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.