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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#121
post #99

"The guy who was showing me around pointed out where they were building "apartments for our people to live". "So they'll work on campus, they'll eat on campus, they'll socialise on campus and now they'll sleep on campus?" I asked. I wondered whether maybe that was kind of unhealthy. Creepy, even. My guide looked right at me, and for a moment, his megawatt smile faltered. When he first worked there, it reminded him of…

While this may sound creepy for a foreigner, getting a decent apartment in the SF Bay Area is really expensive and the commutes are horrible. So in this context, that could be a good thing.

Why does it sound creepy? What percentage of the population, historically, have been "free" in a sense that they don't belong to an organization that exerts some sort of control over their social world? It seems there are many shades and dimensions here...

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#122
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.

> Twitter is more anonymous. How did you arrive at that conclusion? I assume Twitter retains everything as well (even "deleted" tweets) and it's all associated with an email address. Or did you mean it in the sense that far fewer people have a Twitter account?

Twitter is more about finding your own social graph of people you find interesting than friends/family/coworkers like Facebook is primarily about. I could have a completely anonymous persona on Twitter and get all the same content. I could use a fake name on Facebook but it wouldn't make as much sense, and I could be reverse engineered with some accuracy from just my social graph. Your family is going to tag you as family, etc. The other non family and friends content on Facebook is more watered down than on Twitter and Facebook wouldn't be worth using for that alone.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#123

"The guy who was showing me around pointed out where they were building "apartments for our people to live". "So they'll work on campus, they'll eat on campus, they'll socialise on campus and now they'll sleep on campus?" I asked. I wondered whether maybe that was kind of unhealthy. Creepy, even. My guide looked right at me, and for a moment, his megawatt smile faltered. When he first worked there, it reminded him of…

I disagree that onsite housing at company HQs is always bad depending on how it's used. Tons of companies are already directly renting housing for interns, newly relocated employees, and then also for shorter terms for people interviewing or on short term business trips.

I imagine doing such is in the long term cheaper than the amount currently spent on hotel services for the above population. But yes, long term on campus housing is a bit weird in this day and age (but many rural communities were built by companies needing to house their employees near the factor).

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite is more likely to be true. This sounds creepy because it is creepy and the only place it seems reasonable is in the increasingly disconnected culture of Silicon Valley.

Many undergraduate, graduate and postgrads live on campus in housing provided by the university, and get paid by the same university. Soldiers in the military live in barracks, even some who would otherwise have the option to live off base. Even expats working for private energy companies abroad sometimes live in corporate housing campuses.

Yes, and socializing students into broader society is a core topic for "campus life" divisions at universities, and transitioning back to civilian life is a significant challenge for many when discharged from the military. These are closed and walled off ecosystems of human engagement, each with their own challenges and failure modes for human psychology.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite is more likely to be true. This sounds creepy because it is creepy and the only place it seems reasonable is in the increasingly disconnected culture of Silicon Valley.

Many undergraduate, graduate and postgrads live on campus in housing provided by the university, and get paid by the same university. Soldiers in the military live in barracks, even some who would otherwise have the option to live off base. Even expats working for private energy companies abroad sometimes live in corporate housing campuses.

Universities are not top-down controlled institutions - profs have tenure (i.e. independence) and run their labs at a relatively micro scale, so whatever the criticism of tech mega-corps, it probably doesn't transfer because of those differences.

