From the drafts: Data science as function fitting

Let’s dig out another article from my drafts bin, something I don’t think I was ever going to finish. This draft was titled “Data Science as function fitting”. It begins:

In the buzzword-ridden age of AI hype, perhaps there’s value in having more unmagical ways of talking about data science. My most unmagical description, is that data science is basically function fitting. It’s like what Excel does when you ask Excel to draw a trendline through a set of data points.

So that’s the thesis statement. But is it a thesis worth arguing? It feels kind of “hot take” quality to me. When you have a large enough audience, you start to be aware that at least a few readers are experts, and will call you out on your bullshit. And so immediately after stating the thesis, I felt it was necessary to add a ton of qualifying statements. You know, like I didn’t really mean it.

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No apology

Imagine, if you will, using a public restroom.  After about a minute, a stranger that you were barely paying attention to, pipes up unprompted.  “I’m sorry I haven’t been a proper conversational partner.  I’m just not in the mood for small talk today.”  Awkward silence…

A bit of wisdom from over 15 years hobby blogging: never apologize for an absence.  While I might have a personal commitment to write this or that much, barely any readers will be aware of my commitment, and none will care that I’ve missed it.  Apologizing for absence is a form of self-centeredness–and it’s natural to be self-centered on a personal blog, but let us not express self-centeredness in a way that only serves to make ourselves feel bad.

And that’s not to invalidate feelings of inadequacy.  I have two or three more hobbies than I can reasonably sustain, the pain is real.  But publicly and uncritically expressing those feelings will only reinforce them.  So this is me giving voice to those negative feelings, while being highly critical of same feelings.

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Existentialist thoughts on blogging

When FTB went down for several days, we all had a bit of an existentialist moment. What if FTB goes down for good? Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but even without any catastrophic incident, it’s fairly obvious that blogging is on the decline. If it’s not a sudden death, we’re just going to slowly fade away instead. It’s fine.

By “we”, I mean independent hobbyist bloggers. Independent means we’re not bound to any particular platform. Hobbyist means we don’t do it for money (although some may make money incidentally). Blogger means we chronically write, generally nonfiction in the medium length range between tweets and novellas.

I have to attach the adjectives, because I think that there’s still plenty of interest in blogging. It’s just the specific niche of independent hobbyist bloggers who are on the decline. We’re squeezed on two sides, first on the “independent” side and second on the “hobbyist” side.

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Spam bloggers get

There’s a certain kind of spam that bloggers get, which is mostly invisible to non-bloggers. So many people may not recognize it as spam, for lack of experience. Let me describe it for you.

The end goal of the spammer is to create links back to a website. I don’t pretend to know how their business model works, but I’d speculate that these spammers are paid by some website to boost their search rankings. The websites are generally disreputable shoestring budget operations, filled with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and other nonsense, and absolutely do not deserve to have their search rankings boosted.

The most common way to create links is by leaving comments. I get about 30 spam comments a day, but I never look at them because WordPress has a very effective spam filter. Many comments don’t bother trying to trick you, they’re straight up ads. Other comments are generic “I loved reading this!” type stuff, with a profile link back to the target website.  Perhaps it’s no wonder that cranky old bloggers like me don’t appreciate generic praise.

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The collapse of Twitter

On legitimate surprise

A game that sticks in my mind is “You Are Jeff Bezos“, a free text-based adventure where you wake up as Jeff Bezos and try to spend all your (Jeff Bezos’) money. One option is “Buy Twitter and delete his account”, for 50 billion dollars. This game is from 2018, so it’s referring to the traitor in chief, scourge of democracy. A wish fulfillment fantasy.

Back here in the real world, Trump got banned in 2020, and it seemed like Elon Musk was doing the reverse, buying Twitter specifically to unban his account. That’s what I thought would happen, and perhaps it still will. What I did not expect, is whatever mess is going on now–an exodus of users, employees, and advertisers.

The surprise is worth noting. It would be easy for an Elon-hater to claim that they knew this would happen all along, but did they really? It’s okay to admit that Elon Musk surpassed expectations.

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Video essays are like blogs but more so

Blogging has been declining. I don’t have much evidence, aside from Google trends, but it’s fairly obvious from personal experience. For example, atheist blogs used to be a huge cultural force, with big celebrities and countless indie blogs, and now it’s sort of a backwater with a few networks of marginal relevance, and a mostly dead indie space. And no other blogosphere has replaced what atheist blogging once was.

Maybe his just has to do with my personal circles? As a reality check I tried looking up the question. I learned, according to Google, that blogging is bigger than ever, and is still a great way to make money by advertising your product! Okay, so I should specify that I’m not interested in all blogs, because marketing blogs can go die in a fire. I’m talking about personal blogs, and more specifically essay blogs. Essay blogs are declining, that’s what I meant.

Essays aren’t dead though, because it is now popular to present essays in video format. The video essay is a booming genre, and I for one think it’s great, for the same reason essay blogs are great.  But there are also some significant differences.

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Too many topics, not enough time

Like many writers, I have a long list of ideas that I never got around to writing about. I’m not very consistent about writing them down, but still the list gets longer and longer, until I start deleting old ideas that no longer make any sense to me. Some of them I missed the moment to write them, or they required more research than I had energy to put into it. Some of them were just bad and non-starters.

Here is a short list of ideas that I made after deleting the ones that I’m obviously never going to write about. If any of these interests you, let me know, your comment might cause it to happen!

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