Link Roundup: September 2024

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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Review: Umineko When they Cry

Umineko When they Cry is a 2007 Japanese kinetic visual novel with about a million words in it, making it the length of a series of books.  I spent the last 8 months reading it.  For many games and visual novels, people often say “trust me, it’s good, just go in blind”, but I don’t think that’s very helpful.  Therefore, this review will contain some spoilers regarding the basic premise and structure of the story, and a few specific elements that I liked.  If you’re totally avoiding spoilers and just want a five-word summary, it’s “Epic anime Agatha Christie metafiction.”

Recently, I wrote about the idea that mystery stories must be solvable.  This is not, in fact, true of most works in the mystery genre.  The solvability of mystery stories was promoted during the “golden age of detective fiction” (i.e. the early 20th century, with Agatha Christie as its most famous author), but it was not otherwise the genre norm.  However, in Japanese literature there was a revival movement in the 1980s and 90s, known as honkaku.  Umineko is clearly part of the honkaku tradition, or at least responding to it.

That’s right, Umineko, a visual novel with a million words, is a solvable puzzle.  How does that even work, without the reader feeling like they’re gnawing ineffectually at a massive jawbreaker for 8 months?

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Origami: Butterfly on leaf

Butterfly on leaf

Butterfly on leaf, designed by Tomoko Fuse

I don’t have much to say about this model, except that it’s surprisingly efficient.  The edges of the paper are radially folded inwards.  The excess paper forms the shape of a butterfly, seemingly by lucky accident.

Is Kamala Harris Black?

Yes. Obviously.

Although, if we want to be pedantic about it, it’s less clear that she’s African American. In the US, “Black” is split into two groups: Black African and Black Caribbean. Harris is mixed race—Indian on her mother’s side, and Jamaican on her father’s side—which would classify her as Black Caribbean.

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I read Raygun’s paper on Olympic Breaking

I mostly ignore the Olympics, but my husband purchased access, and I sat down with him to watch one thing: the women’s breakdancing quarterfinals (see final battle). I didn’t know anything about breaking, but it was impressive to watch nonetheless. It was only later that I heard about the Aussie competitor Rachael Gunn (“Raygun”), whose earlier performance got memeified, and went viral on TikTok.

It’s hard to find publicly available “neutral” clips of her performance, but some options are provided here. Or, if you just want the meme version, I put a couple gifs below.

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Link Roundup: August 2024

This month, I wrote an in-depth article about asexuality in the DSM.  There are still problems in the current edition–but the root problem is in the hearts and minds of psychologists, not in a reference book.

Concluding thoughts on “The Great Sex Rescue” | Tell me why the world is weird – Perfect Number has been doing a chapter-by-chapter review of The Great Sex Rescue, a book intended to identify and correct the many problems with sexual attitudes among evangelical Christians.  Perfect Number also supplies a perspective missing from the book–the queer and ace perspective.  It’s an insightful series, but if you only read one article, it should be the concluding overview.

Gentrification is a distraction and Your Comprehensive Guide to Homelessness Grift | Streeter Sweeper (videos, 57 and 99 min) – Some good videos on housing politics.  I learned a lot, for example that there are many homeless kids, but you usually don’t see them because they’re prioritized for shelter.  Homelessness is not correlated with weather or better homeless services (as many people have told me), but is correlated with bad housing markets.

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Vote for Democracy 2024

In January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump incited a riot on the US Capitol to try to overturn the US presidential election. Most people know that. But for those who missed it, I’d like to highlight the worst part. Prior to the riots, the Trump campaign deliberately tried to counterfeit the election results. The purpose of the riot was to demand that congress to accept the counterfeit.

In an obscure step of the US election process, each state submits a “certificate of ascertainment” that declares the final vote count and winner of the election. The Trump team submitted fraudulent certificates of ascertainment in seven states. Nobody was fooled by the fraudulent certificates, but the Trump team argued that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence had the power to accept the counterfeit certificates anyway. All they had to do was pressure Mike Pence to do so.

Therefore, the primary target of the January 6 riot was not democrats, but rather Mike Pence. Thus, the “Hang Mike Pence” chants from rioters.

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