deathmtn

[Facebook] enters markets with wide-eyed innocence and a mission to “build [and monetise] communities”, but ends up tripping over democracies and landing in a pile of ethnic cleansing. Oopsie!

In mid-2014, after false rumours online about a Muslim man raping a Buddhist woman triggered deadly riots in the city of Mandalay, the Myanmar government requested a crisis meeting with Facebook. Facebook said that government representatives should send an email when they saw examples of dangerous false news and the company would review them.

It took until April this year – four years later – for Mark Zuckerberg to tell Congress that Facebook would step up its efforts to block hate messages in Myanmar, saying “we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically”.

...

“Their AI can’t detect real hate speech and rumours. Mostly it detects just the words like ‘Ma Ba Tha’ [a Buddhist monk-led nationalist group] and ‘Buddha religious’ or something like that,” said Myat Thu from Burma Monitor, a not-for-profit. “It’s not the tracing root cause. Only Burmese content reviewers can know the local context.”

Their reluctance to hire human workers here is in sharp contrast to the case of Facebook M, in which they wanted everyone to believe amazing AI was answering people's questions, but it was actually a bunch of poorly paid human workers.

I'm going to say that this song is quasi-dungeon synth, even though I had no idea the genre existed when I wrote it: Mouth of the Coldest Seas, retroactively dungeon synth!

It was a long day. But on the way home, I saw:

- A dog in a backpack!
- Two cats who rarely appear, much less together that Katt named Millionaire Cat and Millionaire Cat Platinum. They were both in the window today!

I'm not the biggest fan of try/catch in JS, but I'm willing to accept the control flow changes for certain situations. I thought it might be worth it for looping over async stuff with async/await.

e.g.


function doThings(thingFns, done) {
try {
thingFns.forEach(doThing);
} catch (error) {
done(error);
}
}

async function doThing(thingFn) {
await util.promisify(thingFn)();
}

That catch won't actually catch errors from with doThing, though. You have to catch them from within doThing. However, you cannot throw the error from within doThing and have it caught by doThings, either. (Perhaps you could if you were running the loop with a traditional for?)

But either way, whatever. That's just too much fiddliness. If I just call each callback via d3-queue (about 120 lines of very readable code!), it's way easier to debug.

10-4-4-4. Last one was a struggle, even with a long break between the second and third sets to try to record a blue jay. Whoop. (I had never heard on before. They're loud!)

You guys, I just checked out Acid Witch for the first time, and it's so satisfying! Unlike the stuff I've been into lately, the riffs are kind of rich, creamy, and familiar, instead of shaking you out of your shit like Frontierer or something. It's heavy but pleasant, like a lot of doom.

Also, they're really funny, as you can tell from the album title. I L'd OL during the "Shut up! shut the fuck up!" part in I Hate Halloween.

A statue of Horus from 664-525 BCE.

Last night, I broke my rule about programming at night. I figured I'd just do this one thing that'd made it easy for me to get RSS for all of my bots. But then, I was like, oh, if I do this, then they could all easily post to the web, RSS, Twitter, *and* Mastodon.

Before I knew it, I was trying to escape the chokehold of my ancient rival, multipart-form encoding and terse 500 errors. By the time I got things working, it was 1 AM. I did not chill with Katt though we needed to do that, nor did I get to sleep at a reasonable time after feeling kinda hazy all day.

I had been so good about sleep hygiene until then and thought I could just do this one small thing.

Turning back time to Wednesday, I had snoozed my alert to take the soiled litter out of the Litter Robot. And I had not gotten back to it.

This morning, I had found out that one or both of the cats had pissed on the floor outside of the Litter Robot. And rightfully so. The tray, which sits under the rotating orb that holds the litter into which the cats go, was so full the orb could not rotate. The orb was filled with soiled litter. (This is not the first time this has happened to us.)

But! Miraculously, I feel OK today despite only six hours of sleep! And I was able to clean up the floor and bottom of the Litter Robot without interruption. (I don't know why it's stressful to get interrupted by a kid while cleaning up as mess. Perhaps it is mess-shame.)

Summary: I fucked up, but also lucked up! Not going to push it.