multiple agencies that would often be municipal are handled by the state or require state approval/ explicit delegation.
The city also gets exceptions for more power, including taxation powers. It's all case by case.
The NYC mayor's powers are complex for this reason. On the one hand, no one cares much about other mayors, so you have a ton of political power. On the other hand, you're not exactly empowered to do a lot without asking someone else to sign off.
While the federal government does delegate some powers to the states, many of the states powers are reserved to the states explicitly in the constitution, with the federal government only having those powers explicitly granted to it. (See the 10th Amendment where this is explicitly laid out.)
NYC is a large city, consisting of 5 boroughs (divisions); each of which is larger in population than many US states. Its also the financial capital of the world. So just going by population alone, the NYC City Government represents more people than several state Governments. The economy of the city is also very high tech, high income etc. Although the Mayor does not have the same powers as Governor (e.g. they can't pass tax laws), he still has a lot of impact.
He has control over city agencies, budgets, personnel. Has little or no power as it relates to laws or infrastructure (like the MTA)--that's all state level.
It's only interesting because 8 million people live there, and many more pass through the city
This population size is greater than most countries, and the density and speed of commerce there is fairly unique, so it's a constant coordination problem and experiment on a large scale that people look to.
Think of NYC more as one of the Free Cities in the old world.
They aren't a top level government by any means but they're mostly left alone to have nearly unilateral control of their jurisdiction. New York City has some unique challenges with key infrastructure (like all of the trains) being controlled by New York State and the Federal Government.
NYC is a special case, because it’s at or near the center of the universe: the US financial hub, the center of theater, dominant in all entertainment media, the UN headquarters, the most important historical entry point for all immigrant groups, the most important city for book publishing, advertising, etc. It’s one of the five most important, powerful cities in the world. It has its own foreign policy and diplomatic relationships. Its mayors have frequently, and for many decades, been interviewed for their opinions on world affairs that would seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with city government.
I am always confused with the role of CTO. I don’t recall any company I worked at where it seemed the CTO had much of an impact. They were just thee, some of them were good at demos, but overall I just didn’t notice what they were doing.
At every companies I've worked at the CFO always has a large presence at every townhall, after all they are the one who is responsible for sending your paychecks on time. As for CTO, yeah it's a mixed bag in my experience, I mostly see them as just another layer between the CEO/COO and the principle engineers. Maybe that's exactly what they want though.
What is this business about her role in GIFs? She helped invent Macromedia Shockwave.... Not remembering any kind of connection between those things... I mean, animated GIFs were already a thing that popularized on their own.... nothing to do with Shockwave really. Just both contributing at the same time to popularizing or encouraging the use of animation on the web, yeah?
̶N̶e̶t̶s̶c̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶i̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶G̶I̶F̶s̶. Edit: Netscape added looping to animated GIFs per reply. She apparently led that effort. The press is misreporting her actions as having invented GIF in the first place, which is wrong. That happened at CompuServe in 1987.
GIFs already had animation. Netscape added an animation loop counter.
For a rough idea of the complexity involved, when I wrote a GIF decoder and renderer a few decades ago, implementing the loop counter extension took me about 10 minutes.
I don’t have access to the article, so I’m basing this response solely on your comment. I wonder if the author thinks all animations on the web are called GIFs. So being part of creating one of the early methods of publishing animations on the web (Shockwave) confused the author.
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.
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.
Addendum: In the paragraph after merging Shockwave and GIFs, NYT references a Forbes interview[0] where she specifically says she didn't invent GIFs.
NYT:
> Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.
Interview linked in the very next paragraph:
> Gelobter: I want to clarify that I did not create GIFs although I get credited for it a lot. I think people conflated thinking about animation on the web as being animated GIFs but that was Shockwave. Again, what we did with Shockwave was transformative.
The misinformation around this is ridiculous. There's a bunch of articles, written more recently than not, that all make some kind of unfounded claim that Shockwave lead to GIFs or GIF animation. One of them is the source for the line in the Wikipedia article that makes a similar claim. The Wikipedia doesn't even mention her working at Netscape ever either. Brutal.
> In 2016, Gelobter founded and took on the role of Chief Executive Officer of tEQuitable, a start-up that provides an independent and confidential platform to address issues of bias, harassment, and discrimination in the workplace.
Lisa Gelobter, whose work helped shape the modern web, was also on the launch team at Hulu.
Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.
Notably absent on resume and in the news article is proficiency in AI or machine learning, so I am curious to see how she plans to weave that into the portfolio of work and help transform NYC.
