Remember when I drew 98 cubes? Well, this time I drew 164 dodecahedra. I created an infographic-style diagram of dodecahedron/icosahedron symmetries.
A Trivial Knot
Everything is simple except when not
Remember when I drew 98 cubes? Well, this time I drew 164 dodecahedra. I created an infographic-style diagram of dodecahedron/icosahedron symmetries.
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.
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?
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.