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Seattle startup selling ladies entrepreneurs is puzzled by Fb’s ban of its adverts

Published

12 months ago

December 24, 2020

Susan Gates (left) and Kate Isler, co-founders of TheWMarketplace. (TheWMarketplace Photograph)

The TheWMarketplace, a Seattle-based platform selling ladies and various entrepreneurs, was excited to function Askanya Chocolates and its Haitian founder on social media. It was good for the pre-holiday push. That they had stunning photos of the chocolatiers and messages of inspiration and ladies’s empowerment.

The advert was seemingly inoffensive to anybody — besides, it seems, the algorithms at Fb and Instagram.

Since early December, TheWMarketplace has submitted the paid advert for posting on the social media websites, had it rejected, revised the advert and had it rejected once more.

“I don’t get it,” stated Kate Isler, CEO and co-founder of TheWMarketplace. “There may be nothing political about this. It simply speaks to that darned gender parity factor.”

TheWMarketplace tried to run adverts selling a Haitian chocolate vendor, however they had been blocked by Fb. After an preliminary advert was flagged, they tried once more and failed with this second model. (TheWMarketplace Picture)

Because the election polls closed on Nov. three, Fb stopped running “social subject, electoral and political adverts” in an effort to “cut back alternatives for confusion or abuse.” It described social points as “delicate subjects which can be closely debated, could affect the end result of an election or lead to/relate to present or proposed laws.”

However Isler and co-founder Susan Gates weren’t positive how the coverage may embody Black ladies promoting goodies. They obtained automated rejections with obscure language after submitting their adverts.

“Your advert could have been rejected if it mentions politicians or delicate social points that would affect public opinion, how individuals vote and should affect the end result of an election or pending laws,” learn the response from Fb.

After being contacted by GeekWire, Fb reviewed the adverts and found that they had been incorrectly flagged. They’re now accepted for posting.

TheWMarketplace obtained this discover from Fb when its adverts had been blocked.

TheWMarketplace shouldn’t be alone in being inexplicably muted on the platform. The New York Times reported final month on a variety of small companies and nonprofits that intersect with refugees, deprived youth and foreign-based retailers or organizations that had been having their adverts blocked. Bloomberg additionally reported on small companies swept up within the advert bans, impacting vacation gross sales.

It’s unclear when the brand new coverage proscribing some of these promotions might be lifted. Fb supplies an choice for requesting a second evaluate of a rejected advert in its Adverts Supervisor and Enterprise Supervisor instruments.

“We’ve needed to make tough choices to guard the integrity of the election, which is why we’ve got quickly paused adverts about social points, politics or elections. We all know this can be disappointing for some companies and apologize for any disruption. Companies that consider their adverts had been flagged incorrectly, can request a further evaluate,” a Fb spokesperson stated in an e mail to GeekWire.

This Fb advert that includes TheWMarketplace platform made the minimize. (TheWMarketplace Picture)

Fb defines social points by nation and provides examples of language that require additional steps to cross muster. In the U.S., together with the phrase “It’s time for us all to face up and demand equal rights for ladies” would require authorization of the supply and a disclaimer about who paid for the advert, whereas “We have now over 100 newly-published books about systemic racism and Black Historical past now on sale” can run as is.

Fb has been hammered this 12 months over the way it regulates its platform. Main advertisers upset about hate speech boycotted the site this summer time. Fb’s efforts to battle disinformation and misinformation had been criticized as ineffective, within the case of its online ad library, and too little too late in its post-election restrictions on political ads.

Fb CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in addition to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, appeared before U.S. lawmakers final month to defend his firm’s policing of data.

Fb can also be going through a pair of antitrust lawsuits filed earlier this month by the Federal Commerce Fee over alleged “unlawful monopolization” and anticompetitive conduct.

TheWMarketplace, which launched in September, had been working adverts that promoted its market and hadn’t run into any issues. In truth, the adverts carried out effectively, serving to quintuple site visitors.

The Askanya Sweets advert was their first effort to showcase one of many 215 distributors presently on the location.

“The entire function of our platform is to advertise our wonderful sellers,” stated Gates, chief advertising officer at TheWMarketplace. “It’s actually irritating.”

Complaints from corporations over Fb’s advert insurance policies date again a number of years. Seattle ladies’s well being startups Pulse and Genneve (which has since rebranded as Gennev) had been fed up with Fb final 12 months, for instance, after it prevented the businesses from shopping for commercials.

“Whereas this may occasionally appear trivial, I feel it speaks to a a lot massive subject each on race and gender,” Isler stated. She needs “to convey visibility to the truth that a male-owned enterprise is arbitrating our capability to advertise ladies, gender equality and black-women owned companies and categorizing them as ‘delicate social points.’”

News

On October 25, Apple will release iOS 15.1 and iPadOS 15.1. What we know so far

Published

2 months ago

October 17, 2021

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Apple released important updates for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 on Tuesday, to address several issues and a severe security hole affecting the two platforms. Now, according to reports, Apple is working on iOS 15.1 and iPadOS 15.1 builds for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPads.

