Tumblr’s adult-content ban takes effect Monday — announced two weeks ago (proximate cause: a child-safety app-store removal; structural cause: Verizon-owned Tumblr’s ads business needing brand safety), and executed via an ML content classifier whose false positives have become a genre unto themselves: flagged sand dunes, flagged classical sculpture, flagged Tumblr’s OWN announcement post. Two lessons for the file. One: content moderation at scale is classifier deployment at scale, and shipping a high-stakes model with THAT precision profile is the ML equivalent of the TSB cutover (#130) — the confusion matrix IS the product. Two, the bigger one: communities are load-bearing (#061’s Reddit lesson) and this is its corollary — a platform purging its core community’s content is a MIGRATION EVENT for that community, and the diaspora (Twitter, bespoke sites, Discord) is already routing around the damage. Platforms are temporary; archives are personal (#087). Export your things.
Also this fortnight, two flights of note: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo reached space (by the 50-mile definition) Thursday — the first crewed US spaceflight from US soil since the Shuttle retired, and a genuine redemption arc four years after their fatal 2014 crash. And Google+ announced it’s dying FASTER — a second API leak (52M this time) moved the shutdown up four months. Even the graveyard has SLAs.
Smash Bros. Ultimate is out and the office bracket is seeded; I main King K. Rool out of respect for legacy systems that finally got their port.
TIL: precision-recall trade-offs have POLITICS — Tumblr chose recall (catch everything, flag the sand dunes) because the cost function was written by lawyers, not users. Every threshold is a values statement wearing a decimal point.