- Clean up after it.
- Don’t stop for anything.
- If you stop cleaning it will END.
- You can pet your horse sometimes, but not for too long.
- Take a picture of it.
- Put it away when you’re done.
Tumblr is dedicated to realizing the most radical, founding principles of Internet culture: individuality, freedom of expression, and human connection. Fundamental to all of that is trust and transparency between ourselves and our users.
Publishing this semi-annual report is one of the ways we reaffirm that trust.
As with previous editions, this report comes in two parts. The first is a review of requests for user information from governments foreign and domestic between July and December of 2016. The second part covers any copyright or trademark claims we’ve received during that same time.
This time around, we received a total of 258 requests for user information, relating to 317 different blogs. That’s 0.00009% of all blogs on Tumblr. To put that in perspective, you’re about as likely to be subject to a request as you are to be killed by a kangaroo.
Enjoy the numbers, Tumblr.
A quick update on one of our priorities right now: Getting rid of spammy followers.
We’ve recently made a lot of headway, including shutting down several large spam rings that were responsible for most of these spammy follows.
We’re always improving our algorithms to catch these annoying bots, but one of the best tools we have are your reports. If you ever catch someone spammy following you, you can use this icon to report them:
Not only will you stop that bot from bothering anyone else, you’ll help our team catch thousands of stupid bots just like it. (Easier reporting is coming soon to our mobile apps too.)
Thank you for your vigilance, Tumblr.
So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?
For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?
One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.
By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.
By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.
Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.
…oh, okay.
Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey:
Although not reliably.
In fact, looking at the neural network’s output as a whole, it is evident that:
1. @lewisandquark is doing brilliant things with neural networks. 2. You should probably take this opportunity to tag yourself.
Hey. It’s Pride Month!
Over the next 30 days, we are actively encouraging you to share your LGBTQ+ pride with all of Tumblr. You deserve to be proud of who you are 365 days a year, but these next 30 days, we’re going all out. There’s no wrong way to do it. Upload an illustration. Write a poem. Make a GIF. Take a selfie and slap a Pride sticker on it. Maybe send a sticker to a friend. These precious babies are in your app right now:
Do one thing, do 100 things—whatever feels right. Just tag it with #TumblrPride so other people can find it. And, hey, if you can’t do any of these things, know that we still support you. You have every reason to feel proud this month, even if you aren’t ready to show it. <3
We’ll also be signal boosting other influential LGBTQ+ voices all month long. We’ve secured some really amazing people for Answer Time and Issue Time:
Have a safe and beautiful Pride Month, Tumblr.
