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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#201

Post by mcv »

Vinnl wrote: post #134
mcv wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More precisely: the first letter of a name is always capitalised. So in "Hans de Zwart", the 'H' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised. But in "De Zwart", the 'D' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised, even if it normally wouldn't be. There might be an exception to that if that letter is not part of a whole word. "De" is a word, but I once knew a guy whose last name was 't Zet . The "'t" is not a wo…

Since we're bringing up fun facts about Dutch capitalisation, when the first two letters are "IJ", which pronounced as a single letter (a vowel) in Dutch, then both are capitalised.

There are (a lot of) people who consider the 'ij' to be a single letter. When asked whether that means Dutch has 27 letters in the alphabet or the 'y' is not a Dutch letter, the discussion becomes very confused. Best explanation is probably that the 'ij' is a letter that's not in the alphabet, or it is, but shares the 25th spot in the alphabet with the 'y'. But it is still a different letter, because "symbool" and "royaal" are also valid Dutch words. The situation isn't helped by the fact that some names and words that currently contain an 'ij' used to contain an 'y'.

(Personally I think it's two letters, but there are very serious sources, including a major encyclopedia as well as primary schools, that disagree. In games and puzzles it's also usually considered to be a single letter.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#202

Post by thayne »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #184
duxup wrote: post #160

>The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.” It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people. I had a dom…

> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so muc…

> Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled.

I think the problem here isn't that there was a mistake, but that de Zwart had no reocurse when it happened.

> It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee.

So what? How often do things like this happen? If it happens enough that Facebook's customer support can't keep up, that suggests their automation needs some serious work.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#203

Post by superjan »

barkingcat wrote: post #166
ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

Note that this sentence (and the whole article) contains the same mis-capitalization the articles complains Facebook is doing. It is most likely an aggressive final pass of spellcheck or auto-correct that wasn't re-incorrected before publishing, but really ironic all the same.

No, if you only write the last name in isolation then you should capitalize the ‘D’. So it’s Mr De Zwart, but Hans de Zwart.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#204

Post by moron4hire »

Back when I got my driver's license in the late 90s, Pennsylvania couldn't handle Scottish surnames, so my last name ended up "MC BETH" after I wrote it on the form as "McBeth" (which is ludicrous, there have been Scots people in Pennsylvania far longer than there have been licenses). When I moved to Virginia 7 years ago, Virginia could handle it, but my PA license showed a "MC BETH", so my VA license shows "MC BETH".

Before they issue the license, they give you a form to review. They warn you to check the form for errors, because errors are "serious business" with "serious consequences". So I point out the space on the form, that it is not the correct spelling of my name.

The clerk got quite surly with me. It didn't matter that all the other documentation I had to submit--including my birth certificate--along with my change of residency showed "McBeth". Apparently, the PA DMV of 1998 was infallible and I'm now trying to pull some sort of fraud fastball in VA in getting that space removed.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#205

Post by ethanwillis »

nine_k wrote: post #200
ethanwillis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't categorize this as best-effort. This is why we need more consumer protections because I think any reasonable person can agree that this is not how consumers should be treated and we shouldn't normalize it by providing a flawed rationalization of "Google needs to make more money"

If you are not paying for a service, should you expect the same protections? If you do but implicitly (by sharing info good for ad targeting, etc), should it not be made explicit then? It should stop being "free" and legally become "free* (conditions apply)".

The grandparent comment that we're talking in the context of said that they registered a domain through Google's blogger service. I assume they paid for that domain.

And I've used paid Google services, support really isn't any better.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#206

Post by Mathnerd314 »

kokey wrote: post #49
op03 wrote: post #15

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators ca…

It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.

There's a simple solution: cap the number of users. With a closed system you don't have to worry about the registration mechanisms being gamed, and moderation of a fixed-size group is easy to plan out.

Similarly you could use an invite system with limited invites, if you want growth at a constant rate- although this could still lead to moderation problems if you don't grow your moderation team at the same rate.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#207

Post by jfk13 »

katmannthree wrote: post #191
cgriswald wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product ( e.g. , safety equipment, emissions standards). If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government ( e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building la…

In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following: >Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actu…

> Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society

Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#208

Post by jfk13 »

wang_li wrote: post #183
tomp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I consider "gender" even sillier - e.g. Facebook adding 100s of different genders to their website - how about just removing the field altogether? Same about "legal sex" - why would the government care in the first place?! ( Doctors might, but the rest of the government, not really.)

Different sexes have different civic obligations. E.g. Selective Service, a.k.a the draft, in the US.

Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#209

Post by Xelbair »

jdmichal wrote: post #154
Xelbair wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that would work as an excuse back in ANSI days. we have UTF8 as a standard nowadays.

Unicode doesn't magically make this stuff go away, much less any specific encoding of it. A glyph can consist of multiple codepoints, and then those can sometimes be standardized to other codepoints. For instance, Unicode has codepoint U+00C4 for an A with a diaeresis (aka umlaut). But it also has codepoints U+0041 U+0308 for an A with a combining diaeresis, which should then map to the combined U+00C4 for font rende…

and both cases should be handled properly, as it is in Unicode standard.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#210

Post by thesuitonym »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #184
duxup wrote: post #160

>The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.” It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people. I had a dom…

> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so muc…

A few years ago I bought a laundry washer and dryer set. They were nice, mid-range units and I was pretty happy with them. About a year after purchase, the plastic clips that held the handle on the dryer broke off. I called the phone number on my warranty papers and spoke to a human being in Tennessee. I told her what happened, and she asked me for the model number and my address. They shipped a replacement that arrived at my house two days later.

A mistake happened, the plastic was too weak (Or maybe I pulled too hard, I don't know!) but I was able to contact the company and get it fixed.

It doesn't matter what mistakes are made if there is a way to fix it. If these systems are automated, fine. But if a mistake is made, why isn't there a way to get it fixed? That's where humans come in.

btw, Alphabet's income is about 42 times that of the company that made my washer/dryer. How is it that they can afford phone reps when Alphabet can't?

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