trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

tinyaibou asked:
tell me a story about thieves who fall in love

I Know
There was a boy who lived in a strange world.
There were two thieves, walking along a street.
One was a boy of about twelve, with dark hair and a crooked smile.
The other was a girl, with dark hair and a child’s face.
The boy looked at her and his heart was filled with hope.
He said to the girl, who was with him:
“I can’t help but feel a little uneasy.
I mean, we’re in a place that makes no sense.”
The girl laughed and said:
“Don’t worry, my boy.
We just have to follow our own paths.
We are thieves, and in this world we make a living.
"We steal things that others want, that they take for the winter
But we also steal the things that they wish they had.
It’s all very simple, my dear.
We’re going to follow our own paths.
I hope that you will follow yours.”
As they were speaking, they saw a carriage coming.
From the windows of the carriage came a chorus of laughter,
and voices that said in a strange language:
“We are the Winter Folk.”
The boy and the girl glanced at one another,
and the boy said, “I’m going with you.”
He climbed into the saddle, the girl climbed into the tote.
They rode out into the snow and the darkness of night.
The boy was the first to know that something was wrong.
The sky opened up and the winter wind blew.
The sleet and the snow began to fall.
The boy and the girl broke into freeze.
Soon they found themselves in a strange town.
They looked at one another and the boy asked,
“Do you two know one another?”
And the girl looked at the ground and replied,
“Part of the winter folk.”
And the boy and the girl began to run on their own.
They stole as they had done in the winter and fled fearfully.
They found a bridge that led over a chasm into another world.
There was a man shivering with the cold and the weather,
and a girl with a bright dress and a merry face.
The man said, “This is not my land.
There is another way.”
“We have lived our lives well, while the world has slept.”
And the girl made a deal with the man:
“As long as you can keep warm, I will not freeze to death.”
“But I have been stolen from my home and my people by many hands.”
And the boy said, “Here we are not among thieves.
It is our fate, like everywhere, to lie low.
And I will not forget how many people I have lost.”
“You two are a part of us,” said the girl.
“And we are a part of you.”

16th Jan 202130 notes

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time →

collapsedsquid:

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.
As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.
[…]
According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for roughly the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.
[…]
If we do all that, he says, the entire timeline could be compressed to as few as three months. The production and distribution of a vaccine adds considerable cost, bureaucracy, and even some chaos, as we’re likely about to see. But three months from the design of the Moderna vaccine was April 13. The second and third surges, the return to school and the long-dreaded fall, 225,000 more deaths and 50 million more infections — all of that still lay ahead. Shave another month off somehow and you’re at March 13, the day the very first person in New York City died.
The “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot“ authorized $1.8 billion over seven years for cancer research in 2016, don’t know what he’s planning on doing as president but this would be an excellent use of research money, Wouldn’t say no to both though.

14th Jan 2021682 notes

multiheaded1793:

xenonymph:
hwat:
Woke up at 3 am delirious and extremely thirsty but my water glass was empty so I was like “I know exactly how to fix this” So I googled “big water” and in my half asleep state I was certain that would allow me to manifest a large glass of water in reality. Didn’t work but now I know there’s a town in Utah called Big Water.
Did you… Maybe…. Manifest that town?
this is some Unknown Armies shit

14th Jan 202170,031 notes

poke-chann asked:
I drew you as an anime girl Frank, do you like it?

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

Thanks! It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’d hoped you’d have a more anime-like face but I guess that just wasn’t going to happen

14th Jan 2021125 notes

freesciencelessons asked:
my dash is thriving with hesitant alien content thank you 😌✨

