Interesting Links for 24-03-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Sex Worker-Led Payment Platform Shuts Down After Being Cut Off by Processor

(tags:sexwork payment banking OhForFucksSake )

2. Who, really, *is* Brandon Sanderson? (Other than the biggest fantasy writer in the world)

(tags:writing fantasy )

3. Sometimes card tricks look so impossible that they just have to be magic

(tags:magic cards video impressive )

4. Women comparing themselves with 'perfect' genitals in porn is contributing to a 300% rise in labiaplasty

(tags:genitals vagina surgery porn society )

5. Who knew octopi would be so clingy?

(tags:octopus cute video )

6. Epic's new motion-capture animation tech has to be seen to be believed

(tags:motioncapture impressive faces )

7. Nasal Covid vaccine shows promise in early clinical trial

(tags:pandemic noses vaccine )

8. Armed Metropolitan Police officer escapes domestic abuse prosecution after controlling 'every step' of his investigation

(tags:police abuse UK OhForFucksSake )

9. JPMorgan Chase thought it had $1.3 million worth of nickel stored in a warehouse. A closer examination revealed bags of stones.

(tags:fraud metal trade )

10. A Doctor Who game - join them together and try to reach 13. (I've gotten as far as the War Doctor)

(tags:drwho games )

11. Nearly one in five people find everyday sounds intolerable

(tags:sound psychology )

12. A machine that learns to play noughts and crosses, built from 304 matchboxes

(tags:ai games )

Comments

[cmcmck]

4 Doctored images! It's been a problem for so long.

When I had my GCS at 21 a friend from uni asked if she got to see what I'd spent all that money on and her reaction was that mine were so much neater than her own, but that didn't make her rush off and seek surgery.

Surgeons did tend to make the effort to give you 'perfect' genitals whatever those might actually be. Back then, here was the assumption that you'd be using them or at least that some guy might be.

How things have changed!

[channelpenguin]

I'm a little confused. Do you mean that now surgeons DON'T assume you'll use your newly-configured fun bits?

[cmcmck]

I think they now assume that trans women are now as varied on the sexuality front (or as asexual) as anyone else and that the uses may be equally varied.

Back then (seventies) the assumption was that you were straight and that was the expected behaviour from the gatekeepers- you are a woman so you go with men.

As it turned out I was and am. Being a young transitioner meant I didn't have any previous experience to compare to. :o)

[channelpenguin]

Well, yes, anyone can be asexual, but I must admit I'd assume that in doing surgery they'd make everything as completely functional as possible anyway. I didn't think there would be options... Are there? Like for instance? It's oddly fascinating...

[channelpenguin]

Well, yes, anyone can be asexual, but I must admit I'd assume that in doing surgery they'd make everything as completely functional as possible anyway. I didn't think there would be options... Are there? Like for instance? It's oddly fascinating...

[cmcmck]

I think the various surgeons have their own individual approaches to look. I know some people only require the appearance rather than the function.

When I underwent surgery, I was lucky because up to then, things hadn't been entirely functional- form tended to trump practical use, but the ability to create a clitoris came in around that time so I was 'experimental' as my surgeon asked my permission because he was very much at the forefront of that experimentation. There was a 50/50 chance that it would work back then, although it's standard surgery now.

It worked so I am fully sensate down there and can therefore experience sexual climax and you won't hear me complain about that. :o)

[channelpenguin]

That's great for you. I do find it odd that people might not want that functionality, but hey, it's up to them!

[cmcmck]

It tends to be people who transition later in life and don't expect to be getting into any further relationships and maybe don't fancy the length of surgery- I believe it's about four hours now although it was over ten when I had it.

[channelpenguin]

Hmm. I suppose there are people who might have health issues with longer time under a general anaesthetic, hadn't thought of that.

[bearshorty]

I really enjoyed the article about Sanderson. I never actually read him - I know of him, of course, and I keep meaning to check him out at some point. But this article was actually really fascinating, from what his readers find appealing about his worlds to Sanderson himself as a person.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I've seen complaints about it online, but I really enjoyed it.

[nancylebov]

2. I've seen two complaints without even looking for anything, though I suppose youtube is spying on what I read.

I do think the reporter was mean-spirited and arguably violated hospitality. Also, okay, the prose is mediocre. Hammer, hammer, hammer on the prose. Why not try to understand what Sanderson gets right about plot?

11. I suppose I don't have misophonia proper, but my tolerance for loud sounds is way below average. No rock concerts for me.

[nancylebov]

2. Sanderson's answer. It's remarkably civilized.

[andrewducker]

That's pretty much the best possible answer, I think.

[channelpenguin]

It occurs to me that Brandon Sanderson is the modern equivalent or counterpart of Mercedes Lackey!! Very prolific fantasy writer, big fanbase, lots of criticism of writing style...

(her fanbase tends female as much as his does male)

[channelpenguin]

4. For me, function tops form any day. I'd never change my fun bits because they do seem to work really well... why risk it?

2. I rather dislike Sanderson's writing, esp the lovingly laborious details of operating the video-game-like magic... I only read one book (way of kings) but it didn't compel me to read more. Story was ok. Would make decent TV though, that could really work.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I won't be carving bits off of my genitals to make them more aesthetic. It seems like it might be problematic.

I've not read any Sanderson. I'm intrigued enough to maybe get round to some at some point. But I have a long reading list that's not getting any shorter already.

