Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 9: extremism

 Reshared from an acquaintance.

I'd be fascinated to know how Facebook is going to use the data they collect from this. I'd assume it will feed into a pattern recognizer for "extremism-like typing." Interesting that it leaves the definition of extremism up to the viewer.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 8: Gronp edition

The offending image that FB chose to block a ~98,000-member group for was this:

So, nobody precisely knows what happened here. As far as I am aware, FB gave no official explanation and unbanned the group about 3 days later. The likeliest explanation I've heard is that it misinterpreted the image of the lead singer's guitar as a firearm held in the hand of Creed-Dathon here.

I don't envy Facebook the task of applying its TOS to images; that is, traditionally, the easiest way on Facebook to hide a TOS violation from auto-moderation (encode it in an image so text-based recognition misses it).

Part of me is suprised that a group with nearly 100,000 members doesn't automatically trigger a manual pass before banning the entire group when the system detects a potentially violating image, but I don't know the scale Facebook's operating at; perhaps 100,000 is small-time from their point of view.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 7: Guest edition 2

 

Unfortunately, I have no additional context on this one. Seems like it'd be more helpful to people trying to avoid violating the TOS if an indication of what TOS was violated could be given though.

a brief cogitation on thread-safe memory access

Hey, I've got an idea. Let's you and me write a couple programs and share data between them. To share the data, we'll both open a file. Now, we'll just scribble bits we want to share into the file and read them out as we need them.

"Bad idea," you say?

"Very likely to result in data corruption," you say?

"There's a reason we have database engines," you say?

"Sure, but only if we do it in a very well-defined structure, such as 'Only one program can write in, only one can read out, and the file is a stream, not random-access'", you suggest?

... We should all probably stop thinking multiple threads touching the same memory without either programmer-constraining disciplines or resource-consuming protections is ever something we should do.

Mark's gallery of Faecbook infractions 6: Guest edition

 Transitioning now from my own infractions, I will now be bringing you infractions sent to me by other people or that I have observed.

Beginning with a bit of culture clash: when the algorithm meets military camaraderie.

At first glance, I can very much see why both the algorithm and a human might think this is a bad thing. But I'd hope either of the two would be able to pull definitions for phrases from common sources.

Anyway, if you're USAF, be cautious talking shop on Facebook.

Cyberpunk 2077 is bad (unless it's performance art)

I'm finding it enjoyable to consider Cyberpunk 2077 as a work of art involving the creation and consumption of the commercial product in addition to the game itself. A cyberpunk cyberpunk experience. A game about videogames, if you will.

Consider: A product, lauded in the fan space, hit the market like an un-wrapped Fabergé egg falling out of a 747. Colossally broken. Deeply disappointing. So bad that business partners pulled their support. Twenty-three patches later, I felt it was ready and jacked in.

I'm presented with a gorgeous and violent world, and a broken world. When it works, it's beautiful. It's what the thirteen-year-old dropping Netrunner cards on the table with a flourish that I inherited this meatsuit from thought this world would be. It's a thing of beauty with broken edges. And the game itself is... The same. When it's all working, it's perfect. But how often it comes off the rails.

• I stand and talk to a woman who tries to convince me to sell out my chooms and split the money 50/50 with her. Her handbag is fused through her palm at a right angle, and she gestures with it wildly. I try to focus on her entreaties of betrayal, but it's tough... That urge to let someone know they have some broccoli in their teeth, or some Cronenberg in their hand kinematics.
• Another mission unfulfilled forever. The trigger just didn't fire in the event scripting language. The gun seller stands there, slack-jawed, waiting for a pattern of 1's and 0's to tickle his data structure's flag fields... A pattern that will never come. You know what, fuck it. This was tutorial; XP's not worth the time to reload and do it again. But that mission will be in my inbox forever. Shouldn't bother me. It's just that games've got me wired so I feel the uncleared objectives like bugs on my neck... But I can't swat.
• Jackie, my best friend, the man I'd die for, the man I'd kill for, is an unstoppable juggernaut. Literally, as he plows face-first through a shelf, the shelf letting him pass like the mathematically described non-thing it is, immobile and unchanging as the number 7, the items on the shelf screaming away, ping-ponging into the corners of the room as the simulation desperately tries to reconcile impossible collisions. Jackie, his attitude unchanged, the rudimentary AI driving him unable to comprehend what it's doing.
• A glass-walled conference room. I shoot out the glass with my Unity auto-pistol. It shatters algorithmically into fractal shards, realistic patterns, giving brilliant visual verisimilitude. And it shatters silently; they'd spent so much time on fractal glass break algorithms that they didn't have a bug-free audio playback of a stock-standard "crash" sound.

And then, the stories of its creation: the exploitation, the crunch time, the promises made by suits that the rank-and-file were never going to be able to honor. The scent of scope creep everywhere in the finished product. The blood-in-the-mouth raw ship-or-die survival economics that is the tragic story of so very many game studios in this bastard of an industry that has Hollywood and Silicon Valley ciphered into its DNA and seems to have taken the worst genes from both.

This game is a dream of steel, wire, and chrome, wrung from the meat, blood, and bones of the dreamers who thought they could build it. They failed. They failed beautifully. The wings of this Icarus are so fragile but when it soars, oh, how it soars.

11/10 GOAT would recommend bring aspirin.

p.s.: To fully round out the experience, I'm playing on Stadia. It works great; no complaints about that. But my goal with this choice of platform: to finish the game before a faceless corporation gets bored being in the gaming-as-a-service industry and wipes my account. 

V's on the clock and so am I.