This link roundup does not include any discussion of the US elections, and I do not have plans to write about it in the immediate future.  My thought about it is: pace yourself!  We’re on a slow motion train wreck, don’t burn yourself out on the first week.

This month, I reviewed I Want to be a Wall–that’s the silly graphic novel I referred to earlier.

Cohost September 2024 Financial Debate Retrospective: Making Sense of The End | osteophage – The ad-free social media platform Cohost recently financially collapsed.  Why?  Coyote explains why many of the popular theories are incorrect.  Cohost was able to generate healthy revenue for its size, but its dev team had unrealistic expectations, trying to support four full time tech salaries.  Also the devs were trying to make a competitor to Patreon, but this is a doomed venture because it requires a great deal of regulatory compliance overhead that the devs weren’t even aware of.

Yeah, that just sounds like ordinary tech startup incompetence.  There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about what they were trying to do!  Other ad-free social networks exist.

The Visualizer’s Fallacy | Christian Scholz – After writing my post about Wittgenstein, I found someone who wrote a dissertation on Wittgenstein and aphantasia.  He observes that aphantasics can in fact think without visualizing, and they even perform well on shape rotation tests.  So does that mean visualization is unnecessary for mental rotation?

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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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Did you know that some of my links, I get from other link roundups?  I don’t always give credit to aggregators, since it’s not like they wrote the original article.  But in case you like more links, the ones I follow are Critical Distance (games criticism), Perfect Number (ace ex-evangelical blogger), and Ozy (rationalist blogger).  I also run a separate link roundup for The Asexual Agenda.

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I wrote a couple queer fiction book reviews this month: Aces Wild, and The Bell in the Fog.  On to the links:

Can You Trust An AI Press Release? | Asterisk Magazine – When I wrote about LLM error rates, I pointed out even when AI companies boast of their models’ performance, the error rates are there in plain sight.  But I also said you shouldn’t actually trust those numbers.  This article goes into more depth, explaining how AI companies can select information that shows their products in the best light, while understating the performance of rivals.

The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War | People Make Games (video, 1:12 hours) – A look at the world of wargaming, i.e. games made for the serious purpose of helping decision-makers prepare for war and other crises.  The video forthrightly confronts the ethical question: is this killing people?

I think my stance is fairly favorable to wargaming.  Assuming that wargaming is effective (although this is legitimately in question), I would really rather that decision-makers are good at strategy, rather than bad at it.  I wouldn’t celebrate an incompetent soldier for saving the lives of rival soldiers.  I think it’s a mistake to blame only the military for bad wars, when a lot of the blame belongs to the cultural and political systems that decide to make war in the first place.  The part I blame on the military is when they produce propaganda that tilts cultural sentiment to their own benefit.

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In the past month, I wrote an article for The Asexual Agenda discussing causality.  And on a more personal front, I composed a couple short songs for music box.  (Did you know, I made an EP back in 2022?)  Anyways, onwards with the roundup.

Seeing Beyond the Veil | Bullet Points Monthly – This article discusses the association of psychosis and spiritualism, through the lens of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (a game I have little familiarity with).  In the first game, the protagonist’s psychosis is a source of suffering; in the second game, it’s a source of spiritual power.  This serves a narrative of empowerment–but it takes place in a world where giants and fairies exist.  In the real world, people may have more complicated feelings about attempts to turn their suffering into something mystically useful.

‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of | Ace Film Reviews – Blue Ice-Tea discusses three independently created concepts, each describing experiences of people who are not necessarily trans or non-binary, but lack a strong sense of identity.  I think by the nature of the thing, people with these experiences may not be very vocal about it, and may not even think much about it.  Creating labels for the experience has the disadvantage of drawing unwanted attention to the question of who is or isn’t.  But I do think it’s worth being aware of this side of gender experience, and at least some people may find the words useful.

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This month, the Ace Community Survey published a report on sexual violence.

The real story of Gamergate 2 (conspiracy theories, crybullying, and a consumer revolt) | NeverKnowsBest (video, 1:38 hours) – I’ve been loosely following the story of antiwoke backlash currently going on in the gaming community, but it’s pretty hard to take seriously when it’s founded on something so ridiculous and petty.  NeverKnowsBest clearly explains the sequence of events and issues of concern, and persuaded me to take it more seriously.  After all, the Gamergate of a decade ago also started with something silly and petty, but it snowballed into something bigger by galvanizing the alt-right presence within gaming communities.  Also, the media environment is very different from how it was a decade ago, with traditional games journalism being far less influential.

What these neo-gamergaters want is games that cater more to their political tastes, i.e. centering straight white men, dropping black & queer characters, making women sex objects again, etc.  That’s already hard enough to sympathize with, but then they add all these conspiratorial claims involving a tiny consulting company, and ESG investment.  When it comes to progressive politics in games, they can’t accept the more basic explanation that some game devs are pretty progressive, so instead they believe that investors of all people, are the ones pushing the progressive agenda.  This is so obviously wrong, just look at all the indie games, which are less beholden to investors and publishers than ever.

How Does Fiction Affect Reality? | Thing of Things – Ozy discusses the evidence regarding the real world impact of fiction.  There’s surprisingly little, although fiction can impact social norms such as norms around family size.  As a critic, when I criticize a work of fiction, the purpose is rarely to say “this work of fiction is causing harm and should not exist”.  Often, criticism is just an intrinsically fun and valuable activity, in the same way that fiction itself is just an intrinsically fun and valuable activity, independent of whether it has an impact on society.  Yes, there is criticism, such as feminist criticism, that wants to push towards positive social change.  But I think it’s more important for people to engage with criticism than to avoid engaging in the material being criticized.

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