[simont]

#12: I remember reading about MENACE in a Martin Gardner book when I was a child – and that book in turn was collected from columns published in Scientific American earlier still. The column in question is from March 1962. So, fair enough, the link itself goes to a more recent blog post on the same subject, but in another sense, that link is older than I am :-)

I've always thought that one of the risks with this kind of matchbox-based 'machine learning' system is that you might run completely out of counters in a particular matchbox, so that play halts when you reach that state because the engine simply can't think of any move to make at all. In the system's early phase, it might well lose a lot, because generally its moves will be bad; so if every loss due to bad play in the late game causes a counter to be removed from an opening box (even if that opening move was objectively a good one), then you risk running out of counters completely in the opening box before ever starting to find winning lines of play on any branch of the tree.

You could imagine this happening on purpose if MENACE was trained by playing a really skilled opponent, who crushed all its hopes on purpose. And if you assigned two MENACEs to play each other – or perhaps even had the same one play itself – then it would at least be possible for this to happen by accident, even if it had low probability.

In that situation, it should be mandatory for a computer implementation to stop and report "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

[andrewducker]

Hah!

And it does seem feasible that MENACE might end up losing all of its marbles. But it seems unlikely. It'd be an interesting challenge to write a bot that could beat it in that way.

[helen_keeble]

We made simplified MENACE matchbox computers in my Y7 maths class (age 12)! The biggest challenge was collecting enough matchboxes to map out all the states (I vaguely recall the game was significantly simplified from noughts and crosses, though I now don’t remember how - in any event, I don’t think our math teacher expected each group to prepare 300+ matchboxes).

I remember partnering with a boy whose dad owned a restaurant, so we had no problem getting enough matchboxes. I think we didn’t add beads to influence winning states - instead, when the computer lost a game it would remove the bead for the final move that it made, thus pruning the decision tree. We spent many happy hours playing the matchboxes against each other…

[doubtingmichael]

I think in the Martin Gardner article this is described as "the machine resigns", because it's aware that it has no possible move to avoid a loss.

With the machine as described, it won't happen. But if you consider a version of noughts-and-crosses where draws are a loss for the first player (to make up for the advantage of the first move), then eventually the machine will lose all its marbles and refuse to play any more. Can't say I'd blame it.

[calimac]

2) I tried reading one Sanderson novel, and found it unreadable. Not the prose, but the plotting, which was incoherently baffling. I was equally thrown by Robert Jordan back in the day. How can people actually like this?
And I'm aware that some have said the same thing about Tolkien.

4) I was all ready to be dismayed at the phenomenon of women who dislike their own labia until I read the attribution of this problem to "distorted body image." Isn't that what anti-trans types claim that trans people have instead of actually being trans? Now I'm suspicious that "distorted body image" is a legitimate thing at all.

9) This is confusing. Who actually intended to own these bags of stones, and why?

"Distorted body image"

[ng_moonmoth]

It's 100% legitimate. Talk to anyone who's recovered from anorexia. (I have a niece who has done so.) Carrie Fisher wrote about her experience with it. Just about any fashion model has been told they were "too fat" to keep their job, even at weights significantly below healthy levels. Women's gymnastics competitions preferentially reward athletes with prepubescent-appearing bodies, to the point where there are way too many documented cases of competitors who wind up eating little enough that puberty, including menstruation, winds up shutting down.

And that's on top of a pervasive culture that grades women on their appearance, and invokes harsh social punishment on those who vary significantly from cultural norms. Add the leverage of online bullying to make it even worse.

[movingfinger]

9. The repeated, determined use of the term "mix-up" where "fraud" or perhaps "theft" could be is unintentionally funny. I wonder who last did due diligence on those bags of "nickel?"

[hairyears]

The threat to the credibility of the London Metals Exchange could cost the UK billions.

The exchange will compensate JPMorgan, but the likelihood of recovering the value of the metal from fraudster - let alone the cost of the investigation - is negligible.

Sound ...

[agoodwinsmith]

... can be a thing.

People, like an instructor, standing behind me and speaking normally feels like I am being prodded unkindly on the back of the head (just where it joins the neck).

Constant snorky sniffing instead of nose-blowing drives me bananas.

People chewing like baby bats with a banana give me the creeping creepy creeps. Baby bats doing it is just fine. People with lips and tongues - ew ew ew ew.

I jump at all unexpected noises.

Strangely, when I worked at an art school, a graduating installation was a student in the echoey main gallery next to our office shouting rantily for two hours every day between 2 and 4. Rolled right off me, ho-hum, though I could certainly hear it well enough. Drove everyone else bonkers. It wasn't behind me, the student didn't smack their lips, and after the first ten minutes on the first day, it was a mostly predictable rhythm.

Relatedly weird: something else I find odd is that travelling along a road with spindly trees where the sunlight flickers through them as we go makes me absolutely FURIOUS. Not slightly cranky, but really enraged. No idea.

Re: Sound ...

[armiphlage]

Lights flickering between 1 and 20 Hz is known to cause nausea, frustration, dizziness, and sometimes seizures, so that makes sense.

https://www.bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Bucha_effect.html

Re: Sound ...

[agoodwinsmith]

Ah. It would be in keeping with my general response of rage to any frustration.

Re: Sound ...

[cellio]

People chewing with their mouths open are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. And chewing gum is even worse, because at least with the food they f*cking swallow eventually. Cringe cringe cringe. Always been this way for me.

Speakerphones, including cell phones turned up (not necessarily on speaker) also drive me nuts. That many people now think it's perfectly reasonable to watch videos on their phones or play games (with the sound on) while waiting in restaurants is maddening to me. They can be 30 feet away and it's still painful for me. Speakerphones in office conference rooms, same thing -- office walls never have any sound insulation in them, near as I can tell.

People actually talking in person -- just fine. There's something about coming through the speaker that does it to me.

Flickering lights, including what you described and also most fluorescent bulbs, are very painful for me, too.