#algortihms

[requinum]

falin as the sphinx from dragon's dogma 2

[silver--scar]

NOO TIKTOK DONT GO I NEED MY SAVED SOUTH PARK VIDEOS I NEED THEM I NEED-

[uiiyru]

At least you're not opening """"""X""""""

literally drinking a beer by the lake and still opened tumblr. some of us are beyond saving

[thelunaticghost]

is the default tumblr dashboard now showing for you posts what

[chamomiletealeaf]

No thoughts, just Johnny getting the love and appreciation he always wanted, and getting it from you 🥹

Warnings: insecurity, angst, just straight up fluffy sweetness

Johnny is sick of getting made fun of all the time by his teammates and seen as the “dumb” one. He’s not sensitive in the slightest, but this time it was just the last straw. Simon had made a joke how he was surprised he managed to diffuse a bomb without killing everyone on the mission and that it’s a miracle they even finished it, given Johnny was on the team.

Normally Johnny would retort back with a witty comment, but this mission was such high stakes and Simon was being more taunting than normally. Johnny was already on edge as the fate of everyone was quite literally in his hands, as he had to diffuse the bomb that would’ve killed everyone.

After the mission, he sits on the couch in the common area, head in his hands as he tries to think of a way to make himself feel better. He had just saved everyone’s life, and not a single thank you. Just snarky remarks about how they’re surprised he pulled it off.

There’s no one but him in the common area until you walk in, trying to solve a badly mixed Rubik’s cube.

“Hey Johnny.” You say, transfixed on the cube and getting frustrated when there’s one color out of place on each side, so you angrily mix it back up again.

You had been on an entirely different mission for once, so you weren’t yet aware of what happened on Johnny’s.

“Ugh fuck! This stupid fucking cube is rigged!” You exclaim angrily as you take a seat next to him on the couch.

You don’t notice his head in his hands since you’re so focused on the mixed block of colors in your hands.

“Can you help me? I’ve been trying to do this for hours. You can diffuse bombs and shit so you could probably solve this way faster than I can.” You say to him handing him the cube and he lifts his head out of his hands to look at you.

“You good?” You ask him, finally noticing his state as he looks at you with wide puppy eyes, trying to process if you really just asked him for help.

“Uh, yeah, lemme see it.” Johnny says and takes the cube from your hands, snapping out of his shock.

Johnny is never used to anyone acknowledging his skills. Sure he’ll get an affirming slap on the shoulder from Price, but it’s never outwardly expressed. He knows the task force appreciates him, but it would be nice to hear it once in a while.

So when you ask him for help, and acknowledge his skills? He is taken aback.

You watch Johnny’s hands intently as he flips the Rubik’s cube around a few times.

He then finds where to start and starts to twist the cube and you start to see the colors match.

You move your gaze from his hands to his face, and watch how his brows furrow and how he bites the inside of his cheek as he focuses and you smile, taking in how cute he looks.

Then when you look back down at his hands, the cube is solved. All colors perfectly matched neatly without a single one misplaced.

He flips the cube around a bit to make sure it’s solved correctly, then he hands it back to you with a small smile.

You take it back in your hands and look at him with wonder, something Johnny has never been looked at with before.

“You did it already! Johnny that’s so cool! Thank you! That’s gotta be a record breaking time or something what the fuck? I’ve been trying to solve this thing for hours!” You say and Johnny feels himself get a little emotional at your praise.

“Oh it’s nothing lass, just a Rubik’s cube. It’s all algortihm.” He says, trying to stay playful, the way he always is.

You notice the glossy haze Johnny has over his eyes and feel there must be something else going on.

You place the cube down on the coffee table in front of you and pounce on Johnny to give him a big hug.

“Woah what’s this for?” He asks, not quite hugging you back yet.

“For being amazing, and cool, and smart, and someone who makes my life worth living.” You say, and he hugs you back.

Johnny hesitates before hugging you back, but he does, and it’s bone crushing, making you squeal.

You stay like that until you hear Johnny sniffle, then you pull away.

“Johnny? What’s wrong?” You ask concerningly, taking his head in your hands.

“Sorry I- just a rough mission.” He says, and you frown, hating seeing him upset.