Soldiers in military often have a hard time adjusting to the freedom of civilian life, and it seems that structure is there out of institutional necessity (i.e. society could not exist without a military to protect it), not for the benefit of the individual soldier. Creating corporations that are both single-leader authoritarian and control more aspects of their employee's lives may not be how we want more of in our society. A lot of successful corporations seem relatively all-consuming for their employees (both small and big corps), so it seems like a subject without a solid path toward consensus.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is intentional. It's funny you are so sure of this. And you essentially just called me wrong without providing a use case. My statement was I couldn't think of a use case for them to do this intentionally and your statement does nothing to disprove that. Hiding a video can and probably is just an "UPDATE videos SET visible=0 WHERE id=123" And it is extremely common to soft delete things for hard delete later i…

Okay, so if it wasn't intentional how else could old videos still be in the system. Videos is not a new feature and the videos date back as far as 2008. Facebook may be a bad player, but they have tons of talent working for them. Are you seriously suggesting that they stored a decade worth of videos that never saw a single view/download and nobody there realized it?

I'm not on Facebook's side here but if you have to consider deletes in a large storage system then you have to consider fragmentation. I implemented a storage system similar to Facebook's Haystack (which they use for photos and videos) and did exactly the same - mark the replaced or deleted object as such and ignore it until a separate process compacts the stack.

Compaction means copying huge quantities of data around and re-indexing everything in a particular stack, while at the same time maintaining good read performance. It's an expensive operation and not worth it unless you desperately need to reclaim space.

The alternative is to overwrite deleted content, but that carries a performance cost because new files may need breaking up to fit into smaller gaps left by deleted files, leading to IO devices spending more time seeking per-object. Defragmenting such a scheme is even more expensive than compacting a haystack-style scheme.

So yes - the system may not actually destroy the bytes on disk by design. However, it should not report those objects as still being available to layers above it since doing so may lead to inconsistency. This leads me to believe that nothing was actually even marked as deleted, it was simply never "published".

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a 21st century company town? What's old is new again.

A bit like university.

Except at least at university there's a built in time limit, and the focus of all university time is implicitly "planning for what you do when it's over". There's usually even staff whose roles include helping students transition and adjust out of it, into broader society. The company town, however, is an end unto itself.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#128
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mansplaining even I am fascinated to know how you are going to wedge gender politics sideways into this completely gender neutral conversation. I agree that talking data storage strategies to people that aren't interested is unrewarding, but please mansplain to me how explaining technical concepts is mansplaining? Ideally, also define mansplaining in the process.

I believe the label mansplanting is used by non males to describe men teaching something in detail (often the complex idea is over the head of the person making the label comment). For some they would not like to be educated by males and men explaining technical details that no one asked for qualifies. Many males have stopped educating for fear of that label as most thought they were doing a favo(u)r by sharing. Soci…

It’s most often used when an idea is far _under_ the explainee’s head to the point that any explanation is absurdly unnecessary. That is, mansplaining usually refers to explaining while incorrectly assuming the incompetence of women.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#129
post #99

"The guy who was showing me around pointed out where they were building "apartments for our people to live". "So they'll work on campus, they'll eat on campus, they'll socialise on campus and now they'll sleep on campus?" I asked. I wondered whether maybe that was kind of unhealthy. Creepy, even. My guide looked right at me, and for a moment, his megawatt smile faltered. When he first worked there, it reminded him of…

While this may sound creepy for a foreigner, getting a decent apartment in the SF Bay Area is really expensive and the commutes are horrible. So in this context, that could be a good thing.

I don’t know. It makes rents higher since companies pay more and it takes units off the market and they can deduct the expense unlike traditional renters.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mansplaining even I am fascinated to know how you are going to wedge gender politics sideways into this completely gender neutral conversation. I agree that talking data storage strategies to people that aren't interested is unrewarding, but please mansplain to me how explaining technical concepts is mansplaining? Ideally, also define mansplaining in the process.

It's simple: - most folks in tech are men - most men date women - in 2018 any attempt a man makes to explain something to a woman is a candidate for being accused of "mansplaining". I'll say one other thing: I honestly have no clue if mansplaining has a more technical definition but in general I see most people interpreting it as a man explaining anything to a woman.

My understanding is that the whole point of the term is to denote explanation that is redundant and caused by a man assuming a woman's incompetence. Like some story about a man explaining a book to the female author of the book.
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