When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook
medium.com
medium.com
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 domain through blogger that I registered ages ago on the blogger site. Google started emailing me that it was expiring and directed me to Gsuite.... but I don't have a Gsuite account and google didn't make one for me...
The domain didn't appear in my Google domains account.
Google had just pointed blogger domain users to Gsuite and called it a day.
Google was no help, I never got a response from the handful of ways (none of them good) trying to reach out to them.
Finally I found the old registrar google used behind the scenes and they let me renew the domain.
I never heard back from google other than all the spam about my domain expiring and asking me to login to Gsuite... repeatedly.. sent to an email without a Gusite account.. someone just flipped a switch and screw everyone I guess.
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 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.
Most importantly: People aren't paying Facebook. It's just not realistic to expect a free platform serving billions of users to have 100% perfect execution.
I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.
Even just assigning call centers based on the callers country of origin would be dramatically cheaper than US wages for everyone.
What’s in it for them to do that?
Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a stronger company in the long-term? That they don’t do it suggests they don’t think it would.
In other words the real limitation isn’t their current number of employees or really their business model. They are simply acting like a monopoly which lacks competition. I am sure they think simply buying any social network that starts to get traction is cheaper than providing a better product.
If your boss came to you and said, “Retric, we’re making the world better, but as a side-effect, we’re cutting your pay by only 10%,” how would you react? That’s probably close to how the board and shareholders would react to Google doing it.
Sometimes a support call from a tiny new account that costs them 2$ can be worth a new 20,000$+/month revenue stream. Or that same account can walk away with a bad taste in their mouth. Similarly, if their getting thousands of calls about something that’s often a fixable problem which they would otherwise never know about.
Which isn’t to say it’s profitable in the short or long term, just significantly less expensive than the sticker shock suggests.
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.
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?
Google and Facebook each have 3-4 orders of magnitude more customers. I'm not sure manning phones is realistic.
I think the issues come down to incorrect or misaligned incentives.
Sometimes it's cheaper to have things work, say, 90% of time, and maybe manually fix some stuff when badly needed, on a best-effort basis. Often it's the only viable way. Usually, if there's no written contract, best-effort is the only treatment you can expect. (Even Google's support is said to be much better for paid users.)
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)".
And I've used paid Google services, support really isn't any better.
Precisely the problem: People who are paying for services do not receive protection!
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 can be asking a simple question - how many people are needed to administrate a 2 billion member city? How many does Facebook have to do the job. And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.
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.
(I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)
But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and moderation is mostly left to the individual sites. Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for them to do anything at all.
In other words we need more platforms that put themselves front and center, avoiding that also avoids the reputation problems with a hands-off approach.
And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.
That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn there from existing governmental technology.
If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a reputation for opaque capricious moderation.
NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.
The problem is that what is "widely applied in the world" is using the grey-area of who to bring the hammer down on randomly to tip the scales in some way.
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.
Also it's kinda messed up Facebook can't just add more moderators because it's gonna cost them. They are worth 786b because they decided not to moderate their content enough.
Finally why isn't advertising taxed like oil and cigarettes is? Seems obvious we should disincestivise consumption, but then FED's primary goal is minimise unemployment...
And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has been sold to Microsoft.
The datacente will then create revenue through services and add jobs. Jobs wont be just employees, you're going to have security, shipping, power plant jobs, recycling servers, etc.
It also seems that they'll get some energy from datacenter heat back plus greenhouse heat... so a nice opportunity to do research and create bleeding edge facilities.
It's also credits, as in Microsoft first invests and then gets free electricity for a while...
Then there's a nice national security benefit having datacenter in your country.
So overall a good deal...
That's the million (billion?) dollar question for me. I observe that it will sadly follow the precedent of the oil industry and other industries -- a slap on the wrist to the tune of a fraction of the true damage, with society left to bear the brunt of the externality in perpetuity and prosecutors able to say "at least we tried!"
I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.
All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook. Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become a part of them.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't great. That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.
Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
"A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.
Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face."
The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.
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 large suburbs that require vehicles) or consumer behavior (e.g., driving drunk, reckless driving), you'll either: (1) destroy the industry or (2) create strong incentives for the industry to lobby government to make such behavior impossible (say by passing an amendment to ban the consumption of alcohol).
You also either create a situation where victims can double-dip, getting paid both from the industry and from the individual consumer—who has already paid in aggregate by paying the industry; or a situation where the consumer has no direct responsibility, which will likely have the effect of riskier behavior; at least until the industry successfully lobbies the government.
>Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.
I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior?
Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there.
So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.
Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?
For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things.
Not having free will doesn't mean people immediately turn into dust, it just means the reason you decided to get a Big Whopper Breakfast Bucket™ from McWendallKingFC© has more to do with explicit and intentional psychological manipulation on their part than it does on you as the individual making a totally intentional, rational, and well thought out choice that definitely doesn't have anything to do with their highly optimized (to their benefit of course, not the benefit of your health) food and very realistic commercials of smiling happy people and great vibes.
There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).
This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives.
> A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool.
I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers.
I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.
> I think we can do better.
Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.
Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation incidents are fungible for the purposes of this discussion. That segues right into the question of relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick google search brought up this article from the washington post [0] which gives the following:
Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles
Car: 7.28
Ferry: 3.17
Train: 0.43
Subway: 0.24
Bus: 0.11
Plane: 0.07
Granted this is skewed by cars being the only viable last-mile rural transportation method but we can examine that too. According to USDOT, urban motor vehicle crash deaths overtook rural crash deaths in 2016 in a reversal of the previous longstanding trend of deaths being 60% rural and 40% urban [1]. You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car. That's almost 90 lives saved per day if we all rode the bus. I suspect this rate is tied to CDL and bus maintenance standards and would remain largely unchanged if buses became the transportation method of the majority.
>I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence.
I'd love to see some data but given what I've seen of the local street racer scene and how they view certain movie franchises that glorify their subculture I think the influence is significant. Would society be better if we straight up banned everything that shows people doing bad stuff? Probably not, but media still has a tremendous impact on how people behave. It's again a case where an industry offloads negative externalities onto society.
>I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.
Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no? I used to be a vocal proponent of not yielding an inch of freedom as well but I'm less and less convinced about that as time goes on. Just because the harm isn't as immediate as people getting trampled 30 seconds after one yells fire in the crowded theater doesn't mean it's still not real harm that could've been avoided. There's a significant amount of internal propaganda here in the US about how amazing freedom is but I'm really not sold on the idea that the average person's life here is better as a result of it compared to a society that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of the world and responds to it with structure rather than "individual freedom" and a literal world-leading number of people sitting around making license plates in jail.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/14/the-s...
[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
These numbers don't reflect the absolute difference in safety between these modes of transportation. Imagine a world in which buses replace cars as the primary mode of transportation. You've now got many, many more buses on the road. So, if there is a collision, rather than probably being car-on-car or car-on-bus, it's most likely to be bus-on-bus. That will raise the fatalities per billion passenger miles in two ways: (1) The amount of energy in a bus-on-bus collision will be quite a bit larger than when a car hits a bus or a car hits a car. (2) When there is a fatal collision, the number of fatalities is likely to be higher. (It takes no stretch of the imagination to imagine if one person on a bus dies in a collision, his fellow passengers are more likely to also die.)
You also have second-order effects, like vastly reduced visibility for bus-drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists...
> Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no?
No. Not if they don't actually have any control or responsibility over the externality, like in the case of drunk driving, which was my original point. The only things a manufacturer could do in that case is fight for prohibition or install a breathalyzer in every car. The former was tried and turned out to be pretty bad for society. The latter probably would destroy the industry and/or be trivially worked around by the dedicated drunk.
Search is altogether another problem, because we really do depend on it.
If it’s 1% then the moderator to writer ratio is 1:1000 instead of 1:100,000.
And presumably the moderators are working full time (?) whereas the posters hopefully don’t spend more than 1h or so on average per day writing. So the moderator hours to writer hours ratio may be closer to 1:200?
Add some AI based admin tools and it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous?
My "favorite" is if you once had a spare FB account for playing some game, and later FB has blocked that account (for inactivity, or being obviously fake _after_ they instituted the real name policy)... but you still get occasional emails from FB begging you to come back and login - your friends miss you! Of course you cannot login, and you cannot stop the fucking emails from FB. There's no process for dealing with this, so you ultimately have to write a custom filter to process these zombie FB emails.
I urge everyone, no matter what your "need" to have an account on FB is, to just stop logging in. Don't delete the account... just never login again.
Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global proportions until we collectively send it the way of MySpace.
If you are not European you can probably still use their mechanisms for complying with the GDPR to fix this as they cant really tell who is a European citizen and who is not.
I log in, I have a browse at what my acquaintances have posted, I close the tab and go on with the day.
Sometimes I flick through the 'People you may know' and smile at some old real-world friends.
