First, I’ll plug this month’s Ace Journal Club, which discussed a paper about Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder and the “responsive” sexuality model.
AI Is a Lot of Work | The Verge – This article is about “annotators” or “taskers”, people paid to label data to train machine learning models. You can think of this as people who are paid to do captcha codes endlessly. Or imagine Papers Please, but it’s real. As you might imagine, it does not pay very well.
From the data scientist end, this is a well-known process, although I don’t have direct experience with it. Typically, you’d go through an intermediary, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and never learn anything about the workers themselves. Despite workers being paid poorly, it’s an inherently expensive process, and requires a lot of controls.
Games that Don’t Fake the Space | Jacob Geller (video, 31 min) – Video games often use tricks and illusions to make a virtual space seem bigger than it is, but not every game. Some really are that big. Now the question I always have about measuring video game spaces is, what’s the measuring stick? Could we make the world bigger by making the character smaller or slower, or simply lowering the camera closer to the ground? I feel like virtual spaces should be measured in square minutes instead of square miles. I have to put a word in for The Longing, which has a big world by virtue of its protagonist walking very very slowly. You tell the protagonist to walk somewhere, and then you quit and come back later, that’s how slow he is. It’s not a conventionally “fun” experience, but it’s interesting to see games do big/slow once in a while.