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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Link Roundup: August 2025

I don’t have many links this time, and all videos.  If you’re one of the readers who doesn’t watch videos, you can skip this one.

The Physics of Dissonance | minutephysics (video, 27 min) – A good introduction to the overtone theory of dissonance.

The one thing I would add, is that it’s useful to distinguish “dissonant” from “unpleasant” from “rough”.  Dissonance is a cultural concept–basically a set of musical tropes used to convey darkness or tension.  For some reason people often define dissonance as an unpleasant sound, but this is obviously untrue–minor chords are considered dissonant and yet people often like them.  In the context of psychoacoustics (as in this video), many authors use “roughness” for the psychoacoustical effect, and “dissonance” for the cultural construct.  Roughness often aligns with dissonance, and is theorized to explain it, but it obviously can’t explain dissonance completely given the cultural and historical variation.

Downton Abbey and the Origin of Capitalism | Unlearning Economics (video, 1:02 hours) – A discussion about the historical origins of capitalism, informed by academic theory and also a TV drama.  There’s the cartoon version of history, where everybody used to barter until somebody invented currency, but that’s definitely not how it actually happened.  According to the argument in this video, capitalism arose specifically in England within the last few centuries.

This argument makes capitalism look pretty good, honestly, but mostly in comparison to the aristocracy-based system it supplanted.  Everyone in this argument is aware that capitalism can still be bad.

Fantasies of Nuremberg | Jacob Geller (video, 49 min) – Jacob Geller describes the actual history of the Nuremberg Trials, and how it was perceived by contemporaries.  When the historical details are examined, it seems to illustrate the futility and dissatisfaction of justice.

“Brain art” sparks controversy

content note: fiction

Recently, brain interfacing technologies have been leveraged to make images and videos straight out of people’s heads. Some people are calling it art, but detractors say it isn’t art at all.

“It lacks any intentionality,” says prompt artist JustAlice. “All they do is lounge around, and the images are just handed to them. They don’t even need to verbalize what they want, or sort through results to choose the best one. And the results look like shit!” She shows me examples of what she considers bad brain art, furiously highlighting all the five-fingered hands. “Is it so hard to just pick up a keyboard?”

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NSFW and defensibility

Earlier I wrote about Itch.io delisting NSFW content. Here’s some followup discussion.

I’ve been impressed by how quickly gamers mobilized around this. There’s an ongoing campaign to flood the call centers of Visa/Mastercard/Paypal. Financial institutions are now ineffectually trying to deflect blame onto each other. I think there’s a chance to win this particular battle.

The issue seems to have united gamers of all types. Progressives can talk about how this hurts LGBTQ games. Other gamers might be confused by the LGBTQ association, but they’re still vehemently anti-censorship. And look, I’m not complaining.

In the long term, Collective Shout and Project 2025 are targeting all porn as well as LGBTQ content. However, Collective Shout will claim that in this case, they were only trying to take down the very worst stuff, i.e. games with sexual abuse, incest, or pedophilia. From what I’ve seen, opinion is divided on these “abusive” games. Opinion is divided… but there is not much disagreement. Gamers recognize that the “abusive” games themselves are not particularly relevant. Whether you’re in favor or against the presence of “abusive” games, it doesn’t actually matter, because the censorship goes way beyond that.

But my instinct is to defend the “abusive” games. I’d like to elaborate on that, and also explain the LGBTQ associations.

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Origami: Passiflora Ornata with Spirals

Passiflora Ornata with Spirals

Passiflora Ornata with Spirals, designed by Ekaterina Lukasheva

Looking through my old photos, here’s one from 2014.  It’s a variant on the Passiflora Ornata, of which I have an example here.  The long points, instead of being used to make flower pettles, are twisted into spirals.  I believe the spiral design is quite similar to Tomoko Fuse’s Origami Spiral Star, so if you’d like to try a simple version you can look into that.

Waking up, past tense

Do you like waking up? Yeah, me neither. I prefer that all my waking be done strictly in the past tense, i.e. to be woke.

I’m looking at my drafts bin and I have a lot of stuff here that I never finished and never will finish. I thought I’d turn some of these ideas into a more casual blogging. How do you like this format? How do I like this format?

I have a draft dated to 2023, whose premise is “a linguistic analysis of ‘woke’”. Basically, I would use google trends and time-constrained google searches to identify the historical trajectory of the word and its meaning. I’ve done this a few times before, e.g. tracing the history of “No homo”.

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The NSFW game purge

Recently, Steam purged a bunch of NSFW games from its storefront. This occurred as the result of efforts from Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout who applied pressure through payment processors. Collective Shout is a “””feminist””” group, although nobody with a passing glance would recognize them as legitimately feminist. Its founder is anti-abortion, what does that tell you? Collective Shout has previously fought to ban GTAV, Detroit: Become Human, as well as rappers Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Tyler, the Creator.

The games that were banned on Steam primarily contain non-consensual and incest erotic content. I was curious what specific games were banned, and found a website dedicated to tracking it (warning: link contains thumbnails for NSFW games).

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