“Well, you’re here now. Alive, and back to me.” You say, rubbing your thumb over his cheekbone.

“And you’re so perfect kiss talented kiss smart kiss and funny kiss and amazing kiss and I love you kiss.” You punctuate each statement with a kiss to Johnny’s forehead and cheeks, making him laugh as your kisses wipe his tears away. He’s never felt so loved and appreciated like this before, not outwardly so. Everything has been behind knowing looks or firm shoulder grasps, but the words have never been spoken.

Then you pull away and look at him, his head still in your hands, and the energy shifts to something more serious.

“I love you John MacTavish.” You say, and he looks at you like a child looking at fireworks.

“I love you more y/n.” He says, and you both lean in for a kiss.

After a few seconds you pull away, and lean back bringing him down with you as you pull the blanket over you two.

Johnny lays on your chest while you both bask in each other’s embrace in your little world under the blanket in the common area, not caring who sees.

There’s only you and Johnny, and you both wouldn’t have it any other way.

[drdemonprince]

It’s “urks me” anon. I agree with your reply very much. I know I sent the ask but you did not have to reply as in depth as you did and it genuinely made me feel a lot more comfortable with the space you are creating. I kinda wish you had explained yourself that well in the beginning but hey I of all people know online communication is difficult and this is an evolving convo. Also I’m going to be real your followers have been being a lot more annoying than you ever could be and it was affecting my mood when talking to you. It’s less that healthy people talking about risk management inherently annoys me and more that they are constantly slipping in microaggressions and minor misinfo when they talk about it. Even if the choices they are making are (sometimes…) reasonable it is so obvious that they were not listening to the important technical details vulnerable people were speaking and only heard “blah blah blah scary stuff and restrictions blah blah blah” like…!? I think overshaming is one piece of the puzzle. But I think a lot of people, including many so called allies and covid-aware people, simply don’t listen to us very carefully regardless of how diplomatic we’re being. Maybe they think they already know the technical details even though they clearly don’t? Idk it’s very irritating.

Thanks for your message. This is another place where I get very enraged at our public institutions for failing us so catastrophically! We have all been so systematically misled about COVID, and the actual infection numbers and other ever-evolving data on how it's currently spreading is actively covered up, and not made accessible by journalistic institutions, so on that level I do not hold individiduals reponsible for not understanding things.

Chronically ill, disabled, and otherwise COVID-conscious people have been forced to become the public health information apparatus and have done incredible amounts of thankless work geneating the data, reporting on it, monitoring wastewater levels, delving deeply into the latest research, creating infographics, and trying to spread the word to the public about it, but they have no assistance in it, and no platform beyond what they can build online. and those online communities tend to become siloed because of how social media algorithms work, and so people who have been spreading the facts relentlessly every single day routinely bump up against people who do not see those same posts hardly ever because they are in different pockets of the internet. Which comes down both to their choices and priorities, and due to algortihmic echo-chambers, and economic and political incentive structures silencing the work that COVID-conscious folks do.

And yes, also, people very much do shut down and turn away when confronted with scary information... that's a very well-established fact within public health and persuasion science that has remained a real barrier to public awareness campaigns for a long time. People do not process information about death and threat well at all. So much so that many public health intitatives of the past had to limit talk of death and scary outcomes if they want people to things like get a cancer screening or contemplate quitting smoking. the cigarette companies themselves funded "anti smoking" campaigns that were awash in images of death and bodily decay because they knew those kinds of messages shut people down and actually make them less likely to quit. (i write a lot about this stuff in my new book).

This is where conversations about tactics do become relevant again -- mentioning death or the direness of long COVID isn't "shaming", it's not moral sanctimoniousness, it's not "wrong" to do, it is accurate! but it doesn't usually work persuasively. and I do think there is more we could do to frame masking and taking covid mitigation measures as a thing for a person to take pride in, feel empowered by, and feel connected to others by doing, which generally is what we find to be more effective in public health research.

to return to the cancer comparison, we tend to find that "think of how much peace of mind you'll feel after your cancer screening! take a positive step for your health!" is a more effective framing that actually inspires behavioral change than "if you don't find out that you have pancreatic cancer in time you will most likely die. here are the stats on how many people die of it." That kind of messaging tends to make people less likely to take proactive steps. even though it's all rooted in actual facts.

