Category: Interesting

Heuristics That Almost Always Work

TheSmithy

By Astral Codex Ten

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work

The Security Guard

He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind.

It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.

At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro.

This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.

The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it.

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A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon – Playing with reality

TheSmithy

Written by Reed Berkowitz

QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. It has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an ARG, online role-play (RP) or LARP before. The similarities are so striking that it has often been referred to as a LARP or ARG. However this beast is very very different from a game.

It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development. QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted.

https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5

A deep-learning text-to-speech tool

TheSmithy

https://15.ai/

It is really amazing!

From the website:

A deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters. The voices are generated in real time using multiple audio synthesis algorithms and customized neural networks trained on very little available data. This project demonstrates not only a significant reduction in the amount of audio required to realistically clone voices while retaining their affective prosodies, but also the feasibility of an on-demand, stable, and autonomously-improving speech synthesis application that aims to mimic a voice of limited availability. As of January 2021, this current iteration of the algorithm (v11.2.x) is the most cutting-edge in the fields of voice cloning and speech synthesis.

1835 Great Moon Hoax

TheSmithy

Wiki

The “Great Moon Hoax” refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time.

The story was advertised on August 21, 1835, as an upcoming feature allegedly reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant.[1] The first in a series of six was published four days later on August 25.