The job is 99% program management and 1% tech. It’s the government. Anyone focused on tech will burn out in 2 weeks and quit loudly via twitter. You know, like DOGE.
Every tech person I know who tried to work in NYC government burned out rather quickly. The government is so sclerotic and shackled to laws meant to break up the Tammany Hall machine that its impossible to do anything good or fast.
A lot of stuff gets bid out, and the procurement process is overly burdensome...
Which results in a limited number of qualified bidders collecting rents, and then subbing out the work to subs who then sub it out further.. such that its all done offshore for peanuts while we pay real money to some schmuck who ticked the right boxes in order to collect said rents.
Briefly in the mid 2010s the NYC Department of City Planning tried to build some stuff in house and hired some good people, but the old ghouls in the city ruined it by obstruction and everyone left by the end of 2017.
City government in most US cities is so fucked, it's really wild. Another guy I know who graduated from NYU Wagner as a planner got hired by the city to do some mapping work but his boss miscoded his job in a way that precluded him from ever being promoted, so he quit.
As of 2023 at least there were people working in city planning who didn't have computers and refused to use them, professional staff.
CTO is typically an executive position, not an IC position.
The CTO at my $500m, YC, series-C startup is not the most technical member of the staff, does not have the broadest technical knowledge, is not the most experienced, nor is he the best in any single technical field in our team.
You misunderstand the role of the CTO in most orgs. His job is to guide technical strategy based on where business is headed. Manage staffing levels, general technical org operations, manage people, be the final arbiter on some org-level technical decisions based on business strategy alignment.
It really depends on the size, it can span from the lead programmer to the lead architect to the lead technical manager to the strategic technical partner and/or technical visionary for the company.
Why do you think she doesn't have an high-level knowledge of AI? Like what's a NN, a transformer, how they're trained? Anyone can pick that up over a weekend. She doesn't need to have experience training models or designing new architectures for this job.
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
Yeah, we wouldn't want someone who understands the most revolutionary technology in 100 years to be the technical advisor to the mayor of the largest city in the United States or anything. That would be silly.
Why do you assume she doesn't understand it? From her Wikipedia article:
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
I don't know what the difference is intended to be but the guidelines also don't have anything to say about voting on comments except not to complain about it.
https://archive.is/fM36L
This is a bad puff piece article. Jeffrey C Mays the author is not technologically adept. She was a software engineer for a year. She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.
I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article, I challenge anyone to show me proof that she has done anything noteworthy technically. She jumped from management job to management job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter - Her wikipedia states she took 24 years (enrolled in 1987, graduated 2011) to graduate with her computer science degree, claiming "financial hardship", but she had already been a PM at many companies by then. I challenge anyone to show me technical depth or proficiency by her.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
As most people who have worked in engineering at large companies can attest, there are entrenched dinosaurs who have worked themselves up the management chain due to inertia. This is such an example. They are almost always out of their depth technically, and are great at taking credit for the work of others. There are people in this comments section, and online claiming she invented Adobe Shockwave.
This article claims she invented Adobe Shockwave while holding the title of "Director of Program Management".
https://www.govtech.com/workforce/tech-and-gif-pioneer-lisa-...
There are disparate sources online from Facebook and Instagram claiming she invented GIFs.
There are (incorrect) AI summaries when searching her name on Google that claim she invented Adobe Shockwave and GIFs.
Even her Wikipedia page seems to have been edited by her #1 fan. It reads:
What in the world? That's not even remotely close to the tone that wiki articles are supposed to be.We've all encountered people like this who are good at climbing the chain. Big oof.
The Director of Program Management may have had the initial, vague idea. Is that "invented"? It almost certainly wasn't "implemented the first working prototype"...
That may be a puff piece, but this comment reads like a slam? I don't know anything about her personally but the consensus among tech folks I follow and respect (and are politically aligned with...) are pretty universal in applauding the choice.
Disagreeing on politics is fine but let's not slam someone technically because we don't like them. Especially in a role where tech management is actually the way more relevant skill than hacking ability.
Which tech folks you respect are applauding the choice? (politically aligned) with is something you noted, which may be why they are applauding it. I am not slamming her technical ability, there is no representation of it online, and her roles are not technical at all and do not lend credence to the headline, or verbiage used in articles about her ability.
> She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.
Also called Project Manager or Product Manager. It's generally the position that developers who don't like programming or are bad at it move to.
> I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article
I remember when we weren't allowed to criticize the "authoritative source" here not too long ago. Is dang asleep at the wheel? I don't think the groundbreaking aspect has to do with her being a computer scientist. What about her or her attributes would make her groundbreaking in a nytimes article about her?