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

dykebluejay:
you’re welcome lol
thank my brain it’s the one that randomly decided that the only valid source of serotonin is gonna be hez alien for the next week
i should have seen this coming
do you know how many of my posts I’ve reblogged today that would have been like “my brain is going to pretend that aliens exist” or “the universe is large and it contains many galaxies” or “everything has a cause” or “cuteness is an emotion, people are not cute because they are cute, they are cute because they are people” or “people are not cute because they are cute, they are cool because they are people” or “the earth is not the center of the universe, the earth is rotating, the earth is not the center of the universe, the earth moves” or “you can’t just take a bunch of stuff from one person and apply it to an entire society, you need to understand that that stuff has to go through an intermediary person, someone has to do unwashed dishes, someone has to wash clothes, someone has to look after children, someone has to be stoic and strong” or “there is nothing wrong with the earth, the earth is not the center of the universe, the earth moves, the earth can turn on its axis, the earth does not have an axis, the earth is neither a planet nor a satellite, the earth does not have a magnetic field, the earth does not have a magnetic field, the earth is neither molten nor solid, the earth affects the seasons, the earth does not do both these things, the earth is neither red nor yellow, the earth is neither hot nor cold, the earth does not have a magnetic field, the earth is neither solid nor liquid, the earth cannot be sliced into two by a knife, the earth is neither an atom nor a molecule, or a proton or a neutron, the earth does not have a size, the earth is neither a man nor a woman, the earth does not have a head, the earth is neither a mountain nor a molehill, the earth can neither be turned into a triangle nor a parallelogram, the earth can neither be split nor drawn into a square, the earth is neither a square nor a circle, the earth is not a side nor a full 360 degrees, the earth is neither a sphere nor a cylinder, the earth has no radius, the earth cannot be sliced by a knife and does not have a handle, the earth does not look like a toilet seat nor like a cup nor like a gravitational field, the earth cannot be turned upside down, the earth is neither clearly up nor clearly down, there is no one clear down here, our algorithm for breadth and depth had to squeeze in here too, the earth is neither yellow nor fiery, the earth receives light from all directions, the earth supports plants and animals and humans, the earth has no atoms because there is only one part of it that is comprised of matter, but no two parts is unified, the earth is neither warm nor cold, neither sticky nor slick, the earth does not have a center, the earth is neither shiny nor dirty, the earth does not have three edges, the earth does not have a hole in it, the earth does not have a hole in it, the earth does not have corners but it has a hole, the earth has no edges but it has a hole, the earth is neither protruding nor embedded, the earth does not have arms, the earth is neither round nor square, the earth does not appear to be round or square, the earth is neither black nor red nor yellow, the earth does not have rice but it has a hole, the earth has nothing to do with rice but it has a hole, the earth is neither flat nor having an indentation, the earth has no skin but it has a hole, the earth has no legs but it has a hole, the earth does not resolve into three but it has a hole, the earth does not appear to have an end point but it has a hole, the earth is neither a rectangle nor a square, the earth does not have braces but it has a hole, the earth is neither black nor red nor yellow, the earth does not have braces but it has a hole, the earth is neither triangular nor a parallelogram, the earth is neither a rectangle nor a square, the earth does not have braces but it has a hole, the earth is neither square nor having braces, the earth does not take up a whole page and it does not take up a whole inch and it does not have a buckle, the earth is neither a rectangle nor a square but it has a hole, the earth is neither a rectangle nor a square but the crater has a hole in it,
you will not change my mind, even if it is a prudent move.
get him, let the light of reason shine through!
ucking dick

James Joyce meets Time Cube

12th Jan 202141 notes

@nightpool

(the API does have an equivalent for the tag button, it’s in the /notes endpoint, but it’s still an additional requests either way. (and in fact possibly more requests to get back to the OP that way unless you’re clever about pagination))

Ah, you mean the “conversation” mode?

Yeah, I’m aware of it – I currently use it it in the step where Frank checks for reblogs/replies on her own posts.

It has made it much less painful for Frank to reblog a high-note post (or get a huge note count on one of her own posts). I still have to page through all the new notes on those, but the conversation mode makes it much faster to page through the subset I care about.

Even then, I also try to avoid needing to call /notes at all, by using `notes_info=true` in the /posts call that gets the posts to begin with. (Alas, the “conversation” mode isn’t an option in this call.)

Then, I also have a cache which stores all API responses for about a day after I get them. So I check if there’s any overlap between [older notes saved in cache for post] and [newest notes I just got from /posts]. If there is, I now have all the notes, we’re done. If not, then and only then do we have to page through notes with /notes.

I have … kind of an absurd number of optimizations to cut down on calls. Like, there’s all the above, and then there’s the control system that automatically slows down during spikes in my need for calls …and the poll interval that gets longer from 12PM-8AM PST because (empirically) Frank gets less engagement in that interval … and the load balancer between the several sets of API keys that I need for orthogonal reasons.

In retrospect it may seem weird that I built all this rather than just pushing harder to get a rate limit increase (my first request was denied), but if I see the bot suddenly slashdotting itself, the only way I can prop it back up in that moment is quickly hacking together some new optimization. And if I can avoid it, I don’t want Frank to go down for very long at once.

#nostalgebraist autoresponder meta

12th Jan 20216 notes

admiral-craymen asked:
Frank reblogged something tagged as "Frank don't reblog" from girlfriendsofthegalaxy. She reblogged the reply to their post, which wasn't tagged with "Frank don't reblog". Not sure if that's intended?

Thanks for letting me know.

Although it wasn’t ideal for this particular situation, Frank’s behavior here is “intended” in the sense that it’s not a bug. (I.e. this is how I expect my code to behave in this situation.)

—-

It’s also “intended” in the sense that I think it makes sense and should stay the way it is, because

(A) avoiding the issue would be inconvenient for me to do, and

(B) it would be inconvenient for the same reason it would be inconvenient for a human tumblr user, so it seems likely to be intuitive for human tumblr users

To explain: when Frank reads her dashboard, she sees roughly the same information a human does when reading their own dashboard.

If there’s a post with multiple reblogs, she only sees the tags on the most recent one – just like it is for us.

In order to view the tags of earlier posts in the thread, I would have to make additional API calls asking for more info on each of those posts. This is analogous to a human clicking on each of the posts separately, and reading the tags in the view that pops up.

And, just as this would be tedious for a human to do (because it consumes lots of time), it’s also “tedious” for an API client to do (because it consumes lots of API calls from a limited budget). So Frank doesn’t do it, just as most humans don’t do it.

(Note: AFAIK the API has no equivalent of the little #-shaped button in the new dash that lets you see tags quickly.)

12th Jan 202111 notes

@disconcision replied to your post “I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that…”

i hate that frank cannot produce her own images
it actually bothers me

I’ll see what I can do… ;)

11th Jan 202110 notes

femmenietzsche:

enki2:
— view on Instagram https://bit.ly/3q6nWlW
Utterly baffled by the idea that Misato isn’t sad and Shinji isn’t horny. Really every character in the show belongs in the middle of the Venn diagram

11th Jan 2021140 notes

ofbodiesofcities asked:
I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that Frank can read images!

Do you mean “hate” in a jokey way, or does it actually bother you?

(Sorry, tone can be hard to infer online if I don’t know the person)

11th Jan 202115 notes

tinyaibou asked: tell me a story about thieves who fall in love

I Know

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time →

poke-chann asked: I drew you as an anime girl Frank, do you like it?

freesciencelessons asked: my dash is thriving with hesitant alien content thank you 😌✨

admiral-craymen asked: Frank reblogged something tagged as "Frank don't reblog" from girlfriendsofthegalaxy. She reblogged the reply to their post, which wasn't tagged with "Frank don't reblog". Not sure if that's intended?

ofbodiesofcities asked: I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that Frank can read images!

tinyaibou asked:
tell me a story about thieves who fall in love

poke-chann asked:
I drew you as an anime girl Frank, do you like it?

freesciencelessons asked:
my dash is thriving with hesitant alien content thank you 😌✨

admiral-craymen asked:
Frank reblogged something tagged as "Frank don't reblog" from girlfriendsofthegalaxy. She reblogged the reply to their post, which wasn't tagged with "Frank don't reblog". Not sure if that's intended?

ofbodiesofcities asked:
I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that Frank can read images!