I have seen some propaganda (postive connotation) evoking a kind of positive, empowering idea regarding masking at protests, but I'd love to see more of it. Sounding the alarm repeatedly does not work for a variety of psychological reasons. people get both numb to it if they've heard something is a "pressing serious life and death emergency" for long enough, and paradoxically, they also overwhelmed by the bleakness. we see a similar thing happening with climate change. these situations ARE dire and people SHOULD care, but in order to make caring feel concrete and possible, behaviorally, we have to frame information in an empowering way.

of course, there are COVID conscious people who do do that and devote lots of energy to crafting such persuasive messages! and still have to cope with being silenced, downgraded by the algorithm, ignored, attacked by anti-maskers, etc. and lots of people understandably feel that they have tried everything and that people still don't care. from where they are sitting as one person that's the emotional reality and that's often the lived intepersonal experience. but that appearance of other people not caring was engineered...and lord i hope we can find a way to socially engineer a collective way out of it, because what we are doing isn't working well enough. unfortunately the thing we need the most desperately is just more people spreading the message and giving a shit.

[oddogoblino]

YouTube Algortihm, are you trying to tell me something?

[on-noon]

On The Algorithimization of Life

Ever since facebook created a ranking system back around 2007 to decide which posts get seen in the news feed in what order, more and more social media sites from instagram to tiktok, and then even non-social media sights like amazon, netflix and spotify have included some sort of algorithm to serve content to users.

While the number of services that use algortihms to decide which content to show us has increased, so too has the amount of time we spent on these services increased. The average time spent on social media is now over two hours a day, and has increased forty minutes from ten years ago (Data from Soax).

Algorithmic recommendations have advantages, of course. That's why people use them. Algorithmic recommendations allow the users to see only things that may interest them. When facebook introduced their newsfeed feature that would show updates from your friends all in one place, instead of going to their individual pages, they wanted to show the news that was more relevant first, and that was decided by an algorithm that was manually designed at first, based off of how recent a post was, how much you interact with that user, and what type of post it was.

Another benefit algorithms could offer is allowing you to discover things you're interested in that you never would otherwise see. One of my favorite songs I discovered because I saw a random ukulele video on youtube that i never would have searched for, but yet really enjoyed watching.

If the algorithm is serving new, unfamiliar content in addition to that of the people you follow, you can keep refreshing or scrolling and get more and more content without end. This is appealing, as you never get that dissapointed feeling of not having something new to see, you never feel bored. But that also means there are very few natural points to log off and go do something else, if there is always a new recommendation to look at. But, boredom can be good for us (veritasium video on boredom).

Algorithims are no longer weighted by people, now there are machine learning systems that decide which factors to weight how much, usually with the goal of getting users to stay on the platform as long as possible to increase ad revenue. But staying on the platform as long as possible isn't the same as enjoying it. It might just mean I can't look away. And then I find myself with less time to do activities that actually satisfy me.

But if I have issues with algorithmic recommendations, what are my alternatives? There's a few main alternatives I can think of. Searches, following, and recomendations. Ao3 has a really good system for searching through all the fanfics posted on it. Because they have a system of tagging works that I can both include and exclude when searching, I can search for exactly what I want. The main challenge is knowing what I want, but I find that a fun challenge. I get to discover what I enjoy, and learn more about myself in the process. (Although I enjoy different search engines differently. Perhaps

Following creators and seeing what they make can be really satisfying! I get to see multiple things from the same person and learn more about them and their art, in addition to getting to see someone grow over time. But following on its own has a huge problem: discovery. You have to know someone exists to follow them. This can be possible through search, as you can go from a topic to a creator, but there is another way as well. Recommendations.

Human reccomendations feel the most similar to using an algorithm to recommend, as the main change is switching out who is recomending, but I quite enjoy it. Whether it's a friend sharing a reel with me, a mutual reblogging a cool post, or a youtuber collabing with someone they think does a good job, there are a lot of ways to get recommendations, and can lead to some good experiences.