> It was at Netscape Communications where Gelobter first began working on the development of the GIF.
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
Looks like the GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987?
> CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
Non-animated though - there's a section on animated gifs coming out of Netscape in your link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF
> In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop.
> To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB).
VS from the article:
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
So this person worked on looping the GIF at best, not the animation technology itself. This is a bad look taking credit away from the person who actually did the hard work behind GIF, Steve Wilhite & his team at Compuserve. Netscape certainly made GIF animations popular by introducing the loop - prior to that basically no one used the animated GIF for the prior 6 years before the loop.
The annoying part of the article is making it seem like a technical accomplishment instead of a UX / product / marketing one.
Ahhh, I see. Thanks for clarifying!
She was Director of Program Management, which is different from Product Management as well. You can google what a program manager usually does, and its usually not inventing things or technical work.
"Invented" as in being the first to ask "is there a way we could...?"
Most likely not "invented" as in "created the first working prototype".
GIF89a (1989) already supported animation; the only thing Netscape added was the ability to specify how many times the animation should repeat.
They used the format’s support for application extension blocks to add a uint16 repetition count.
Can an American please help me comprehend how much power a mayor has? I am supposing a NYC mayor would be more influential than that of a less important city. But I still don't understand how that would make an appointment like this significant.
NYC's city budget is larger than every state apart from California, Texas, NY. At $115B, it equals Florida. By numbers alone, he's very influential.
Now NYC is a over-regulated mess that faces gridlock from both unions and the state representatives. In practice, it makes the NYC mayor a cog-in-the-machine. The real task for a NYC mayor is consensus building first, and allocation of funds second.
It varies by city. In some cities, mayor is barely more than a figurehead.
But regardless of power, what the NYC mayor does is widely reported and it's often a political stepping stone (if not always successful) to something greater.
Mamdani in particular is a celebrity right now, and with the reputation of the Democratic party in shambles, many eyes are on him.
> But regardless of power, what the NYC mayor does is widely reported and it's often a political stepping stone (if not always successful) to something greater.
The only "greater" things any recent NYC mayors have done are bankrolling presidential campaigns and failed coup attempts.
Looking back at it, the last NYC mayor who held a notable political position after their mayoral term was Robert Wagner.
In fact, the last mayor I can find who served in a superior political office after their mayoralty was John T Hoffman, who was mayor from 1866-1868 and then NY Governor from 1869-1872.
Obviously NYC is very big and very wealthy. But the powers of a Mayor depend on the city.
I'm not a New Yorker, but here's how I understand it: NYC mayor appoints a bunch of people who run various bureaucratic legs of the city government. The guys who manage taxes, zoning, and whatnot. But the Mayor has to get those people approved by the city council. The mayor can also veto policies written by the city council, but he can be overruled with a two-thirds vote by the council. The council writes the budget, and the Mayor can only approve it or veto it.
This all sounds pretty normal, but it actually varies a lot depending on the city. In Chicago, for example, the Mayor writes the budget, instead of the council. But, the Aldermen (a Chicago city council member is called an Alderman btw) have a lot more power downstream of the budget, since they control stuff like zoning within their respective wards. The Aldermen also redraw their own political boundaries every 10 years, with no input from the Mayor whatsoever. I guess I'd say Chicago's mayor has less "first-order" power but more "second-order" power compared to NYC's mayor. Chicago is weird.
What should you make of this? I'm not sure. Maybe Mayors in Europe or Asia have way more power than Mamdani does, I don't know. I reckon that NYC mayor has more power than most American mayors, even when you ignore the differences in scale.
This is state by state, city by city. In some places, a mayor has broad powers over agencies, taxes, etc. That isn't quite the case in NYC. It's up to the state to delegate these powers, just as the federal government delegates powers to the states.
NYC is explicitly restricted (relative to other cities in NY) by the state in terms of what it can do. It can't independently pass its own tax laws (in many cases, at least), which other cities can, for example. Multiple agencies that would often be municipal are handled by the state or require state approval/ explicit delegation.
The city also gets exceptions for more power, including taxation powers. It's all case by case.
The NYC mayor's powers are complex for this reason. On the one hand, no one cares much about other mayors, so you have a ton of political power. On the other hand, you're not exactly empowered to do a lot without asking someone else to sign off.
While the federal government does delegate some powers to the states, many of the states powers are reserved to the states explicitly in the constitution, with the federal government only having those powers explicitly granted to it. (See the 10th Amendment where this is explicitly laid out.)
