Bad science reporting

This article about a new gout study is really quite annoying.

The headline: "Huge Study Shows Where Gout Comes From, And It's Not What We Thought". Pure clickbait. Nothing has changed the basic fact that gout is caused by a buildup of uric acid leading to micro crystals. The only thing the study has found is more genetic markers to make gout susceptibility more or less likely. Genetics having influence on these things is not surprising to anyone except perhaps blank slatists.

Gout is often associated with drinking too much or not eating healthily enough, but new research suggests genetics play more of a factor in developing the arthritic condition than previously thought.

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Game design considerations of phobias

There was a twitter thread a few days ago that ultimately got deleted because too many people made uncharitable reads of it. The underlying idea was a bit interesting though. I wanted to riff on it, and twitter's not a good place for that. So here's some unorganizeed thoughts.

The underlying idea was just wondering whether games that have well-known phobia-associated things in them (e.g. spiders) explicitly consider whether their game needs to have such elements, or could use something else.

Despite a recent post, I have done some game design.. and such a thought never entered my thinking. But I'm not a designer. Would Romero consider it? There's a spider in Doom. It didn't need to be there. Did he consider it in the context of arachnophobia existing? I doubt it... Others in the threads who have knowledge one way or another have brought up cases where it was considered, though. e.g. apparently Guild Wars 2 cut out a spider mount explicitly because of players with arachnophobia existing.

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Hero Driven Development

Just a brief thought or lament on a common pattern in open source development. It's the dependence on "heroes" of the ecosystem.

Heroes are individuals or groups who "step up" and, for continuous years, make new stuff and maintain it. When they make promises and commitments, either explicit or implicit, you can count on them.

An example of an implicit commitment is registering a domain name. Are you going to be cool and keep that URL working forever? If I ever have to use a site archiver, you have failed, and I'm a bit sad.

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Where's my game?

Nowhere in sight.

And not any time soon.

Ok, I just want a preface effectively saying: don't listen to me about making video games. I have very little to showcase that I know at all what I'm talking about.

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AI Songs

I came across this silly song today, Colors of the Lisp. At the bottom is a link to a youtube video of someone performing it. I don't mean to be rude to the singer; my opinion is that it's kind of a bad performance.

Taking a step back real quick, I think it's sort of a shame that most humans suck at singing (this definitely includes me) -- maybe most could be trained up to something approaching "not grating", if we all had time and inclination, but I don't know. In the past, I don't think it was any different either, most people were bad. But it mattered less, because you didn't have an endless supply of excellent music to listen to any time you wanted, so people sang more even if they weren't very good. And when singing in a group, even if there are a lot of bad singers, the whole sound plus the experience of the individuals can sort of make up for it.

Vocaloid has been around a while, I enjoy it. I also think the idea is implicitly accepted there: even if a singer sounds quite robotic, it's still a lot better than a random human giving an attempt.

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Time series statistics are tricky

In one of my last projects at BigCo, I had to implement a bunch of metrics monitoring and alerting for our services. This was years ago now but every so often I think back on it and how it drove me a bit nutty... Here's a short write up of some of the problems I remember, from just considering one of its aspects: metrics on a single API endpoint request.

People seem to think statistics like "average requests per minute" or "p99 response times" are straightforward metrics that can be pulled with a simple query. But they can be quite complex, and the results can be very misleading depending on how the events and queries have been defined.

So again, starting with something simple, we just want a requests counter for a single endpoint. How you define this counter changes how you interpret its data. One approach is to emit an event each time the endpoint is hit, logging every single request. Alternatively, you could maintain an asynchronous counter that emits its value at fixed intervals (every minute, say), incrementing only when new requests come in.

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Thanksgiving Approaches

I was listening to a bit of my grandma's funeral service recording. Not yet ready for my mom's, but as next month is the 10 year anniversary, I'll do hers then. My mom only did a short segment for grandma, to read a poem, that apparently she read every Thanksgiving at grandma's? But I don't remember that, or the poem. My memory is so shot on these sorts of things. It's embarrassing.

The poem title is "Family Ties", a quick search found its text here and written by Allie J. Hilder in 1954. Though my mom spoke a few differences: "golden memories" instead of "olden moments", which I think is better due to the "silver" later on. And she used "Lord" instead of "God".

Anyway, here's the complete text, using my mom's pair of differences rather than the link's text. Maybe I'll have to bring the tradition back, and at least read it to myself. Alas, I didn't really take up the caring about family bits of personality which my grandmothers on both sides had so much in abundance.

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