34 posts tagged “meta”
2023
I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. (via) If accurate, this describes a nightmare scenario of automated decision making.
Reuven recently found he had a permanent ban from advertising on Facebook. They won’t tell him exactly why, and have marked this as a final decision that can never be reviewed.
His best theory (impossible for him to confirm) is that it’s because he tried advertising a course on Python and Pandas a few years ago which was blocked because a dumb algorithm thought he was trading exotic animals!
The worst part? An appeal is no longer possible because relevant data is only retained for 180 days and so all of the related evidence has now been deleted.
Various comments on Hacker News from people familiar with these systems confirm that this story likely holds up.
Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup. The first in a series by Erin Kissane explaining in detail exactly how things went so incredibly wrong with Facebook in Myanmar, contributing to a genocide ending hundreds of thousands of lives. This is an extremely tough read.
Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding (via) New LLMs from Meta built on top of Llama 2, in three shapes: a foundation Code Llama model, Code Llama Python that’s specialized for Python, and a Code Llama Instruct model fine-tuned for understanding natural language instructions.
Overture Maps Foundation Releases Its First World-Wide Open Map Dataset. The Overture Maps Foundation is a collaboration lead by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom dedicated to producing “reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data”.
Yesterday they put out their first release and it’s pretty astonishing: four different layers of geodata, covering Places of Interest (shops, restaurants, attractions etc), administrative boundaries, building outlines and transportation networks.
The data is available as Parquet. I just downloaded the 8GB places dataset and can confirm that it contains 59 million listings from around the world—I filtered to just places in my local town and a spot check showed that recently opened businesses (last 12 months) were present and the details all looked accurate.
The places data is licensed under “Community Data License Agreement – Permissive” which looks like the only restriction is that you have to include that license when you further share the data.