NYC is a large city, consisting of 5 boroughs (divisions); each of which is larger in population than many US states. Its also the financial capital of the world. So just going by population alone, the NYC City Government represents more people than several state Governments. The economy of the city is also very high tech, high income etc. Although the Mayor does not have the same powers as Governor (e.g. they can't pass tax laws), he still has a lot of impact.
He has control over city agencies, budgets, personnel. Has little or no power as it relates to laws or infrastructure (like the MTA)--that's all state level.
It's only interesting because 8 million people live there, and many more pass through the city
This population size is greater than most countries, and the density and speed of commerce there is fairly unique, so it's a constant coordination problem and experiment on a large scale that people look to.
Think of NYC more as one of the Free Cities in the old world.
They aren't a top level government by any means but they're mostly left alone to have nearly unilateral control of their jurisdiction. New York City has some unique challenges with key infrastructure (like all of the trains) being controlled by New York State and the Federal Government.
NYC is a special case, because it’s at or near the center of the universe: the US financial hub, the center of theater, dominant in all entertainment media, the UN headquarters, the most important historical entry point for all immigrant groups, the most important city for book publishing, advertising, etc. It’s one of the five most important, powerful cities in the world. It has its own foreign policy and diplomatic relationships. Its mayors have frequently, and for many decades, been interviewed for their opinions on world affairs that would seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with city government.
I am always confused with the role of CTO. I don’t recall any company I worked at where it seemed the CTO had much of an impact. They were just thee, some of them were good at demos, but overall I just didn’t notice what they were doing.
You could say the same about a cfo, if the company does not use financial engineering, etc.
The CTO role is to be invisible to the business, and do that by ensuring that the tech org is working
At every companies I've worked at the CFO always has a large presence at every townhall, after all they are the one who is responsible for sending your paychecks on time. As for CTO, yeah it's a mixed bag in my experience, I mostly see them as just another layer between the CEO/COO and the principle engineers. Maybe that's exactly what they want though.
Yeah, probably in the US, where workers protection are mostly non existent - you need to be friends with the money!
If they've been invisible, they are doing their job right.
What is this business about her role in GIFs? She helped invent Macromedia Shockwave.... Not remembering any kind of connection between those things... I mean, animated GIFs were already a thing that popularized on their own.... nothing to do with Shockwave really. Just both contributing at the same time to popularizing or encouraging the use of animation on the web, yeah?
̶N̶e̶t̶s̶c̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶i̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶G̶I̶F̶s̶. Edit: Netscape added looping to animated GIFs per reply. She apparently led that effort. The press is misreporting her actions as having invented GIF in the first place, which is wrong. That happened at CompuServe in 1987.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF
GIFs already had animation. Netscape added an animation loop counter.
For a rough idea of the complexity involved, when I wrote a GIF decoder and renderer a few decades ago, implementing the loop counter extension took me about 10 minutes.
Thanks, updated comment. I had misread the GIF wikipedia page.
I don’t have access to the article, so I’m basing this response solely on your comment. I wonder if the author thinks all animations on the web are called GIFs. So being part of creating one of the early methods of publishing animations on the web (Shockwave) confused the author.
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.
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/
Addendum: In the paragraph after merging Shockwave and GIFs, NYT references a Forbes interview[0] where she specifically says she didn't invent GIFs.
NYT:
> Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.
Interview linked in the very next paragraph:
> Gelobter: I want to clarify that I did not create GIFs although I get credited for it a lot. I think people conflated thinking about animation on the web as being animated GIFs but that was Shockwave. Again, what we did with Shockwave was transformative.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2021/02/18/meet-the-...
Good note, thank you for highlighting
The NYT seems to have an interest in making Mamdani and his administration more palatable to their readers:
http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA
The misinformation around this is ridiculous. There's a bunch of articles, written more recently than not, that all make some kind of unfounded claim that Shockwave lead to GIFs or GIF animation. One of them is the source for the line in the Wikipedia article that makes a similar claim. The Wikipedia doesn't even mention her working at Netscape ever either. Brutal.
> In 2016, Gelobter founded and took on the role of Chief Executive Officer of tEQuitable, a start-up that provides an independent and confidential platform to address issues of bias, harassment, and discrimination in the workplace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter
[flagged]
Interested to hear you cite some examples!
And what has Mamdani lied about?
Huh?
[flagged]
https://archive.is/fM36L
Lisa Gelobter, whose work helped shape the modern web, was also on the launch team at Hulu.
Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.