Also, Twitter user named RobertCFO received confirmation from an Apple Product Security Team member about the final build’s release date. On October 25th, according to a leaked email that was then deleted from Twitter, iOS 15.1 and iPadOS 15.1 will be released, a week after Apple holds its conference.

This follows Apple’s general software upgrade policy, which is to release new updates a week after its events.

SharePlay, which allows you to remotely watch and listen to streaming material with your friends via FaceTime, ProRes video support, as well as Covid-19 vaccination document support in the Wallet app, are all expected features of iOS 15.1.

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PSA: Mining Chia on an SSD Will Completely Wreck It in No Time Flat

Published

7 months ago

May 26, 2021

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When SSDs first started transport in shopper merchandise, there have been comprehensible issues about their longevity. Time, steadily enhancing manufacturing methods, and a few low-level OS enhancements have all contributed to solid-state storage’s popularity for sturdiness. With experiences praising SSDs as provisionally extra dependable than arduous drives even beneath heavy utilization, it’s straightforward to see how individuals may not see the brand new Chia cryptocurrency as a serious trigger for concern.

It’s. Chia is first plotted after which farmed, and whereas farming Chia takes little or no in the way in which of processing sources, plotting it should completely hammer an SSD.

It’s been years since we talked about write amplification, but it surely’s a difficulty that impacts all NAND flash storage. NAND is written in 4KB pages and erased in 256KB blocks. If 8KB of information must be changed out of a 256KB block, the drive might want to learn the unique 256KB block, replace it, write the brand new block to a unique location on the drive, after which erase the earlier block.

Write amplification has been an issue for NAND for the reason that starting and a substantial amount of work has gone into addressing these issues, however Chia represents one thing of a worst-case situation. Right here’s an excerpt from a latest Chia blog post:

Producing plot recordsdata is a course of known as plotting, which requires short-term space for storing, compute and reminiscence to create, kind, and compress the information into the ultimate file. This course of takes an estimated 256.6GB of short-term house, very generally saved on SSDs to hurry up the method, and roughly 1.3TiB of writes in the course of the creation.

The ultimate plot created by the method described above is simply 101.3GB. There seems to be an order of magnitude of distinction between the full quantity of drive writes required to create a Chia plot and the storage capability mentioned plot requires when accomplished.

Motherboard producers have gotten in on the motion, with one Chia-compliant board providing 32 SATA backplanes.

Right here’s what this boils right down to: A number of shopper SSDs are actually unhealthy decisions for mining Chia. TLC drives with SLC / MLC caches will not be really useful as a result of they provide poor efficiency. Low-end and midrange shopper drives will not be really useful, as a result of they don’t provide excessive sufficient endurance. It’s important to watch out through which SKUs you buy and enterprise and enterprise drives are extra extremely really useful normally.

Don’t purchase a QLC drive to mine Chia.

Optane would appear to be a near-perfect match for Chia, given its a lot greater endurance, however I can’t discover any data on whether or not individuals have tried deploying it in massive sufficient numbers to have some concept of what efficiency and endurance seem like beneath the 24/7 load Chia plotters are placing on their hardware. Possibly any individual will put a rig collectively utilizing it, as a lot out of curiosity as the rest.

Past that, ExtremeTech recommends customers not try and plot Chia on any SSD they aren’t snug with dropping, and to not purchase an SSD for the aim until you don’t thoughts throwing it away if it dies far more rapidly than anticipated. Chia plotting is a worst-case situation for SSD longevity and it needs to be handled as such.

One notice of fine information: To this point, Chia mining has had a a lot stronger affect on high-capacity arduous drive costs than on SSDs and smaller drives. Hopefully, this continues to be the case.

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Microsoft adapts OpenAI’s GPT-Three pure language expertise to mechanically write code

Published

7 months ago

May 26, 2021

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduces the brand new GPT-Three integration into Energy Apps in a recorded keynote tackle for the corporate’s digital Construct convention.

Microsoft unveiled new tools for automatically generating computer code and formulation on Tuesday morning, in a brand new adaptation of the GPT-Three natural-language expertise extra generally identified for replicating human language.

The aptitude, to be supplied as a part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, is among the fruits of the corporate’s partnership with OpenAI, the San Francisco-based synthetic intelligence firm behind GPT-Three. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019.

“The code writes itself,” stated Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, saying the information in a recorded keynote tackle to open the corporate’s Build developer conference.

The characteristic is named Power Apps Ideas. It’s a part of a broader push by Microsoft and different expertise corporations to make software program growth extra accessible to non-developers, often called low-code or no-code growth.

Microsoft fine-tuned GPT-Three to “leverage the mannequin’s current strengths in pure language enter to offer Energy Apps makers the power to explain logic similar to they’d to a good friend or co-worker, and find yourself with the suitable system for his or her app,” says Ryan Cunningham of the Energy Apps staff in a publish describing the way it works.