The first ten on today’s playlist:
Day: May 22, 2021, 3:06 PM
Face Up
Went into several stores today without a mask and it was glorious. Made me truly realize how much I hate the masks and how very much my cognition suffered with those things on.
The woman at the counter helping me get some shrimp pad thai said, as I was for once in the mood to be very charming, “It’s so nice to see people’s faces again.” Right on, sister. About 2/3 of the people in the store we dropped by were without masks, though it wasn’t that crowded.
Mask culture needs now to be destroyed as the virus retreats since it has soured into yet another aspect of the abandonment of community and civilization and is emblematic of withdrawing into the loathsome pod.
Call 1-800-CAN-READ
Yep. The opposite. As far as I've been able to track: Not a single death or even a severe case among the vaccinated either by Sinopharm or Astrazenecca (used about equally, with AZ for over 60) in Seychelles (according to their health minister). Look for details, not just charts. https://t.co/7282UvpjGp
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) May 21, 2021
If there is one thing you can count on, it’s that people cannot fucking read. Even “smart” people. Sometimes, they are the worst of all.
ACS Bye
Sounds like a disaster in the making. Government agencies worry so obsessively about privacy that they risk making data unusable for most purposes, while corporate data aggregators operate a largely unregulated market in often sensitive personal information. https://t.co/ZWlg3610kN
— Paul DiMaggio (@paul_dimaggio) May 21, 2021
Wow, that is a terrible idea. That is going to make the data fake and useless for no real purpose at all.
A model is not a replacement for the real data, and would allow for much more political manipulation (which I guess is the whole point of this).
Big Int
I miss specific people but I don’t think I’ve ever felt lonely. Guess that’s just how strong of an introvert I am.
Ref Loop
I’m tired of people criticizing the First Amendment. The government should ban that or something.
No Yum
I am not surprised, because most plant-based faux-meat “food” tastes like a slimy trash bin. The only reason you’d eat the poison food is to virtue signal. Otherwise, you’d go with something that doesn’t have the mouth feel of licking a moldy pea.
Algo Knows Best
Amazon on my phone has decided that I speak Spanish, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
I blame Critical Race Theory
— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) May 21, 2021
Amazon (retail site) on my work laptop has also decided that I speak Spanish, and will not allow me to change it at all. At best, I can only translate the pages to English, not actually switch the site to English.
Note that I have a US IP address, the laptop is new, I don’t have any proxy software installed, I have cleared all caches and all cookies, used different browsers, and have tried in incognito mode, my region and language is set to the US and US English, and my time zone is Eastern. There is no reason that Amazon’s retail site should conclude, based on no evidence, that I am a Spanish speaker.
Luckily, I can read Spanish pretty well so I just roll with it — but when we attempt to live in a world where we think the algorithm knows best absurd things like this occur.
Good to know that I’m not the only person this has been happening to.