Notably absent on resume and in the news article is proficiency in AI or machine learning, so I am curious to see how she plans to weave that into the portfolio of work and help transform NYC.
The job is 99% program management and 1% tech. It’s the government. Anyone focused on tech will burn out in 2 weeks and quit loudly via twitter. You know, like DOGE.
Every tech person I know who tried to work in NYC government burned out rather quickly. The government is so sclerotic and shackled to laws meant to break up the Tammany Hall machine that its impossible to do anything good or fast.
A lot of stuff gets bid out, and the procurement process is overly burdensome...
Which results in a limited number of qualified bidders collecting rents, and then subbing out the work to subs who then sub it out further.. such that its all done offshore for peanuts while we pay real money to some schmuck who ticked the right boxes in order to collect said rents.
Briefly in the mid 2010s the NYC Department of City Planning tried to build some stuff in house and hired some good people, but the old ghouls in the city ruined it by obstruction and everyone left by the end of 2017.
City government in most US cities is so fucked, it's really wild. Another guy I know who graduated from NYU Wagner as a planner got hired by the city to do some mapping work but his boss miscoded his job in a way that precluded him from ever being promoted, so he quit.
As of 2023 at least there were people working in city planning who didn't have computers and refused to use them, professional staff.
Sort of off-topic but fun fact: Tammany Hall is now a dogfood and kitty litter store!
Source: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Petco/@40.7364792,-73.9890...
That's their post breakup HQ - they moved in there in 1929. The Boss Tweed days were in 190 Nassau Street and 141 East 14th Street (demolished)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall#Headquarters
190 Nassau Street - https://maps.app.goo.gl/3zjkd2mC6PwAYVB26?g_st=ac
Well it was after Boss Tweed but pre-breakup
If anything, the job is 99% awarding contracts and 1% monthly progress meetings.
CTO is typically an executive position, not an IC position.
The CTO at my $500m, YC, series-C startup is not the most technical member of the staff, does not have the broadest technical knowledge, is not the most experienced, nor is he the best in any single technical field in our team.
You misunderstand the role of the CTO in most orgs. His job is to guide technical strategy based on where business is headed. Manage staffing levels, general technical org operations, manage people, be the final arbiter on some org-level technical decisions based on business strategy alignment.
> You misunderstand the role of the CTO in most orgs. His job is to guide technical strategy based on where business is headed.
A great CTO not only guides the technical strategy based on business direction BUT ALSO shapes the business strategy informed by technology direction.
It really depends on the size, it can span from the lead programmer to the lead architect to the lead technical manager to the strategic technical partner and/or technical visionary for the company.
Sure, but we're talking about NYC here, not a 3 person startup.
This made me laugh but then I remembered I'm on HN and you're probably serious.
The response to GP is a credit to HN though too.
Why do you think she doesn't have an high-level knowledge of AI? Like what's a NN, a transformer, how they're trained? Anyone can pick that up over a weekend. She doesn't need to have experience training models or designing new architectures for this job.
EDIT - someone posted a link to her Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter), which states:
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
I’m not thinking granular low-level knowledge, but rather a strategic point of view to shape the tech strategy and organizational goals of NYC.
We know that AI has to form part of that story and so you want a CTO who can steer clarity and vision, without resorting to keyword soup and hype.
To be clear, I have no signal where this CTO is likely to fall on that spectrum, so I’m very much looking forward to the difference she will make.
I so totally read this as "Hooli" on first reading.
Gell Mann amnesia hitting hard on this one.
Good?
Seems like she was there when Hulu was great and when Macromedia was great.
>Notably absent on resume and in the news article is proficiency in AI or machine learning,
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yeah, we wouldn't want someone who understands the most revolutionary technology in 100 years to be the technical advisor to the mayor of the largest city in the United States or anything. That would be silly.
Why do you assume she doesn't understand it? From her Wikipedia article:
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
Macromedia was a great company
Hilarious
There's still time to add the /s
Unnecessarily being voted down. Post is adding some information. Doesnt violate any HN rules. cc @dang
HN doesn't have rules it has guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't know what the difference is intended to be but the guidelines also don't have anything to say about voting on comments except not to complain about it.
The comment sucked so I downvoted it. Yours too.
> The comment sucked
A great CTO not only guides the technical strategy based on business direction BUT ALSO shapes the business strategy informed by technology direction.
We know that AI has to form part of that story and so you want a CTO who can steer clarity and vision, without resorting to keyword soup and hype.
To be clear, I have no signal where this CTO is likely to fall on that spectrum, so I’m very much looking forward to the difference she will make.