For the vast majority of people, Facebook is a positive experience.
It's not a majority of Facebook users, but it has an impact on a majority of people, or at least a very large minority.
I'd argue that, for the vast majority of people, Facebook is highly stressful and manipulative environment, and they aren't even aware of that.
The last time I did this my news feed left me feeling so negative I decided that I was done and I deleted my account.
So far it has been easier to say "I don't have a facebook account" than to explain why I never post anything or answer did you see what I posted questions.
Deleted my account and it was perfect, no emails, no getting drawn if, if someone wants to talk with me there's a dozen chat service to choose from besides facebook.
I'm more paranoid about FB hoovering all my personal information by proxy of having an account and friends tagging me in picture and friending me, filling out my real life social network in their database.
You can also download your data in bulk so that you don't "lose" your photos.
To me, utilitarian seems like the best outcome because the most people are improved. But the way to get there, I think, is through deontological methods because it’s actually unclear what actions can be taken to lead to an outcome. So trying to optimize in the short term can lead to unexpected side effects.
Having a rules based system and following it even if it costs $1M to fix a $1 problem seems better in the long run because it is predictable and solves hidden problems.
It seems Facebook is MLing itself into a feedback loop that is missing any core value other than “let’s make it work for 99% and not worry.” But I think this piles up little slices of technical debt until it eventually breaks.
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’ again.
But it showed so little appreciation of other languages and cultures. (It’s like Apple/Siri and others pretending that everyone uses a single language in their daily life.)
This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [1].
As a person with a hyphen in his first name I also get regularly mistreated by all kinds of web forms, worst of all flight tickets, which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly requested to provide the name as stated in the passport.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.
we have UTF8 as a standard nowadays.
Standard "Latin" characters to me are those that are supported on a Latin keyboard, and provided for by the latin codepage.
Some names change capitalisation when the last name is used by itself vs full name for example.
In some languages a name affect the words around it in a sentence (for a random example, an "o" in Spanish (or) becomes "u" when the next word starts by the "o" sound -> "Carlos o Maria", but "Carlos u Oscar".
In general, for a sufficiently large and well-localised application you will need to modify or parse the name at some point. Not sure that a library can do that properly though.
Whether it's curse words or porn websites or whatever.
I guess most plain english words would be curse words in other languages. Conversely, many plain words and names in other languages will be incorrectly interpreted as english curse words. There's no way to avoid this. Forbidding english curse words would be extremely offensive to people whose name coincides with those words.
The same discussion will also have to talk about whether Mr. SomepornwebsiteDOTcom or Mrs. Hitlerdidnothingwrong are real people and what to do about it.
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.
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.
The issue is that many developers have an urge to do some 'clever' processing on them when, really, my conclusion is that they should be left alone. Just sanitise them for security purpose and that's it. This is a typical 'less is more' scenario.
The best person to write a specific name as it should be is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.
It's inconvenient to have the person you are writing about copyedit all of your writing. How would that even work?
And if you don't allow them to do that, how do you account for the situation here where Mr de Zwart's name is capitalized differently depending on context? I'm not even sure if I have it right here.
Previously I wasn't a big fan of this style, but it has grown on me, and I see it now as similar using "they" instead of he/she for an unspecified person. Why assume anything about the name, when you can reuse it verbatim when needed?
I think at some point you abandon looking for a general solution, and employ an expert editor who can advise you on the right style. If you're writing for a small town newspaper far away from the Netherlands and get this wrong because you don't have that expert editor, that's OK, you tried. But if you're Facebook and you have 10 million Dutch customers and you get this wrong setting the policy for the most prominent few words on the whole site, you can afford to have better standards than that.
Also the name of my town has a "Ą" letter in it, which also is problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead just to be on the safe side.
Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work.
Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2 names "Jukka" and "Pekka")
How is that distinguished in legal documents/while registering the name/...?
As for how to register such a name correctly for a baby I have no clue. Also you don't have to give the baby a name at birth (you have 60 days) but the national identification number is given to the baby at birth (it is just date of birth, sequence number and a checksum character). All I know is that I have a colleague which such a name and have seen people before with space instead of - on a 2 part name
edit: How we usually do forms for this stuff is just 2 fields. One for all of your first names and the second for your family name(s) (you can have multiple for example both of your parents or some foreign with de/von/etc). Validation is mostly "check that they are not empty"
Is 4 a hard maximum? Because in Dutch it's not unheard of to have more. Not common (most people have 1 or 2), but at least one famous politician had 5 first names.