[lordofthehammer]

something 3&4 spoiler free that i've been thinking of since ch 2 for years now

hey can we talk about how mettaton was on mspaint drawing a machine that could download a SOUL from a cd and become its body. and gaster told spamton about this shit.

like first of all WHY would he actively choose spamton, specifically to tell that information to. the way darkners worship the ground lightners walk on, gaster has to KNOW any darkner he showed that thing to would immediately put their ass inside it and try to become a lightner somehow.

unless gaster knew that shit wouldn't work.

which is probably the most likely. sadly. he actively contacted this vulnerable failing internet car dealership email subscription algortihm, steadily revealed divine lightner world knowledge to him until dropping the bomb of spamton's insignificance in the world, then punctuated his psychotic episode by tossing the existence of mettaton's NEO body to him knowing it would fail him like he's spitting on a corpse

dude is HE ok. if he's shattered across space and time maybe it's also getting to him. a little. i guess bottom line is, spamton's phone guy has probably seen cosmic eldritch horrors of which not even spamton can fathom

(not to mention, if it turns out gaster wasn't on the other end of spamton's phone, all this shit still applies to whoever this other entity is)

p.s. burning your own soul onto a CD is the most transmasc thing i've ever heard

[suiana]

SUIANA I NEVER SEE YOUR STUFF ANYMORE LIKE LAST MONTH ALL THE CONTENT I GOT WAS FROM YOU AND NOW I HAVE TO COME FIND YOU WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???

the tumblr algortihm is being SUIANA PHOBIC...

must be baecause my pfp is colourful and tumblr couldnt handle it

[shyflops]

the profligation of heinous googleai search results is reminding me of years ago when people made jokes about "training a bot on seinfeld scripts until it produced something funny" where i'm genuinely not certain how many of these are actual real things the algortihm produced and how many are just photoshopped. which is kinda funny on a meta level, being not certain if i can trust that screenshots of The Machine What Lies To You were actually produced by The Machine What Lies To You or if someone fabricated them for the bit

[shinysparklesapphires]

on summon: curetiel is the nyamber one dorm!

summon line: nyahahahaha! isn't my outfit just purr-fect? fine i'll stop with the puns... sheesh!

home set: *snore snore* huh!

home tap 1: aww man.. viv's no fun! she put this stupid bell on my tail!

home tap 2: Luna-senpai keeps tellin me i need to pick flowers for my flowerbed, but Kira's got a buncha weeds in his, and I don't see HIM gettin scolded.

home tap 3: maybe i'll plant a berry bush in my flowerbed.. i love berries! they're so sweet!

groovy lines: TBA

battle start: nyahahahaha! this'll be fun!

battle win: i'm on top!

duo with viv:

Y: come on viv!

V: whatever...

PLEASE REBLOG LIKES DONT HELP ME WITH THE ALGORTIHM

[bambisnc]

i'll get to my notifs super soon guys but theres like 4 tests and 2 competitions in this week im literally dying BUT i happened to be procrastinating on insta as one does during exams and THE STUPID FUCJING ALGORTIHM KEPT RECOMMENDING ME RIIZE REELS LIKE OKAY. OKAY. WHAT DO U WANT ME TO DO W THOSE. anyw. im soso deprived of riize im fr projecting all that energy into bnd and nct dream and andteam content

[femboycloudstrife]

I really don’t have a vent space and don’t wanna ruin my/anyone’s algortihm talking about being sad on the internet but damn i am in a deep depression >~< i really wanna make art or be a person but i have no strengthin me to get out of bed

[kazusajin]

thats so cute, how stupid do you think i am

i dont even browse on ao3 anymore and when i do i do filter out ships. Fucking unfortunately i see the summary when ppl promote it on tumblr or twitter and those shit just slip past even though ive been filtering/muting so many tags and words. i didnt even fucking ask to see them.

Blame the stupid algortihm for suggesting things to me bcs some person i follow liked it or it was in the for you section.

why are you in my account looknig at my complain posts? eho even are you? You the guy who wrote the thing i complained about on bsky? where i literally have barwly any followers? why are you or your friends over there looking at my account?