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[TD1]

I genuinely cannot tell if this guy is crazy, or if Shakespeare actually put secret coordinates in the Sonnets.

I can dismiss everything about this as mathematical or literary convergence...except for those coordinates. What. The. Fuck.

This is not the shit I needed to learn about while in the middle of reading Unsong.

He probably started with the coordinates, then worked the math until it fit. Certainly entertaining, though

[Putnam]

I went to ask a discord if it would be not a horrible idea to open commissions for making mods for dwarf fortress and... nobody answered at all.

Maybe I should ask here. Should I?

[pisskop]

if a guy can write a DF book and sell it why not commissions for mods.

you've done amazing work before

erm ... do keep  in mind that this is a game in active development and any mod will have a lifespan or maintenance requirement.  maybe thats worth discussing with any wouldbe patron

[Arx]

I'm an artist offering commissions. O_o Mainly because circumstances forced my hand, but if you'd told me I would be one five years ago I would never have believed you. Feels weird, man.

Are you offering discount or full priced commissions?

Because if you actually charge the full price then I am impressed!

Discount commissions, because I'd happily take requests right now and it's just a hobby. If I were doing it more seriously I'd bring the price right up to a living wage level.

Of course, a living wage where I live is lower than in many places, so I might still not be charging much, but nonetheless.

[hector13]

I went to ask a discord if it would be not a horrible idea to open commissions for making mods for dwarf fortress and... nobody answered at all.

Maybe I should ask here. Should I?

It might be wise to ask Toady. You would be makin' pennies off the back of his work, and he's offering a free product.

I would personally suggest against it 'cause of that, but I'm not the one making it so... yeah.

[Rose]

I went to ask a discord if it would be not a horrible idea to open commissions for making mods for dwarf fortress and... nobody answered at all.

Maybe I should ask here. Should I?

It might be wise to ask Toady. You would be makin' pennies off the back of his work, and he's offering a free product.

I would personally suggest against it 'cause of that, but I'm not the one making it so... yeah.

He gave his blessing before I went and started taking donations for my mod.

[hector13]

I went to ask a discord if it would be not a horrible idea to open commissions for making mods for dwarf fortress and... nobody answered at all.

Maybe I should ask here. Should I?

It might be wise to ask Toady. You would be makin' pennies off the back of his work, and he's offering a free product.

I would personally suggest against it 'cause of that, but I'm not the one making it so... yeah.

He gave his blessing before I went and started taking donations for my mod.

Donations aren't the same as commissions, though. You're not expecting to be paid for the former.

[Sergarr]

Modern machine learning seems surprisingly boring of a thing. Most of the methods don't even do anything other than predicting a single number, and the more advanced they are, the more "black box"-like and impenetrable to analysis of "why do they work" they become. There's like one method (reinforcement learning) that focus on actual AI-like stuff that does things, and it is basically equivalent to a slightly more complicated variant of gradient ascent for accumulated reward signal.

I mean, its applications are very interesting, but its internal mechanisms are not. And that makes me slightly WTF, as well as a bit disappointed.

[Reelya]

Well you can get into more of the language / predicate calculus style machine learning if you want, that area's far less crowded that the NN / deep learning field these days.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600984/an-ai-with-30-years-worth-of-knowledge-finally-goes-to-work/

[NJW2000]

...that is very inconsistent with what I have been given to understand. Who were/are these people?

[Reelya]

Latest sociology / post-modern prank
https://areomagazine.com/2017/05/21/sokal-affair-2-0-penis-envy-addressing-its-critics/

“The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” written by Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle is a peer-reviewed paper published by the online journal Cogent Social Science on 19th May, 2017. It is a rambling essay, filled with gender studies jargon, which took issue with the implications for trans and gender-queer individuals in regarding the penis as a male sexual organ and advocated understanding it “conceptually” as a social construct. It went on to relate this ill-defined “conceptual penis” to aggressive and abusive attitudes which it related to “toxic masculinity” and ultimately blamed it for climate change. Later that day, Skeptic.com published a piece by the authors who revealed themselves to be the mathematician, James Lindsay, and the philosopher, Peter Boghossian and the paper to be a Sokal-style hoax. Their intention, they said, was to highlight two problems; the low standards of pay-to-publish journals and the meaningless nonsense that can be accepted by the social sciences in general and gender studies in particular, providing it upholds fashionable postmodern ideas of gender.

“The Conceptual Penis” included such gems as describing the authors’ “particular fascination with penises and the ways in which penises are socially problematic,” referring to “pre-post-patriarchal society,” claiming to derive “important social truths” from Twitter hashtags, asserting the act of “man-spreading” to be “akin to raping the empty space” and describing climate change as “an example of hyper-patriarchal society metaphorically man-spreading into the global ecosystem.” The sheer ludicrousness of such utterances which go on for thousands of words should have debarred the paper from being taken seriously by any academic outlet. In addition to this, a quick check of the references would have led a conscientious editor to discover fake papers and even the postmodern generator among them! Unfortunately, it was taken entirely seriously and rated “outstanding” by peer-review.

“After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.”

... yet people are actually defending the paper.

~~~

Oh shit, I discovered a treasure trove of actual papers from that:
https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/811692847040708609

From the paper: Human bipedalism is an oppressive social construct and teaching people to walk upright reinforces ableist norms

And that's a fucking real paper. Only the first one I linked was a hoax/parody. This paper is criticizing the rehab people who taught those siblings in a Turkish village who learned walked on their hands how to walk properly, because it's "ableist".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_That_Walks_on_All_Fours

[wierd]

Metacommentary on the above:

It has been my observation that people with a soapbox fixation are unable to cope with tangential attacks against their soapbox. (In this case, contemporary gender studies, and their biases.)

Rather than see the spoof paper for what it is (Pointing out the very low standards concerning quality in a paid journal), they intrinsically see it as an attack against the soapbox itself (Gender studies)-- and rather than accept the criticism as valid (we need to improve reviewer quality, and paper quality in the journals to keep our discipline on the straight and narrow), they instead reflexively seek to validate the utter nonsense of the paper, in a vain attempt to defend the soapbox.

It is my supposition that this is because the people who love the soapbox the most, are the ones with very little that is meaningful to say or have very low academic merit, and would stand to be summarily excluded from using the soapbox if better standards were instituted.

[NJW2000]

Well, it's clearly been created to do just that, possibly out of a desire for attention or a perception of the soapbox itself as threatening.

[wierd]

Creating a purposefully bad paper does not invalidate the discipline-- It just highlights how bad the submission review process is. Other academics have done basically the same thing (create a purposefully farcical paper, submit it, have it pass review, then call the reviewers on it) for other subjects.

Take for instance, this go-around involving a fake philosophy paper.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/04/16/spoof-ethics-academic/#.WSMoZjfgW00

This paper, and the people who created it, are not directly attacking the discipline of gender studies. Instead, they are inoculating the discipline against poor quality work, by drawing attention to the lack of quality standards in the review process.

The thing these gender studies people should be defending is the discipline, not a purposefully bad paper. They should be defending their discipline by demanding the very same better standards on acceptance that the spoof paper was created to highlight the lack of.

Instead, they are flocking to support an unsupportable paper-- why? Again, my supposition is that those seeking to support the unsupportable paper are those that seek to use the same bad review process to publish utter contemptable garbage for their on purposes/gain, rather than to further the actual discipline as a social science.

[TD1]

I rather suspect it's more a case of it being a touchy subject that said people are used to defending for the sake of it. To do otherwise is, obviously, sexist.