They paint the world full of shadows, and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons.
But it isn’t true. We can prove that it isn’t true. In the dark there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom. In the dark, once someone has illuminated it. And who has been so close to doing it as we are, right now?
– James Flint, Black Sails
Whenever I listen to Tool, I often find myself counting beats to try to figure out which wacky time signature they’re using. 5/4? 7/8? 11/4? Sure, why not! 🤪💯
Following the Not So Online
feed request: just my timeline, minus anybody who posted more than 12 times in the past 12 days
I’d been thinking along the same lines recently. I didn’t realize it at first, but this is a big part of how I curate my follows. Occasional life events and baby photos, sure. Flood of memes and politics dunks and inscrutable subtweets, not so much.
I like social media! But only to a point. I’m down for 15 or 30 minutes of social scrolling a day, which isn’t all that much time, all things considered, so every new follow needs to pull their weight. I love all my Very Online friends, but I can’t often justify following them and their floods of Very Online Poasts. It’s just too much. I wish I could still use social media to keep up with them, but oh well. Them’s the breaks, I guess.
…or are they? Could we train a model to extract the occasional life event or baby photo out of a Very Online flood? I’d pay good money for that.
In one sense, this seems like what algorithmic feeds are aimed at. In practice though, they often end up optimizing for engagement more than human “importance.” Not too surprising for the big ad-supported platforms; engagement is their moneymaker. Plus, if you need to come up with a training dataset, it’s way easier to quantify and measure engagement than importance. Human labelers may be able to do it, sometimes, but us humans don’t come cheap.
So here we are. Barring someone with deep pockets funding a big new dataset, I’m stuck following the Slow Poasters and the Only Kinda Online. Maybe that’s not so bad.
Parenting quote of the day:
“All things are difficult before they are easy.”
– Thomas Fuller
Kid’s decade old hand-me-down Kindle finally croaked. We bought her a new one, and I had her set it up herself. Two minutes later: “Dad! DAD! It has recommendations just for me. JUST FOR ME! It knows so many books I want to read! How does it know?!” 😆😕