Just to be a normal man, just to go out shaking hands

[sovay]

I don't understand Facebook's algorithms. Independent of any pages shared by my friends, it keeps presenting me with this photo of violinist Gil Shaham, upcoming guest of the BSO, and I cannot tell if it thinks that I am the sort of person who listens to classical music (true) or the sort of person who thinks this particular musician is great-looking (also true) and in either case I have no money for the symphony and extant commitments on one of the days he's playing anyway, but I still want to know which data they were farming to produce this result. Seriously, it's been every time I go to check in on the news. I'm not complaining, but I am impressed.



(I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), so the question of whether I find David Niven as beautiful in that movie as Andrew Moor does will have to wait for another time.)

Comments

[rinue]

Yeah, I don't love having that information collected. But given that it is collected, I'd rather at least it be used to show me things that are obviously targeted at me than either (1) continue to be bombarded with stuff I've said I don't want, a la junk mail, or (2) have the information be collected but stay invisible to me, where I think I'm seeing the same stuff as everybody else but it's a manipulative illusion.