Origami: Stick Figure

Stick Figure

Stick Figure, designed by Thomas Speckman

This design is made by someone I know, a teenager that I see in the local origami space.  For him, this is a very simple design, something he can teach others in the space of an hour.  I often see him working on prototypes of much more complex designs, using massive yard-long paper.

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2024 Election positions

As usual, when I write about election positions, my purpose is not primarily to persuade readers, but rather to normalize the research & voting process. I believe in doing a small amount of research so you know what you’re voting for, but it shouldn’t require so much research that you’re afraid to vote all the way down the ballot.

This will include discussion of obscure local elections, which obviously won’t be relevant to most readers.  That’s fine!  You can skip what bores you.  That’s just what voting down ballot is like.

President

Kamala Harris. You’ve likely already decided this, so there’s not much point to doing more research than necessary. But… I will say that Donald Trump has deliberately counterfeited election results, and plans to do more to subvert democracy again. So the least we can do is vote against him, even people who don’t live in swing states.

Really, one vote doesn’t feel like enough, so that’s why I make my displeasure known by voting against Republicans in every election, all the way down the ballot. Kamala Harris is a good candidate in her own right, of course, but even in cases where I complain about the Democrat, I still vote against Republicans.

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Targeted Advertising: Good or evil?

I have had some professional experience in marketing. It’s a job, you know? Targeted advertising is a very common data science application. Specifically, I’ve built models that use credit data to decide who to send snail-mail. Was this a positive contribution to society? Eh, probably not.

In the title I ask, “good or evil?”, but obviously most people think the answer is “evil”. I’m not here to convince you that targeted advertising is good actually. But I have a bunch of questions, ultimately trying to figure out: why do we put up with targeted ads?

For the sake of scope, I’m thinking mainly about targeted ads as they appear on social media platforms. And I’m just thinking of ads that try to sell you a commercial product, as opposed to political ads or public service announcements. These ads may be accused of the following problems:

  1. Using personal data that we’d rather keep private.
  2. Psychic pollution–wasting our time and attention, or making us unsatisfied with what we have.
  3. Misleading people into purchasing low quality or overpriced goods.

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I read books: Philosophical Investigations

Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe

To steal a description from Existential Comics, Wittgenstein solved philosophy in 1921 with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and then unsolved it again in 1953 with Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical Investigations is primarily concerned with what we mean with our language. Many 20th century philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) have tried to translate our language into something more precise, as if to uncover what we really mean. Philosophical Investigations argues that meaning is much more complicated, deriving from practical use.

I have a book queue that consists mostly of queer mystery and romance novels, but Philosophical Investigations was an oddball among them. I’ve been interested in Wittgenstein largely as a result of my husband. He has a degree in philosophy, and his seminar on Wittgenstein was particularly impactful. If you want to know what our banter sounds like, it’s not altogether unlike the text of Philosophical Investigations. I had never actually read it though, so I thought to correct that.

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Link Roundup: October 2024

How I Fell Out Of Love With Facebook | Tantacrul (video, 3:10 hours) – A comprehensive review of all the scandals that Facebook got involved in.  I had known about a few of these but hadn’t heard of the more international scandals, like Free Basics.  I mostly remember how Facebook sought to reduce bias on their platform, and through the funhouse mirror of corporate priorities it turned into refusing to take down politically conservative posts less they generate an appearance of bias.  Facebook really is a nightmare of corporate immorality.

Fast Crimes at Lambda School | Sandofsky – A long article about the scandals surrounding Lambda School, a coding boot camp.

My husband went to a bootcamp (under an income share agreement), and I went to something like a bootcamp (under a hiring fee model).  Both of us owe are career success to them.  There’s nothing about the idea that makes it inherently bad or unworkable.  But… the one my husband went to was exaggerating its job placement rates by excluding people they kicked out of the program, and excluding people who remained at their current job (!?).  The program I went through was more honest–but it all but collapsed during the pandemic.  Both of our programs were extremely selective.  From what I can tell, bootcamps operate on very thin margins, and are not easy to scale up.  It sounds like Lambda School immediately tried to scale up, and simply could not get its unit economics working, no matter how much they fleeced students.

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Tips for respecting microlabels

Readers may be familiar with the idea of stacking queer labels, especially words related to asexual and nonbinary people. For example, somebody might call themselves a nebulagender panromantic aegosexual fraysexual, and what does any of that mean? Perhaps you’ve seen these label stacks applied to a hypothetical person, a caricature meant to be mocked. Perhaps you’ve seen label stacks provided as a rhetorical example of someone worthy of respect, as if to say, “yes, we even tolerate those people”. Or perhaps you’ve seen the real thing in the wild: a person who unironically chains four or more identities together.

I’m assuming that the reader is interested in respecting others, and is not just coming here to mock labels they don’t understand. I offer some basic tips.

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