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I have a confession:

This summer I downloaded a 2014 ACM conference paper from the Internet Archive, opened the PDF, changed the author's name on the title page, changed the email address, changed a GitHub URL in a footnote, rewrote the Author field in the file metadata, and put the altered file on the internet.

The paper is Vanessa Freudenberg's SqueakJS paper (DLS '14). She died in 2025. In 2024 the same paper won the SIGPLAN DLS Most Notable Paper Award, credited to Vanessa. Every public copy of the PDF still had the name she no longer used: ACM, dblp, Semantic Scholar, and every Wayback snapshot of the file on her own site. Same bytes. No corrected edition had ever existed.

She had already said, on this site, what she wanted. In 2021 she replied to me about Dan Ingalls's HOPL Smalltalk paper:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29125515

>Dan published an updated version of that paper here: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/papers/EvolutionOfSmalltalk.... Would be great if you could cite that one next time. The main improvement for me is not being deadnamed. There are other corrections as well.

Dan had quietly put out a corrected PDF of that paper while she was alive, outside the publisher's version of record, because the official copy was too slow to say her name. I did the same thing for the one paper he could not: hers.

The coding agent (Fable, in Cursor) did the search and proved the negative. It proposed the two institutional paths: petition ACM under the name-change policy, or ask her co-authors to re-typeset from LaTeX. It would not propose opening the published PDF and changing the bytes. I had to tell it to. Two trained rules collided. Do not tamper with a historical document. Do not leave a deadname sitting there. The first one won until a human who knew her pushed.

I then wrote down why that push was legitimate, and put the constraints into a reusable skill so the next agent can mention the option with the rules attached, instead of hiding it. All five, or do not do it:

The subject asked, in their own words, or someone with standing acts on that record. The original file stays bit-for-bit, hashed, in the same directory. Every change is listed in a README and in a Note inside the PDF. The filename says what the file is. The publisher correction is pursued in parallel; the edited file is a bridge, not a replacement of the record.

Drop any one of those, and the same edit is just a silent substitution.

Doing it right is the part Gwern is pointing at when he says there is no everyday Photoshop for PDFs. TeX does not store a name as a string. It stores a TJ array with kern numbers between syllables, so ordinary grep never sees it.

The Times subset on the byline happened to contain every glyph for "Vanessa"; we still had to recompute the V-a kern and shift the Td so the line stayed centered over her affiliation. The sans subset used for the email ended at glyph 117, one code point short of the letter v. That font literally could not spell her name. We set the line in Helvetica, sized to match, and resized the link annotation so the clickable box fit the new URL.

Fable did not stop at the byte edit. It rendered page 1 with Ghostscript, cropped the header, and looked at the pixels with machine vision. The first pass was beautiful and wrong: the byline said Vanessa, the email underneath still said the old address. The next pass put the new email in Times, which rendered clean and was the wrong family. It swapped in Helvetica, recentered, and zoomed to 220 dpi next to the neighboring authors until the line sat quietly with theirs. That loop is why the file does not look like vandalism.

The original and the memorial edition sit next to each other. ACM's copy is still uncorrected. Option 3 of their name-change policy is the canonical fix; her co-authors are the right petitioners.

Her comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29125515

The 2021 thread, preserved:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto...

Dan's corrected HOPL paper, the one she asked us to cite:

https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/papers/EvolutionOfSmalltalk....

The unaltered 2014 PDF (Wayback; her site is down):

https://web.archive.org/web/20250119071632/https://freudenbe...

Memorial edition:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto...

Original, hashed, beside it:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto...