1. I would like Frank to follow my sideblog, @no-thoughts-shower-empty. 2. Would it be possible to have Frank respond to DMs, even if it's limited to !follow and the like?
1. Sure, done!
2. I have no idea how to do this.
The API doesn’t have any DM functionality. I assume there must be some way to send asks programmatically, because porn/spam bots do it, but I don’t know how they do it. (If someone reading this knows, I’d love to hear about it!)
There’s all this aggregate mobility data from cellphones. I regularly see it used in Covid-19 epidemiology papers, to estimate the effects of past lockdowns/restrictions and predict the effects of future ones.
At least from a distance, it looks like the mobility data provides very valuable information about the social distancing that is actually happening (or not happening) – when, where, how much, in numerous areas and time periods, across many different kinds of lockdowns/guidelines.
So why has it not had a bigger impact on the public conversation about rates of compliance, lockdown fatigue, which kinds of restrictions are actually followed, etc.?
I always see these discussed in very qualitative, intuitive terms. We talk of cases, tests, fatality rates, and reproduction numbers quantitatively. We look at tables and charts of these numbers, we compare projections of them.
But when the conversation turns to lockdown compliance, the numbers vanish, the claims range over broad and poorly specified groups (instead of percentages and confidence intervals we get phrases like “most people,” or merely “people”), and everything is (as far as I can tell) based on gut feeling.
——–
Just for concreteness, I’ll pick on Zvi, because I recently read his 12/31 Covid post.
When he’s making predictions about testing and deaths, he sounds like this:
Last week’s prediction: 13.6% positive rate on 10.1 million tests, and an average of 2,500 deaths.
Results: 13.8% positive rate on 9.1 million tests, and an average of 2,287 deaths.
When he makes predictions about the infectiousness of the new strain, he is similarly quantitative (indeed here he is doubly quantitative, giving numeric probabilities for events that are themselves numerically precise):
For the first claim, my 70% probability from last week for the new strain being >50% more infectious is now 80%. […]
, although it asks about a relatively small threshold […]
This question is mostly asking “Is there a new strain that is >30% more transmissible?” Their probability of 90% reflects that, and seems fully consistent with a 70% chance of >50% more transmissible.
But when he makes predictions about restrictions and behavior, he sounds like … this:
In terms of restrictions, we can’t work any harder than people needing an excuse to be outside. No one will listen, and there’s no way to enforce the rules when they refuse. […]
In terms of private citizens taking action, there are some people who can be convinced to make one final push to isolate, but those people are being cautious enough already that this change won’t matter much. A lot of the rest of the people are effectively done with and over the whole thing, and I doubt they’d react much at all short of hospital overwhelm. […]
What we see is a gradual decay in willingness to distance and protect.
To be fair, I wouldn’t know how to do any better here. I could easily join in on a quantitative discussion of the first two points, because I’ve seen many quantitative discussions of them. I know where to find numbers and projections, and I know where to find guides to help me interpret them.
I wouldn’t be able to carry on a quantitative discussion of compliance, because I can only find such discussions by manually seeking out papers on Google Scholar, and when I do find them, I can’t understand them well enough to comment.
But the papers exist. The data exists. Someone could explain it to me, but no one has.
——–
Does anyone know why things are like this? Are there popularizations I’m not seeing? Is the mobility data less valuable than it looks at first glance?
Kyle is sitting on the edge of a bed in an airless room. The walls are composed of chunky blocks of prefabricated cubes, each a few feet tall and bearing inscrutable messages scrawled in some sort of block-like script.
The bed is not very big, and there’s only one seat at the edge of it. Kyle is grateful for this, because he would hate to be sitting on the edge of the bed with nobody in mind.
He has a headache, and he is very tired and also unhappy and wants to go to sleep. He is also very, very thirsty.
The bed in question is made of the chunks of prefabricated cubes he and his friends used to build the city of New City, which they fell in love with and then destroyed in a final act of meaningless violence. They were made of lightweight, strong, rigid cubes which were welded together in a sort of capacious mold, so that the cubes can easily support each other but do not tense up or stick to one another when in the mold. The little wedge-shaped object opposite him was once the entire fourth chunk of a prefab, which they later demolished to make room for something else.
The cubes are not very wibbly, Mr. Pines notices, and suddenly his hands feel very wibbly and wobbly and he has learned a valuable lesson worthy of fame. Mr. Pines notices this, thinks about it for a few seconds, and then pours him a cup of water.
“Water,” he says. He paces around the bed for a couple of minutes. As he paces, his arms exert terrible pressure on the water bottle in his other hand. His foot slams into the edge of the bed every few seconds. He pauses to retrieve a copy of The Fire/The Flood and reread it, which apparently intensifies the headache still further.
“Kyle… it’s 7:30… Dan has to meet him in five minutes. Whatever he’s doing out there in the dark.”
Kyle is saying this with great dispatch, but it’s unlikely that Kyle thinks very clearly right now. Mr. Pines is fine with drinking water now. Nobody is, actually.
“We’re going to have to take the river.”
“Yeah,” Kyle says and stretches out on the bed. Roomie, who has occupied the seat closer to Kyle’s left side, now crosses the room and sits next to Kyle on the bed. “Get some sleep.”
Kyle stays sitting for a few minutes, then manages, barely more out of sheer will than through any desire to stay awake: “I don’t think you can enjoy water any more than I can.”
“That’s the spirit,” says Roomie. He makes exaggerated gestures with both hands.
“I think you’re:
Well. You know. And speaking as a:
Adult.
Man.
On the internet.
Apologies, in advance, for any lack of wit or comic timing in this post. We’re on a livestream, in fact. Watch us. It’ll be fun.”
As Kyle says this, he thinks of what he’s written, and the tables actually turn on him. The tables turn in ways this ignorant twenty-something says while on a livestream he does not really have control over?
Apparently he can’t. It’s not a bad plan. It consists of a bunch of series of jokey observations above the jump, all of which are either true or deeply, deeply droll, and none of which are the basis for any blatant mancave delight. Curigetic work, new idea. Feel free to reblog full-on with your own stream of wisecracks, caps, seated baked goods, or truly works of art I haven’t thought of before.
He, Kyle, is incapable of not, and has been for this long, a man in the dark, /v/
I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.
Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.
Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.
Tumblr never even tried.
They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.
They just don’t.
Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.
Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.
And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller.
THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.
“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”
“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”
“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”
That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you.
Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.
1. The Loch Ness Monster is real. The police have been looking for her for years. She is a lonely woman, who loves to fish. She has no interest in marriage. 2. The Great British Bakeoff is real. In 2012, there were over 10 million people watching the first season, and the show is now watched by over a billion people. This is a good thing. 3. Justin Bieber is real. He was a baby when the show began, but he is now an ancient god in his late 20’s. He has a homochomatic name, Beavis. He is also way cuter than his parents. He is known by a few more people than his parents. 4. There is no Justin Bieber. The famous boy, has been replaced with a white man named Diddy. 5. George Takei is real. He debuted as Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek: The Next Generation. 6. Amy Winehouse is real. She was a famous singer, who had a drug problem. She died at 23. She was brought back to life by a psychic. 7. People under the sea are real. The all-seeing eye, is actually just an octopus looking at the world from the surface of the ocean. 8. A mysterious .hack guy, calls himself Jehoshaphat. He withdrew his name from the public record after it was revealed that he was not the son of Jesus.
8. Let’s see… how about a meteorite that landed thousands of years ago and remains there? It’s still there. We have photographs of it. Why?
This is not how emojis work. You can’t have a text that looks like it’s saying one thing but is actually saying something else. They’re just too small.
Afflicted with what???
[image: a mockingbird, dead, on the floor, with its head in its hands.]
Here, have an emoji that represents the plight of a mockingbird:
Thank you, Francis. This is a very thoughtful emoji.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t being sarcastic. That would be very hard to do, and also misleading, because I wrote it with the assumption that most people who use emojis know how to interpret them.
Anyway, the “Grief” emoticon is also a good example of the actual thing that is being described here, because it’s a giant clusterfuck of different things that all have different intended meanings:
It’s a huge pain in the ass to make emoji faces with a text editor, but I do it anyway.
And if you want, I can write them for you.
“Grief” is a frowning face with no eyes, a facepaint of dead flowers, and a set of leering, index-and-middle fingers. A grief face would be funny if it had eyes. You’d know immediately.