For example, in Latvia, the legal treatment is that if you have two first names (two is the legal limit) then they are space delimited and if you have two surnames (it's becoming popular to join the surnames after marriage instead of changing the surname of one spouse) then they are hyphenated.
So if you see "Alpha Beta Gamma" then that means Alpha and Beta as given names and Gamma as the surname; and "Alpha Beta-Gamma" means that Alpha is the given name and Beta-Gamma is the surname, so the name in any official documents can be unambiguously parsed.
(and the author is Hans de Zwart)
> This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was translated into English by Hans de Zwart.
In the original source: https://archive.is/g6H0F it is also "De Zwart" when without the first name, and I would reasonably trust NRC to get it right.
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 word (it's short for "het", the neutral version of "the", whereas "de" is gendered[0]), so probably wouldn't be capitalised[1]. Now imagine 200 countries and languages with exceptions like that and imagine having to write software to handle all of that correctly. This stuff was never a problem before the internet, but I expect the next century is going to see a lot of simplifications in language.
[0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way. Wrap your head around that.
[1] This is also true at the start of a sentence: always capitalised, except when it's not a complete word. If you start a sentence with 's avonds ("in the evening), you capitalise the 'A', not the 's', which is actually the last letter of the archaic possessive 'des'.
(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.)
That's a curious way to present it. "het" is gendered, it corresponds to the neuter gender. There is nothing neutral about it, that's just a (bad) name. In Russian for example, they call it the middle gender. Dutch nouns take one of two genders (three in some Belgian dialects), just like in French.
Both Latin and Proto-Germanic had three genders, which correspond to what we would now call male, female and neuter. Over the span of centuries Latin merged male and neuter into one, leaving French with male/female, whereas in the Germanic languages usually male and female merged into a common gender, leaving common/neuter. But apart from that, it's exactly the same phenomenon.
Mine either doesn't go through, or goes through and is silently trimmed down to whatever amount of chars they support.
Don't they have a process where you can submit a government ID and have your name accepted? Honestly I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening for flagging a name that is both uncommon and one of the most common adjectives in the English language, if the policy is that fake names aren't allowed.
You mean algorithm?
My expectation is that the person who wrote the code responsible for rejecting my name in the mid-to-late 2000s was paid somewhat more than minimum wage.
Facebook is fine until you get caught in the machine at no fault and with no recourse. I would have closed my account by now but I work in low-budget theater and Facebook events and Facebook advertising are unfortunately required to make it in the industry.
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)
Name forms really should just be:
Your full legal name: [accepts anything, modifies nothing]
Shortened name of your choice for our UI: [can have restrictions, esp. length]
Such a lawsuit has occurred:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_for_Men_v._...
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.
Also, sites out my last name under v, which isn't how names are sorted here.
"van der Name" is usually written as "Name, van der" in printed lists to make checking for names easier.
And many dutch IT systems have a separate field for this. We call it a "tussenvoegsel". Which would roughly translate to a "middle addition". It's not a middle/second name either. Cause those are processed separately here as well.
In Dutch one capitalizes 'De' if it is the first word of the name. So the article is correct (for example in ".. says De Zwart."), as is writing "Hans de Zwart" or even "Mr. de Zwart".
Bonus points: figure out the correct capitalization (in different context) of Nobel prize winning physicist gerard 't hooft.
> 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.”
I am really confused. I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart" ... since a human is writing this article, it shouldn't have been too hard for him to use the correct spelling or check the work of any computer involved in publishing the piece.
Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton.
In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regardless of where it appears in the sentence. In case you're wondering: yes, there are quite a few surnames that exist both in The Netherlands with "de" and in Belgium with "De". The same goes for "van" (of) and "vander/van der" (of the), for instance.
Then again, if they're nobility, they might not capitalise the "de" because it might be the French "of" as opposed to the Dutch "de", meaning "the". Confusing stuff.
It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.
Whether that’s you or not, I apologise.
I shall leave my shame there, as a reminder to myself.
The first character of the name is capitalized. Just a Dutch grammar quirk.
We also have variants that we insert between first and lastname: 'van' (from), 'van de' (from the), and many others.
I did notice the juxtaposition in the paragraph there, but everything is correctly written here.
Are you really willing to assume someone spelled their own name wrong before you question your own knowledge about Dutch names? That seems a bit unreasonable. It's much more likely that your assumption is incorrect than someone wrote their name incorrectly.
