I'm no Facebook fan or apologist, but I do think there's a distinction between failing to moderate perfectly (or even well) and refusing to even attempt to moderate.
Yes. Targeted advertisement, and the resulting money, is the entire purpose of Facebook. Automation just makes the process faster. And cheaper; you know, that whole money thing.
I abhor both Parler and Facebook. In the context of these threads, I don't think either has done anything illegal, which is what passes for "ethics" in our economy. Of course IANAL.
I don't think Apple, Google and Amazon did anything illegal to Parler. And until these kinds of companies are legally and explicitly made into utilities, I don't think we can expect them to do anything except whatever they want.
They want to target their ads in general, but they don't actually want to sell military gear to insurrectionists. It was just the AI working too well. Once they noticed, they have now blanket banned such ads until after the inauguration:
Parler had a moderation process. It verifiably failed to actually prevent violent rhetoric (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution days before the crowd took the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!").
> How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.
Look around you. Right here on HN, we discuss politics. We're doing it right now. Yet... no violence. And the reason is moderation. The moderators remove violent commenters and the community shuns them. Clearly HN/dang have been able to "prevent violent rhetoric". It works.
And Facebook and Twitter are doing OK right now. Both were very late to the game, but are engaged in a heroic effort right now to clean up their communities. In fact it was something of a left-Twitter running gag over the past week to giggle at conservatives complaining about their follower count suddenly dropping.
But Parler did no such thing. So outside forces had to apply the moderation.
Parler had deleted several of Wood's posts, and a number of users had used the "report" function to raise the flag to Parler management. I think he was close to being banned.
That particular post was still up when the site went down, I believe. I mean, sure, it's possible they would have gotten better. But this wasn't an abstract issue, we'd just had an attack on congress and there was (and remains) serious worry that something similar or worse would happen at the inauguration. Certainly the rhetoric on the site had not significantly moderated in the few days between the capitol riot and their ban.
Clearly Facebook's systems are able to associate correct ads based on the semantics of the content. Since this is true, why can't those systems moderate said content?
If I assume that they are operating in good faith, false positives versus false negatives. Showing the wrong advert loses you a few pennies each time, incorrectly blocking legitimate content has a power-law distribution of cost in political capital, depending on whose stuff you block.
I don’t trust FB enough to want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this would still be true if I did.
Parler’s chief policy officer contends that they were (1) actively hiring content moderators (to augment their jury system) and (2) working with Amazon to get AWS AI facilities so they could implement automated moderation. These programs were in progress right up until the site went down.
Incitement to terrorism isn't something where failing to moderate perfectly should be tolerated.
There is already a zero-tolerance approach to numerous extremist groups, regardless of whether they are active on American soil or not. Why should this be treated any differently?
Twitter can claim to make a good-faith effort to reduce misinformation, and threats of violence and incitements to terrorism are taken down quickly.
Parler's raison d'etre is that it makes no such efforts. From the AWS team's motion to dismiss:
"There is no legal basis in AWS’s customer agreements or otherwise to compel AWS to host content of this nature. AWS notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement, requested removal, and reviewed Parler’s plan to address the problem, only to determine that Parler was both unwilling and unable to do so. AWS suspended Parler’s account as a last resort to prevent further access to such content, including plans for violence to disrupt the impending Presidential transition."
Obviously this is a rhetorical question. But the answer is an elephant-in-the room kind of thing so I think it needs to be said:
The reason is that the overlap between "extremism" and our (now) minority political party is so large as to have muddled the distinction. Per one poll, 45% of Trump voters approve of the sacking of the capitol. It's really not possible to distinguish people who merely post angry political speech and the ones who stray into extremist rhetoric about revolution and violence. The same people are doing all of it.
So right now, "moderating communities with extreme content" simply looks a lot like "censoring republicans". But... I don't see how that gets better by outlawing the moderation. Republicans need to fix their rhetoric first.
Does it just cool down that much in the evening? What about the weekends?
This is fascinating to me. I've lived in the rural Midwest, NYC and Texas and always had A/C everywhere I lived – only question was central or window unit.
Most older (pre-1980s) buildings in SoCal lack A/C. It all depends on how far you are from the coast, but the evenings in the summer are mostly tolerable with a fan and some open windows.
Nobody except masochists really stay inside a stuffy apartment mid-day in the summer though. The reason you pay so much in living expenses is mostly for the good weather, so people spend their weekends out and about. As a kid in the summer, I remember walking around shops in the mall just to stay cool during the hottest hours of the day, and going to the beach often. My parents would do their grocery store shopping on Saturdays and Sundays mid-day if it was going to be hot. As I got older we'd go catch a matinee, or hit up a restaurant or a bar.
I imagine workers in the L.A. area will largely flood into cafes and co-work-esque places as businesses start opening back up and remote work becomes more dominant.
Coming from someone who is a complete an utter pansy when it comes to humidity, 100F with almost no humidity is a lot more bearable than 75F and 100% humidity
Can't speak in LA, but in Switzerland where almost no one has AC it definitely does not cool enough during the night. During the summer even if I keep the windows closed all day I cannot get the temperature below 26-27 degrees. The main difference though is that I was not trying to work in this conditions as my office had AC.
I had coworkers at Google who lived without AC. Absolutely mind blowing to me. Older buildings just don't have it, and it's only really bad for a cumulative couple weeks in CA.
Yeah, once sun goes down it's actually quite cold. Tho depends how close to sea you are as well. Weekends it might be that you can actually enjoy being outside.
They are mailing out the required hardware and doing remote onboarding for the time being. But hardware shipments are getting delayed leading to some new hires being paid to do nothing for a week or two.
It costs money, but for other readers, I've been using Buildkite[0] at two different companies across ~4 years now and it's great. It's _mostly_ self-hosted in that jobs run on your own hardware and Buildkite itself is only the job queue that your self-hosted agents pull work from. They also provide an elastic CI stack[1] so you can have auto-scaling workers running on AWS
You still own enough of it that if the service is down, you can just execute the scripts manually to build, test and deploy
I think this is a wise approach for large Rails applications, but this just looks like the Repository pattern to me, with ActiveRecord used as the db interaction layer
Yeah and that's for a 538 sqft apartment. I don't know the specifics of the San Francisco rental market, but you can easily beat $4k/mo for a studio in desirable parts of Manhattan, so I assume the same is true of SV
I guess it depends on how short the window and what other restrictions you're placing (e.g. Penn's diet?). But yeah, I can put down 2000 calories at McDonald's in about 10 minutes. And I wasn't even _that_ fat at my fattest (5'10" and 205)
They progress the language by adding syntactic sugar. Many Ruby programmers aren't waiting around for Ruby to suddenly become fast. If that happened it'd be great, but most code I write isn't performance critical, so it's okay if they just give me a feature where i can write `user&.name` instead of `user && user.name`
