Items tagged facebook in Oct
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I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. (via) If accurate, this describes a nightmare scenario of automated decision making.
Reuven recently found he had a permanent ban from advertising on Facebook. They won’t tell him exactly why, and have marked this as a final decision that can never be reviewed.
His best theory (impossible for him to confirm) is that it’s because he tried advertising a course on Python and Pandas a few years ago which was blocked because a dumb algorithm thought he was trading exotic animals!
The worst part? An appeal is no longer possible because relevant data is only retained for 180 days and so all of the related evidence has now been deleted.
Various comments on Hacker News from people familiar with these systems confirm that this story likely holds up. # 19th October 2023, 2:56 pm
But this much is clear: Facebook knew all along. Their own employees were desperately trying to get anyone inside the company to listen as their products radicalized their own friends and family members. And as they were breaking the world, they had an army of spokespeople publicly and privately gaslighting and intimidating reporters and researchers who were trying to ring the alarm bell. They knew all along and they simply did not give a shit.
— Ryan Broderick # 25th October 2021, 8:22 pm
CG-SQL (via) This is the toolkit the Facebook Messenger team wrote to bring stored procedures to SQLite. It implements a custom version of the T-SQL language which it uses to generate C code that can then be compiled into a SQLite module. # 22nd October 2020, 6:25 pm
Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, and simpler messaging app (via) Facebook rewrote their iOS messaging app earlier this year, dropping it from 1.7m lines of code to 360,000 and reducing the binary size to a quarter of what it was. A key part of the new app’s architecture is much heavier reliance on SQLite to coordinate data between views, and to dynamically configure how different views are displayed. They even built their own custom system to add stored procedures to SQLite so they could execute portable business logic inside the database. # 22nd October 2020, 6:22 pm
Whatever weird thing you imagine might happen, something weirder probably did happen. Reporters tried to keep up, but it was too strange. As Max Read put it in New York Magazine, Facebook is “like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.” No one can quite wrap their heads around what this thing has become, or all the things this thing has become.
— Alexis C. Madrigal # 13th October 2017, 1:09 pm
Why doesn’t Facebook use nicer URLs?
Just noticed this link: http://www.facebook.com/notes/fa...—so it looks like things are beginning to improve.
[... 28 words]Facebook’s Instant Personalization: An Analysis of Fundamental Privacy Flaws (via) Oh FFS. “Instant Personalization” means you visit one of Facebook’s “partner websites” and Facebook instantly tells them your full identity and gives them access to full Facebook connect functionality—without you performing any action other than visiting the site. This will not end well. # 2nd October 2010, 11:53 pm
Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research. Extremely valuable research, conducted with a group of typical Yahoo! users. OpenIDs usability remains bad, and if we don’t get it right soon something centralised like Facebook Connect will take over and the Web will stop being open. # 14th October 2008, 4:59 pm
FB App Canvas Pages: I Think I’d Use IFrames. Facebook’s Charlie Cheever explains the difference between FBML canvas pages, iframe pages and XFBML when building Facebook apps. I’m always surprised at APIs that load untrusted content in an iframe, as it seems like an invitation for frame-busting phishing attacks. # 2nd October 2008, 2:39 pm
New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites. # 20th October 2007, 11:25 am
identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin. # 4th October 2007, 2:53 pm
Right now Facebook’s position on 3rd party developers is amazing and I’m sure they are genuine in their support. However, give Facebook two missed quarters as a public company and they might not have no choice but to squeeze every ounce of revenue out of Facebook. That squeeze might include competing with the current crop of Facebook developers.
— Jason Calacanis # 1st October 2007, 8:55 pm