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Comment by random_coder | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with talking about animals anyway? Truly bizarre.

Depends in what context you are talking about the animals.

Trade in animals is covered by a number of laws¹ intended to protect them, and fb has a blanket ban on advertising trading animals. This is a perfectly logical thing to declare wrong.

What has happened here, most likely, is that a right thing (selling courses about Python and Pandas, the technical things of that name not the animals) has been misidentified as that wrong thing, by an automated system that doesn't understand that two concepts can have the same names, with no practical way for the affected advertiser to appeal or even query the automated decision.

Basically this is a variant of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem.

[1] Morals too, of course, but companies like FB work based on laws/regulations² rather than based on what is considered [im]moral.

[2] or based on working around laws/regulations!

That department should upgrade to a modern LLM which would do a better job than many humans in understanding the context of python and pandas.

There would still be need for some sort of appeal/correction process, which doesn't seem to exist in a useful state now and would be required no matter what automated system you put in place.

I think if the front line bot was an LLM, rather than what is probably regex, they would probably have more true positives and less false positives that would potentially allow them to have a real person handling the exceptions - then train the LLM on the exception for the next release.

I'm assuming something to do with the illegal trading of exotic/endangered species; mentioning pythons and pandas, alongside whatever wording was used to sell the course probably triggered the bot to flag it.

That's the only explanation I have.

Just guessing here, but if the senteces sounded like "how to use pandas to help you in work" AI could have decided that you're going to use a cute bear to lay bricks for you. Plus the "exotic animals", as someone else mentioned.

Not guessing, I used to work on that team: it’s based on keywords alone. The list of items is too big and changes too often to handle anything beyond that — more than a trillion edits per month.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell endangered animals if you called them P4ndas.

Makes me wonder what's the worst possible phrasing

"Master Python and Pandas, make them work for you, attack new challanges, earn good money"

"How to use the innards of Python and Pandas"?

"If you find yourself fighting with Python and Pandas, I'll help you improve your technique"?

"Using Python and Pandas in the wild"?

"10 unexpected uses for Python and Pandas in the food and apparel industries"?

"Breaking all the rules for Python imports"?

"How to replace your whole ecosystem with just Python and Pandas"?

"Put Python to work on the family farm"?

I asked GPT-4:

There's a book called "Using Python and Pandas in the wild". What do you think it's about?

"Using Python and Pandas in the wild" likely refers to the application of the Python programming language and the Pandas library in real-world scenarios or practical use cases.

Even text-davinci-003 nails this (via OpenAI Playground).

Prompt:

> The newly-released book "Using Python and Pandas in the wild" discusses

Response:

> the application of Python and Pandas for data analysis, cleaning, and transformation. It focuses on the fundamentals of Pandas, how to use it to explore and manipulate data, and offer guidance for more advanced topics, such as building data visualizations and machine learning models. Readers will also get an overview of the best practices for working with time-series data, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing. The book is designed to be a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to learn how to use Python and Pandas for data analysis.

> Makes me wonder what's the worst possible phrasing

I got some very strange looks when buying one particular book back in the days when physical books were the norm. It was only after I got home that I realised a book called “Python Cookbook” gives an entirely different impression to non-programmers.

It reminds of old Ruby anecdote. There was this guy on a Ruby conference with t-shirt with ":s*x" print, which for rubyists means "s*x symbol", but regular people will read it, well... colon s*x.

(Censored because I'm at work and I'm afraid of my VPN.)

Mmmm, I know rattlesnakes are said to be a pretty good meal. I wonder if pythons and boas taste any good. Those big snakes might make a delicious feast.

Containerized Python and Pandas for easier shipping!

“Minimize cost of your Python and Pandas deployment for international customers”

Perhaps you're not allowed to use Facebook for selling animals. Which would be sensible IMO

Selling pets should be fine?

There are many laws regarding pet ownership and for good reason, if not involving an invasive species there's also animal cruelty issues. Pandas and other exotic animals need specialized care which a typical vet will not be able to provide. And that's if they aren't dangerous. Then there's the puppy mills, which is a huge issue on its own.

The puppy mills aren't running ads, they're using Groups and doing their advertising on the comments sections of local animal shelters. It's grotesque.

A post will be like "Meet Billy, he's been here at the shelter for 2 years," get a few sympathy comments and be followed up with a "look, we have puppies for sale!"

All existing pandas are owned by the PRC so the chance of somebody selling a panda for real, vs selling some sort of panda themed toy/book/etc, is virtually nil. No human would make this mistake; their filter is braindead.

Pythons, on the other hand, are often (illegally) sold, and can be extremely difficult to eradicate as an invasive species. Florida's Everglades are in trouble because people buy Burmese pythons and release them when they grow too big to handle.

That's not to defend Facebook's approach to ad management whatsoever. I definitely agree that it is far too blunt a tool for the problem.

Pretending the problem doesn't exist, however, because one example is unlikely is just intellectually dishonest.

That is true that the python trade is somewhat problematic and is accordingly regulated, but there are also a lot of people who are legally selling pythons on facebook and evidently don't get banned for it. Search "facebook python breeder" and they're easy to find. My conclusion is that the filtering system is totally and inexplicably capricious. A braindead computer program making indefensible decisions that it probably can't even justify to facebook employees themselves, let alone to the people it's banning. Maybe mentioning pythons or pandas alone would be fine, but both together gets you classified as an exotic smuggler dealing in literal bears? Who knows. Probably not even facebook knows.

Depends on local laws.

Also it can be difficult to reliably distinguish between an individual passing on a pet, a properly licensed breeder selling animals, and a bad actor doing the same (selling exotic animals, being an unlicensed breeder in jurisdictions where this is not permitted (generally or for particular animals), etc.). For this reason many advertising companies simply have a blanket ban on advertising any animal trading. Being more selective potentially leaves them open to legal issues if the selection process makes a bad decision and lets something illegal through, and that risk is not worth taking in order to allow (and therefore take a cut from) the more legitimate trade.

Selling animals is highly regulated in much of the world, which is why you see “free animals but pay for the shots” kind of things here and there.

Just as long as you're not selling pandas, which is what the AI thought he was doing

You can talk about them on FB, just can't advertise trading them.

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