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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#91

I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.

I've long viewed working for Facebook (or Twitter) as like working for a cigarette company. Your product makes the world a worse place and everything would be better if your company disappeared, but hey, something's gotta pay the rent I guess?

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#92
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…

And of course don't forget Pablo Picasso :)

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso)

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#93
post #49
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.

Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities.

How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone.

Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice.

You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#94

I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.

And where do you work? I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a long time. Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.

> if it's large and/or has been around for a long time

So why not work for a smaller company with values and a history that you can respect?

You make it sound like in a capitalist society we have to sell our souls to a big evil company. Software developers (especially ones have the skills to work for facebook) can work literally anywhere. Lots of them start their own companies. There's simply no excuse for contributing to the success of companies whose values and actions you can't personally endorse and stand behind.

Of course I'm not gonna resent some dude working at McDonalds for contributing to the obesity epidemic, but software developers just don't have any excuse.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North American company with most (if not all) of it's product/engineering development happening in China. Just reading public information, it seems they have no development teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only natural that some character sets ends up better supported than others.

It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing…

I agree, probably mishandling of combining characters

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#96
post #93
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities. How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone. Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads t…

The dude will abide

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#97
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.

There is no need for a libaray, there is just need for a consistent standard. Meaning, if all programms would use UTF-8, fine. But they don't. But character -encoding is somewhat complicated, because there are a lot of languages out there. Some who even need more than 2 bytes per character, so you get special cases, which break on another system etc.

Being in the public sector, doing our 3rd party integration and being from Denmark gets me the joy of having to deal with a lot of relatively different APIs of very varied quality and æøå in names.

Sometimes when people think they are using UTF-8, they aren’t. I’m not sure if that’s because they are incompetent or if their tooling lies to them, but I’ve gone through soooooo many weird encodings over the years trying to match what was specified as standard UTF-8.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#98

The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger Oh yes. At some point this was a very annoying problem on Facebook. Our last name has ‘de’ as well and Facebook refused to have ‘de’ in lowercase in my wife’s name unless she sent them a photo copy of her ID. At some point they started permitting lowercase Dutch ‘tussenvoegsels’ aga…

If there's one thing that's constant amongst American companies (through various extents) is their blindness to other cultures and conventions (even things like the metric system or DD/MM/AA formats) .

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#99
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…

Another thing is overlooked, which is strange since these companies hire so many statisticians and much about their work is about understanding populations and individual preferences.

When you have huge populations (2B) you're outliers are going to be similarly huge. The meaning and usefulness of means and medians over large and/or disparate populations loses its meaning. There are tons of distinguishable subpopulations (Dutch) which are pointless to lump in with Americans. Etc etc etc. You'd think someone would be familiar with subpopulations and the limitations of treating 2B users as a normal distribution, but yet that seems yet to be discovered.

Ridiculous.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And where do you work? I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a long time. Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.

>Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations. Uh, there's a whole group of people at the end of WWII who would disagree with you.

I think there is some difference between working as a guard in concentration camp and as a toilet cleaner or programmer in HSBC, although HSBC bank was laundering money for drug cartels that also murder people.
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