Ranking the Myst games

I’m ranking the Myst games for no particular reason. I like thinking about them and I like writing, so here we are. Some readers may be surprised that there were more than two of these games–this list is for you.

This is emphatically a recollective ranking, not a retrospective ranking. I played these all a long time ago, and my memory has condensed into a few moments and emotional reactions. My ranking reflects not just the games themselves, but also who I was at the time I played them. I did not make any attempt to overwrite my memories by playing the games again, and I only did research for fact checking purposes.  (ETA: I later ranked these games again using a retrospective approach.)

7. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (2003)

Uru was developed as a massively multiplayer online game, and was released the same year as Second Life, one year prior to World of Warcraft. If you’ve never heard of this before… welcome to this list!

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Origami: Bacteriophage

Bacteriophage

Bacteriophage, designed (and taught) by Miguel Romero

Last month I went to the local origami convention, and this is one of the models that I learned.  Later I folded a second one.

This origami uses a technique called box pleating.  Box pleating typically starts by folding the paper into an NxN grid of squares.  You then collapse into a base that has the right number of “points”.  In this case, there are 6 points for the 6 legs, 2 points are internally hidden, and the head is the 9th point.

This model is simple as far as box pleating goes, but it’s still quite difficult to teach in a convention setting!  When you’re familiar with box pleating, you don’t necessarily have explicit steps in your head, you just do it.  But most people in the workshop won’t have experience with box pleating, and so the teacher needs to come up with step by step instructions.  Even people who are familiar with box pleating may not fold very quickly.  So when I say this model is simple, that’s to its benefit.  Simplicity is a virtue in origami, especially origami that you teach to others.

Three arguments on AI Art

Many artists are opposed to AI art, and there seem to be three central arguments. First, that these AI models were trained artists’ images without their permission. Second, that the use of AI technology endangers the livelihoods of artists. Third, that AI art is bad art. The first is a rights-based argument while the second is a consequentialist argument, and the third is an aesthetic argument.

1. Rights

Starting with the first argument, I think it’s an open question whether artists truly ought to have the right to be excluded from AI training. If an artist-in-training looked at images on Deviant Art to learn how to draw, we would not say that the artists of Deviant Art had the right to prevent them. If you look at art with an artist’s eye, you’re going to naturally learn from it, and it seems unreasonable to allow people to look at your art just as long as they don’t look too deeply, lest they learn something from it.

However, an AI model is substantially distinct from a human artist-in-training, in that it trains on vast number of images–and also it isn’t a person. You could argue that there’s no rule against humans because it’s simply impractical to delineate how they consume art, while it’s far more practical to restrain AI. AI also poses the risk of accidental plagiarism–which is not unlike human artists! But the risk of plagiarism might be significantly be higher in AI, which could affect our moral judgment.

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Silicon Valley Bank collapse

Last week, two major banks collapsed: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature. These were the second and third largest bank collapses in US history—the largest being Washington Mutual in 2008. Since I seem to be writing about finance this month, I wanted to try my hand at explaining why, for the reader who doesn’t know anything about finance.

Short answer: SVB placed a big bet long-term US treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. However, the prices of these assets went down. Companies with money in SVB were worried about it, so they started withdrawing a lot of money, requiring SVB to sell its assets at a loss until it was wiped out. Bank collapses tend to spread via a process called “contagion”, and Signature appears to be the first victim.

Really long answer: Okay, let’s walk through these concepts one by one.

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What do you think of finance?

Dear readers, what do you think of the finance industry?

Ideally, I would keep this short and give up the floor to commenters. But I’ll start by saying I work in the finance industry. I am not a finance expert, I’m just a data scientist. I am ambivalent about the moral value of the industry.

I know from hanging out in leftist spaces that a lot of people feel much more strongly about the finance industry. Strongly negative. I’m curious to hear more.

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Link roundup: March 2023

Although I don’t always plug it here, I run a monthly ace journal club on my other blog.  This month’s article was about asexual experiences coming out.  It might be worth a read if you want an overview of asexual coming out experiences and how they sometimes differ from gay coming out experiences.

Chat GPT is a blurry jpeg of the web | New Yorker – A relatively pessimistic article about Chat GPT that describes it as a copy of the internet, saved with lossy compression.  The author asks, “how much use is a blurry jpeg, when you still have the original?”  I think this a great starting point to understanding the state of the art chatbots.  The chatbots have strictly less knowledge than what you can find on the internet–albeit in more a form that may be easier to process.  Perhaps the megacorps are right, and the best application is search engines.

The Problem With Masterworks | The Plain Bagel (video, 19 min) – If you’ve ever seen sponsored ads on youtube for Masterworks, an art-based investment scheme, you might have thought it sounded scummy.  Sounds scummy, is scummy, this video gives the scoop on that.  Apparently they skirt through regulation loopholes, which gives them a lot of leeway to report returns in a misleading way.  I actually unsubbed to a channel because they accepted a sponsorship from Masterworks.

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Why doesn’t EA divest from crypto?

After Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was arrested for massive fraud in November, there has been a reckoning in the EA movement to which SBF belonged. I’ve linked to several critics discussing how SBF’s actions could have been attributed to EA philosophy and practices, and even offered my own humble commentary.

Of course, it’s very easy to get distracted by philosophical arguments, and miss what’s staring in our face. The much more obvious takeaway from the whole affair is: EA was overinvested in cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is evil, why were they invested in it at all?

Yes, fraud can come from any sector, and no, not every person involved in crypto is fraudulent to the same degree as SBF. No, SBF is not “proof” of the depravity of crypto. What SBF proves, is that EA has been supportive of, and dependent on crypto. EA insiders must have already known, and maybe some readers already knew, but I didn’t know! I didn’t know EA had so much crypto in it! Why is that? And why don’t they stop?

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