351–360 of 514 posts
Other similar cases I'm aware of. * The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic. * Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns). * People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran"). * Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N* er", suggesting that it is the n word. Alexa no…
The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know). How much quicker would this be resolved if the first A…
In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear
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Fear isn't the point here. It's just normal corporate ass covering. If you don't know, you can't complain coherently.
Having been part of conversations with a corporate legal team about making clear policies available to explain these types of decisions, I’m sad to say it’s this and they sort of have a point. One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harme…
The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.
Other similar cases I'm aware of. * The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic. * Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns). * People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran"). * Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N* er", suggesting that it is the n word. Alexa no…
So while I couldn't find info on actually innocent topics, it had been trivial to play around with search terms to find porn that the filter couldn't catch.
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One of the Meta employees suggested that I create a new business account. Except that I can't do that, because my personal account has been banned for life, as has any business account created through it. So I could create a new account that's just for my business. And maybe I will. But ... what a pain, and I'm not sure the ROI is really that good.
The galling thing to me is that these "lifetime bans" do nothing to stop scammers because they can easily create dozens of new companies and identities to continue ripping people off with. For them, it's just a cost of doing business. Either through legal or illegal means, scammers find a way to create lots of different companies and manage to get back on these platforms after their first efforts are "banned for life…
Damn. Perhaps I should rethink the name of my new programming language, Children. Pretty weird how they delete the evidence after 180 days, but apparently the automatic review is still able to pass final judgement after that window closes.
Rust and Go weren’t particularly good names either. At least if you wanted people to be capable of using them as search terms. Yes, yes, you can use “lang” but still.
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In the 90s I had heard about this software you needed to publish web pages called 'Apache' so I googled it on Altavista expecting it to be hard to find amongst all the content about the Native American tribes. To my big surprise it was the web server that was at the very top of the search results. Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still su…
The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results. Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, n…
I do everything in my power that it doesn't, but your point still stands.
My somewhat creepy story about this is that at some point I got lots of COPD related search results and ads and I didn't even know what this is at the time. After a few weeks my neighbors wife died from it.
I can only assume that my neighbors and other people in the house searched for it a lot in these weeks and Google thought I must be interested in this topic too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results. Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, n…
No. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kafka also mentions Apache Kafka before Franz's wiki page. DDG's very existence hinges on NOT profiling you, in any way.
>That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas. Never mind that the first is a programming language and the second is a library for data analysis in Python. Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me. If this is true, that is insanely embarrassing for a company that purports to be a sophisticated programmat…
I think it'd be embarrassing if the tech was making this sort of mistake in a high % of cases. Anecdotally, that's the only account I've read of this kind of error. Not defending Facebook, they ought to deploy humans in the loop. But saying the tech is embarrassing misses how machine learning works. It will always make mistakes, and the kind of mistakes that seem silly from a human perspective. That's because, well,…
I worked on the team that dealt with that, and you pretty much can’t mention exotic animals by name if you sell books, movies, fan art, etc.