Popularity is (almost) scale-free

We live in an ecosystem, where everyone is pressured to be a content creator of some sort.

Suppose you want to interact with your friends on the internet. Let’s say they hang out on BlueSky or LiveJournal or whatever. So you go to those platforms, post some stuff you think your friends will like. And you have like 10 friends, so your posts get 10 views. But that’s not very good! You want your posts to be more widely read by strangers on the internet. So you put a bit more effort into being witty, so you can get 100 views, then 1000 views, and so on. And it’s never good enough because you read even wittier posts from other people, with 100 times the views that you get.

I describe internet popularity as “scale-free” because everything is on a logarithmic scale. No matter where you are in terms of popularity, you feel like a small fish in a big pond. You see other people on the internet with 100 times the popularity you have, so you understand your own little corner of the internet to be a backwater.

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Link Roundup: December 2024

This month, the ace journal club discussed genital plethysmography, and then we took seriously the idea of a sex therapy as a BDSM scene.

The Really Dark Truth About Bots | Benn Jordan (video, 29 min) – How much activity on X is from bots?  Benn Jordan goes through the research, explains how bots work, and concludes that it’s a whopping 1/3.  Incredible.  Kill it with fire.

I often think about the Rationalist/EA crowd, and how for many years they have been concerned about AI causing a human extinction event.  I don’t think the concern was entirely misplaced, but they seemed most concerned with the “AI alignment problem”, i.e. making sure AI does what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans.  However, I’m far more concerned about the billionaire alignment problem, i.e. making sure billionaires do what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans (now with AI assistance).  Or for that matter, the foreign dictator alignment problem.  All the AI safeguards in the world won’t help if powerful people simply don’t want them.

A comprehensive pro-choice ethic | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Some pro-lifers advocate a “comprehensive pro-life ethic” where they advocate for the health of people already born.  You can think whatever you like about that, but Perfect Number turns it around and imagines what it would mean to have a comprehensive pro-choice ethic.  It would be about empowering people to make free and informed decisions on medical treatment and reproductive health.

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Anti-trans “advice” defies sense

Okay, I’ll talk a bit about the election. In November, many people speculated on why Democrats lost the election. This has largely been an exercise in confirmation bias–everyone thinks reason Democrats lost is because they didn’t adopt *their* preferred politics, whatever those politics may be. I’m sorry to say, that’s not how evidence works.

One of the arguments has been that Harris lost points because she’s pro-trans. This is just another example of confirmation bias, and the evidence is found wanting.

To begin with, is Kamala Harris pro-trans? Where did people get that idea from? Republicans ran political ads attacking Kamala Harris for making pro-trans statements in the past, and the ads may or may not have been effective.

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Origami: Cube Tessellation (again)

Cube tessellation

Cube Tessellation, designed by me

Back in 2017, I designed this tessellation based on the rhombile tiling, and I blogged about it here.  More recently, someone asked my permission to teach it in an origami convention.  I said, “Sure, but I only have crease patterns, no instructions.  Can you figure it out from there?”  This being an expert origamist, he figured it out alright, but he said it was very challenging.  I tried it myself, and I had to agree!

The challenge can be part of the fun, but I still wanted to make it a bit easier.  So I revisited the model to see what I could do.  I finally made some step-by-step instructions!  Very difficult to make instructions for tessellations, because every step involves multiple simultaneous folds.  I also added some steps to clean up the “edges” of the tessellation.  The result is what you see above.

2024 was a very artistically productive year for me.  I folded about 10 original designs, revisited my cube tessellation design, and made two group theory infographics. This is in addition to folding dozens of other people’s designs.  It helps a lot that I returned to origami meetups this year, which I had stopped attending during the pandemic.

A better masculinity, for those who don’t want it

A few months ago, I went to an ace unconference–an unconference being an event where attendees create sessions on the spot, rather than planning sessions in advance.  I’ve been to quite a few of these, and I usually end up attending a discussion on ace men, because men are a minority within ace communities, and that’s worth talking about.

However, something was different this time.  This discussion was framed around ace masculinity, rather than ace men.  I relate much more to one than the other.

Several attendees were interested in the question of how to maintain their masculinity while being ace.  A lot of masculinity is associated with being sexually aggressive, so ace men are perceived as less masculine.  However, they were still invested in following some form of masculinity, either because it was gender affirming, or because they wanted a certain presentation as they approached dating, or because they just liked it.  So they were talking about stuff like clubbing and going to the gym.

I don’t deny the value of the discussion, but my reaction was “oh god, I hate masculinity so much.”  I said: being ace isn’t a challenge to my masculinity, it’s an opportunity to escape it.  I talked about how much I liked growing my hair long despite initially feeling that it wasn’t very gender affirming. I talked about preferring Zumba instead of gym workouts.  Several other attendees voiced similar feelings (noticeably, the ones with longer hair).

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My economic simulation of spacefaring kittens

Kittens Game is a clicker game that you can play in your browser. It makes a strong first impression, as it tempts you into choices that will kill off your kittens within twelve minutes. But I’m not here to review the game, I’m here to talk about spreadsheets!

Clicker games often support passive gameplay (e.g. leave it running overnight), active gameplay, or any combination of the above. On the very active end, you could try to optimize it, setting up spreadsheets to run calculations. So, I spent a thousand years tinkering with spreadsheets, and I liked it. There’s a story there, a mathematical story.

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Two kinds of LLM hallucinations

After writing about LLM error rates, I wanted to talk about a specific kind of error: the hallucination. I am aware that there is a lot of research into this subject, so I decided to read a scholarly review:

“Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation” by Ziwei Ji et al (2023), publicly accessible on arxiv.

I’m not aiming to summarize the entire subject, but rather to answer a specific question: Are hallucinations are an effectively solvable problem, or are they here to stay?

What is a hallucination?

“Hallucination” is a term used in the technical literature on AI, but it’s also entered popular usage. I’ve noticed some differences, and I’d like to put the two definitions in dialogue with each other.

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