Devi Sridhar in Nature: “Nearly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, it is time to look back and assess what could have been predicted by health experts.” (tags: sciencecovid19pandemicmedicine)
“I lived for the nerve-shredding rollercoaster of Westminster. But the stress got under my skin, and into my blood” (tags: twitterPoliticsbrexitjournalismhealth)
Neil O’Brien on the fantasies of those in the media, and beyond, who oppose lockdown. There have been a few articles like this recently, hopefully it marks a tide rising against the loonies. (tags: covid19sciencelockdownpandemic)
No evidence diversity training works but capitalists will always do the minimum to make it like they’re doing something, including firing low paid employees to stop the Twitstorm. (tags: twitterpoliticsworkwoke)
The socials are a handy way to stay in touch with friends, find out about dancing events (if they’re ever allowed again) and to get information direct from experts. They’re also an unrelenting cesspool of trolls, bots and undesireables. What to do?
Facebook
On my PC, FB Purity lets me filter on keyboards (I’ve chosen “trump” and “brexit”, as you can see). It can hide various types of update from your feed. I hide stuff like “Fred commented on this thing” (as FB friends sometimes like to argue with the undesirables), as well as adverts. You can also force the feed into chronological order rather than relying on Facebook’s algorithm to show you what it thinks you should see.
On my phone, I use Friendly for Facebook, which isn’t quite as good but does have the keyword filtering (“commented on” works as a filter) and, if you give them a donation, will also filter the adverts.
Secateur blocks people and optionally all their followers, unless you’re following them too. It’s adding to your Twitter blocklist, so once people are blocked, they’re blocked however you view Twitter. I guess there’s a risk that some decent people are following undesirables to keep an eye on them, but if it catches on, I can imagine people using separate accounts for that (of course, the undesirables can do the same trick, having one account for trolling and one for following, but they don’t seem to be yet). It wouldn’t be that hard to extend Tweak New Twitter to add a “Secateur” button to Twitter, either, I might look into that.
The next stage on from this, especially if the undesirables maintain accounts where they don’t follow other undesirables, would be the web of trust: only show replies from people you follow, people they follow, people the original tweeter follows, say.
Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy. It’s an alternative website for which you don’t need Javascript enabled. It will also turn someone’s tweets into an RSS feed, useful if you just want to read them without signing up for Twitter.
I’ve been tidying up my website a bit, and I’ve put everything which used to be on LiveJournal on Dreamwidth, with a view to closing LJ (or replacing all the stuff there with redirects) and using DW as a bit of diary/venting place now LJ’s looking increasingly dodgy. It’s odd to type stuff into a LJ-clone, feels a bit retro, but in a nice way, like a comfy old jumper. Twitter’s a cesspool and neither it nor Facebook are good for more than a few sentences of text.
I’ve also spruced up things on the proper blog a bit, adding a funky new style. I got Journalpress going to post stuff from the proper blog to Dreamwidth, and did my very first GitHub pull request to add a feature to it. This started me off on a “add all my things to GitHub” kick, currently there’s just my LJ New Comments script, but there’s a bunch of other bits I want to keep somewhere sensible rather than on my laptop.
Twust
On the subject of cesspools, has anyone done a thing for Twitter which only shows you replies from people followed by you or the people you follow? Someone really should layer a web-of-trust over the top of it, but I hear their API is designed to stop you doing interesting things with it, because you run into rate limiting. It’s so bad TwitRSSme apparently does stuff by screen-scraping instead, which is icky but possibly unavoidable.
The theist will say that there is Something or Other that Created the universe, but they cannot tell us what this Something or Other was (other than that they call it ‘God’) nor can they say what it means for the Something or Other to Create. At most, as Anthony Kenny argues, they can say that ‘Create’ specifies some unknown and incomprehensible relationship between the Something or Other and the universe.
The atheist can agree to this much. There is some explanation for the universe’s origins. Perhaps future inquiry will reveal the explanation and we’ll be able to fill in the details. (tags: humedavid-humephilosophytheologygodatheism)
