Content note: I don’t have any links about the Trump administration today.

AIs Regurgitate Training Data | Reprobate Spreadsheet – Last month I wrote about the claim that AI “regurgitates training data”, and some people claim that this virtually never happens, or else they claim that it’s the only possible thing that happens.  And I keep saying, you don’t know either way!  It’s a question that can only be answered through empirical research.  And what the empirical research says, is that models do it sometimes–and that’s bad enough.  HJ discusses some of the research here.

But I have a bit of a critique.  HJ describes a study that asked an LLM to predict number sequences, such as currency exchange rates.  The predictions had lower root mean square error when predicting sequences in the training data.  The researchers call this “memorization”, and HJ calls it “regurgitation”, but I call it a textbook description of “overfitting”.  Clearly the models are retaining excessive unwanted information from their training sets, but calling it “memorization” creates a false impression that it’s verbatim quoting, which it’s not.

This is Arousal | No Pun Included (video, 20 min) – A board game critic traces a popular claim: the most fun part of a board game is opening the box, and then they read the rulebook where fun goes to die.  It’s based on a small study of families playing Hasbro, which measured physiological arousal rather than fun.  It’s not a strong study, but you know, it’s just a grad student’s proof of concept, it’s fine, been there.  It’s just wildly inappropriate to generalize into a nugget of conventional wisdom.  This video is a great example of science popularization done well in an unusual domain.

Thomas Sowell and the American Dream | Unlearning Economics (video, 3:08 hours) – This video is framed in terms of criticizing a conservative economics textbook, but it’s just a good educational video that covers a variety of economic subjects from economic mobility to immigration and unemployment.  It’s the analogue of science popularization, but for academic economics.  Did you know that the best economic research shows that raising minimum wage does not increase unemployment?  Although counterintuitive, it’s a strong empirical result across the literature.

Destroy Pop Culture? | Life’s a Gas – Bébé Mélange (née Great American Satan) advocates for discarding of pop culture.  I’m of similar mind, usually preferring culture on the long tail.  To be quite honest, I just didn’t like Neil Gaiman–I read a book by him 15 years ago and thought “never again”.  And putting aside my personal preferences, the production of pop culture seems to be a rat race full of abuse and broken dreams.  I get that pop culture serves as a common touchstone for people, but I wonder if there is another way.

A Pivot to Indie won’t save us | Aurambles – An oblique counterpoint to the previous link.  I play lots of indie video games, and in the past year they’ve been having a moment.  The AAA video game industry has been suffering, with huge numbers of layoffs and high-profile flops, and in the mean time indie games are killing it.  Among players and critics, there’s been a sense that maybe we should pivot to indie games, which may be artistically (and morally?) superior.

However, it’s worth noting the distance between the perspective of players and the perspective of devs.  While a few indie games have been major hits, and those are the games that players pay attention to, the median indie game is certainly not a hit.  If the AAA game industry has been lagging, so has the indie game industry, it’s just less visible.  This article talks about it from the professional dev perspective, and highlights a number of issues that plague indie game development.

This link is via Critical Distance, which also linked to a response from someone who does non-professional game dev.

Actually investigating “Gaming is Dying” | Never Knows Best (video, 1 hour) – The common narratives around the decline of the video games industry irritate me to no end.  Gamers and games journalists have no clue what they’re talking about, because ultimately they’re just media critics, not experts in finance or economics.  Yeah, sure, corporations are greedy, some games are bad, etc. but that wasn’t not true several years ago.  Anyway, I really appreciated this video, which clearly has much better research behind it.

Hey, remember the God of War Sex Minigames? | Afterthoughts (video, 31 min) – A retrospective look the obligatory sex minigames in the pre-reboot God of War series.  They’re a lot funnier when viewed as an artifact of a cultural past.

Blogaround | Tell me Why the World is Weird – I’m linking this link roundup specifically for the commentary on RedNote.  Since TikTok is being banned, some people were moving to Chinese social media app RedNote.  I think it’s a bit of a meme about sticking it to the US government, and I doubt the US users will stay, but in the mean time there’s a bit of cultural exchange going on.  Perfect Number remarks on what Americans find surprising about Chinese life, from the perspective of an American expat in China.