Category: Facebook

We went to Long Beach Comic Con last weekend…

We went to Long Beach Comic Con last weekend. Had a good time. Katie dressed up as Professor Trelawney, we found some cool art and hit some panels, and J. spent as much time as he could playing laser tag and looking at remote-controlled Astromech droids.

10 Years of Long Beach Comic Con! (2018) – K²R

Back in 2009, I attended the first-ever Long Beach Comic-Con, an event that filled the void left when Wizard World cancelled WWLA at the last minute. I had a good time, and it had a lot of support from the industry, but I wondered how long it would last. Ten years on, LBCC is still …

I haven’t been active here on Facebook for a while.

I haven’t been active here on Facebook for a while. I’m less comfortable with the major social media platforms these days, and Facebook starts sending “hey, why don’t you like me anymore?” emails and notices on a daily basis, which I find annoyingly makes me want to *not* come back.

But this is where most of the people I know are, so after a few weeks I finally get back and spend too long trying to catch up on 87 notifications that aren’t actually the kind of thing that would be a notification on any other platform, they’re things FB thinks I want to see, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong, but 90% of the time it’s about Facebook and whether they can get me to look, not about “Hey your friend wants to get in touch with you about this thing.”

Anyway, I’ve been most active on Mastodon lately. It’s similar to Twitter, but instead of one centralized corporation it’s a lot of different servers run by different people and groups, so it can actually be moderated on a human scale, but the servers are able to talk to each other like email servers do. You can find my main account at

KelsonV (@KelsonV@wandering.shop)

On Facebook

When algorithms surprise us

Exploiting floating point errors for free energy is a good one. And lots of cases where the problem wasn’t defined precisely enough, and the simulation solved it in a completely different way than was expected.

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that we’re not living in a computer simulation is that if we were, some microbe would have learned to exploit its flaws.”

When algorithms surprise us

Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has t…

Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked – The Firefox Frontier

This is pretty cool: Firefox has a new extension that isolates your Facebook session from the rest of your browsing. That way Facebook isn’t able to track you as you visit every website that happens to have a Like button or embedded FB comments.

Facebook still knows what you do *on* FB, but this cuts down on their ability to track you elsewhere.

Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked – The Firefox Frontier

The Facebook container extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.

A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.

A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.

Did a close pass by an alien star system millennia ago rain down comets on the solar system?

I shared a link to an article on Medium about social networks. It didn’t show up at all on FB mobile…

Ok, this is messed up. I shared a link to an article on Medium about social networks. It didn’t show up at all on FB mobile, even when I looked directly at my profile. I thought maybe it’s hiding posts from Buffer. So I re-posted it, directly in the Facebook desktop site.

It’s still not here.

It shows on the desktop site, but not the mobile site. I’d bet it doesn’t show up in the app.

And we know a lot of social networking is done on mobile these days.

On Facebook

Update in comments:

Thanks for checking – so it looks like it’s just the mobile website, not the mobile app. Which is better than it could be…but still bizarre (and suspicious).

Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app

Facebook is plugging a VPN app they own. It lets you hide your non-FB activity from your ISP and let Facebook collect that data instead.

Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app

Onavo Protect, the VPN client from the data-security app maker acquired by Facebook back in 2013, has now popped up in the Facebook iOS app itself, under the..

Interesting story about the history of the Los Angeles River (and paving it).

Interesting story about the history of the Los Angeles River (and paving it).

Paving the Los Angeles River wasn’t an egalitarian idea. The plan for revitalizing it should be

As we remake the Los Angeles River once again, we ought to allow the river to re-make us, too — into a more equitable city.

On Facebook