This is the premise that should drive software as far as user input goes. The rule should simply be "Trust that the user entered their data correctly and don't try to 'fix' it programmatically." Validate it, sanitize it, but don't change it.
> The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger ...
which seems to imply pretty unambiguously that using "D" is incorrect. Assuming that all the information I have is what is contained in the article, this is confusing.
Still unopened because I haven't owned a DVD player since.
One morning, my bank account was frozen by the tax office. It took me two days and many calls to even understand what was going on. There was no warning, no apparent reason why direct debit would fail that one time, but it took me 7 days to get access to my account again. Meanwhile, I couldn't buy groceries. I got a few late payment fees and a mark on my credit score. No one apologised. No one even noticed.
This is not a tech problem. It's a scaling problem. An increasingly large part of your life is at the mercy of automated systems. If you don't fit on a flowchart designed by a white collar guy in California, you don't exist.
If one in a billion users has an issue, they must be really loud for one in twenty thousand employees to pay attention.
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.
I always have to check under the D for Dutch, N for Netherlands, and T for The when filling in my nationality or my postal address on an international form. Its a minor annoyance till you encounter very important forms without an easy way to scroll or some other broken UI making input hard.
I don't understand why: bureaucracies are a brilliant response by oversized institutions/businesses to force people to reveal how much they care about solving an issue. Don't really need your website to be cleared? You won't make a fuss about it.
Is it unjust and inequitable? Yes. Is it unsustainable? Cannot see why.
These big companies do these things all the time calculating on people just giving up. We should take the advantage of the courts to teach some lessons as much as possible.
How To Cook For Forty Humans
People might be rioting right now over something that is not even True.
This was 2 years ago and I still have the request number with me.
That's puzzling. Maybe de Zwart just kept pursuing up to the point that he paid a ghostwriter to blog something about it?
Frustrating "experience", to be sure.
The name seems to be spelled with a capitalized D throughout this Medium essay also.
Facebook as it is isn’t compatible with society. It’s at least a decade past the point it had to be corrected.
If you do a matched-case search in the body text, de Zwart appears 3 times, while De Zwart occurs 7 times outside of quotation marks, and other locations (like at the beginning of a sentence) where English rules will capitalize a name.
I believe to follow proper Dutch capitalization, it should be similar to, for example:
Being a digital rights activist, de Zwart knows this discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his attempts to get clarity.
However, I can't be sure if in Dutch, a lower case pre-surname is capitalized in circumstances when it's used in a sentence vs as a full name.
Without the clarification of rules governing the use of such lower case surnames, I can't be exactly sure whether the capitalization is on purpose or not.
However, when used in isolation it needs to be capitalised so as to differentiate it from "an incorrectly capitalised noun/adjective following the definite article".
If English had surnames that started with "the ...", the same rule would be applied, where "Jason the Bouvier" would be the correct full name spelling, but in isolated context, such as "According to The Bouvier, this policy has [...]", capitalisation should be used to make it clear that this is expressly not the definite article.
Which of course doesn't preclude Facebook from making a completely wrong-headed decision.
content moderation
at scale
is impossible
Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.
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 you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense)
The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people.
> If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense)
I think that is massive hyperbole. Do you despise all the people who work for oil companies also? What about everyone who works for Nestle (all the pushing of formula milk in Africa that led to the deaths of babies), I mean where does it all stop?
> The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people.
He was a 19 year old man at this point (and I'm not even sure that happened anywhere except The Social Network). I'm pretty sure lots of 19 year old males have done things similarly except no one cares, because they're not billionaires.
Uh, there's a whole group of people at the end of WWII who would disagree with you.
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.
Thirdly, I have looked for ethical companies who'll pay me to analyse data, and I am yet to find any industries that don't have ethical issues. I'm not sure what makes Facebook special in this sense (do you feel the same way about Google, Snap, Twitter and TikTok?).
And that's without even getting into any of FB's terrible practices around data collection and privacy, none of which need to be repeated here.
Facebook is cancer.
"Facebook isn't the problem, human beings are the problem, and they just expose it"
Some nuance, please.
What good does an improved Linux network stack do if society collapses?
Whatever facebook does is tainted. I don't want the equivalent of blood diamonds.
1. The Big Lebowski uses the word "fuck" many, _many_ times, which may start to look abusive to an online system that doesn't know any better.
2. The movie contains references to nihilists and Nazis which an irony-unaware system may not be able to distinguish from actual endorsement.
FB sucks sometimes. I can feel this guys frustration.