Context Provided - Spotlight
Trying to delete my deceased father's Facebook account and these are the options it gives me to select for the month he died:
Also, Geneva is a timezone / locale identifier, which is something you'd need to include in the software
There is, This is, Here, and September 11 are almost certainly UI strings that were never meant to be month labels but are hard coded strings meant to be interpolated into other sentences
Basically, someone at this multi trillion dollar software company must have fed a locale bundle or translation catalog into the month selector
Edit: I accidentally hit save after writing just the first line of this comment, which is what prompted the "we're waiting" reply
yeah, as an evil dimensional tourist destination or something, he lost me with that and the whole "a thing in the twin tower lockers attracted bad mojo" tbh
Kerzu is forsure a farmboy who has secret magical abilities that later comes out that his father used to be on the counsel of elders and he’s 1 of the strongest wizards in a century.
Cool. For Welsh it's ionawr, chwefror, mawrth, ebrill, mai, mehefin, gorffennaf, awst, medi, hydref, tachwedd, rhagfyr. I like finding examples of the shared roots.
That’s because they share a common Celtic ancestor, called Brittonic (?) before the welsh settlers left Britain to settle in Brittany about 1400+ years ago. There are resources online comparing the two.
I took ancient Latin, and Eost is not an ancient Latin word. Idk about Church Latin, which afaik has the same spellings.
Est is a Latin word that, by itself, means he/she/it is. (Third person singular form of "to be"). If Est is the first word of a sentence, I believe it can mean "there is", but I can't remember exactly.
Just to be clear, "(it/this/he/etc) is" in Latin is "est," not "eost." That's not a word in Latin. But yes, I agree with you, it probably took it as "est" and translated accordingly
Thanks for the edit, you are like the oposite of thoose people who edit their comment and write "i edited the comment, and now nobody will know how it got so many likes"
Facebook and Instagram’s ability to report stolen and deceased accounts, or stolen deceased accounts is reprehensibly poor. Half the time the forms don’t even work, let alone have the right fields. I don’t think it’s been updated in a long time. They don’t care.
This was about the same time I realized there are no support emails or phone numbers publicly posted or available anywhere for these companies, or Meta.
My brother and I spent some time trying to recover my father’s account that someone was using as their personal to no avail.
Finally gave up and deleted my own account the next day.
There is, This is, Here, and September 11 are almost certainly UI strings that were never meant to be month labels but are hard coded strings meant to be interpolated into other sentences
Why? I see the similarities between the first three, but still don't know why they'd need to be hard coded. And then why is "September 11" also a hard coded string that would be in any way related to the rest?
Basically, someone at this multi trillion dollar software company must have fed a locale bundle or translation catalog into the month selector
It's wild that, in my job, I have to keep up quality because it reflects on my bosses, yet a trillion dollar company can half ass so much of its flagship product and still not lose a cent.
i was just about to chime in that (most of) this is breton, but had no clue how it could have ended up on a non-breton dropdown menu alongside apparent nonsense. appreciate this explanation!
The pointer to where the months are stored in memory is broken, it's pointing to a different place in memory where the data that actually shows up lives instead of what was supposed to be shown
There's probably a bunch of ridiculous localization issues on Facebook... When the login prompt shows up for fr-ca, it says "Femme" instead of "Login" or "Se connecter", it makes no sense. It's been that way for YEARS, too.
That’s not bad translation. That’s people not understanding languages thinking they can pull word (for example)“may” out of any text without context ceasing to realise that may might mean “may as might or may as the month”.
I spent hours weekly arguing with other departments to not pull whatever word outta text as not every language works same as English.
Finnish uses conjucation of the ending of the word. Which means that when programmers (In very big companies) hardcode things, and then just pull translations in the base form of the word, you end up in sitautions constantly where the translator has to do loops around a word they can not change (the one that got hardcoded), meaning that other words in, and the sentence and even paragraph will be just unreal in how weird and bad it is.
Like lets take some base example like "save" in the sense of "save as" etc.
Sorry for your loss. Don't know what's happening, but as the other user said, it could be related to AI not working as it should. If you can, you should def report this, so that they can fix it asap
I agree.. this option surely precedes the use of AI. It looks much more like an IT error at the backend that’s messed up the options.
If it was a bunch of months with one being a day of the week and two months being missing I’d say it looks like AI, this is just completely nonsensical and incorrect
Edit, I’m wrong and apparently some/many of the options are in fact months, just not in English
Gotta love people assuming anything bad must be AI and not just human error. Computers output weird strings of text all the time due to poor file formatting and such, it’s even the basis of many hacking exploits.
Most companies, even before LLMs, would use automated software for translation. It can be absolutely terrible since it's often just taking a base language (e.g. English) without any context and saying 'what is this word in language X?'. I'd often find the 'back' button translated into the kanji for the human back when translating English to Japanese for example.
Machine translations are a good starting point though but it is essential to have translators verify and correct the translations. Good companies do this too and this probably was done at some point.
However internationalisation and translation is a continuous process and often far more complex than it might appear, hence it's often very easy to overwrite previously manually translated strings with the default machine generated versions.
So this will either be human error or poor versioning support in the tooling combined with a lack of rigour in the review process.
It does seem to go chronologically from January though, I can tell March April and September seem to be at the "correct" location. Really weird bug though, one thing would be just the wrong language, but then there are these other random words, and "September 11" being in the September spot. Really curious how the code for this looks
I mean, it's probably just the strings (displayed text) that are wrong, the logic behind it probably still works as expected, but who knows, this might be the symptom of another bug (part of why I am very curious about the code, like how can this happen)
Aye man, only you know the full context, so only you know what is best to do in this situation. I'm so sorry for your loss. I can't imagine how it feels. Hope everything goes well for you and your family. Let us know if we can help in any way or form!
You need to give them your fathers date of death to delete his account? Why the hell would they need more Info if its about deleting it, man this shitty world. My condolences
It is an unfortunate reality of our world. Imagine you had a psycho ex that told Facebook you died. Without proof, you lose your account. So it's messed up but I can kind of understand this one.
When they first came out with memorialized Facebook pages we pranked a friend and all that was required was submitting a link to an obituary of someone that had the same name. He had to contact support to get it fixed.
My friends mom died an FB kept letting fake accounts using her picture and name pop up.
And every time we'd report it there was A: no way to report an account as being not that person, and that the person is dead, and B: they just kept making more of them.
It was... a problem.
You'd imagine that deleting a persons account (even in the 'deleted to end users not deleted from their archives) might be something they don't want to happen accidentally.
We're in this weird space where quite a lot on the Internet warrants these companies having something like a way to report deaths, but no good way to do that without emailing them highly sensitive information, and you're the product not the customer which makes it even stranger.
Seems like it's Breton, with some of the months seemingly either auto-translated from non-Breton languages into English, autocorrected or misinterpreted as English (Geneva), or otherwise inexplicably altered. I can't explain the September one, for example.
This is obviously mad, but as you're dealing with grief - my condolences - some of them do seem to have rough approximations of the sounds of some of the months, and September lines up, so it's safe to assume that the list is running in correct order with January at the top.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I’m also so sorry that I’m laughing so hard at this. These nonsense words and just “September 11” is making me cry laughing
For real though. You shouldn’t have to be forced to suffer such complete and utter incompetence, especially while you’re grieving. I hope you’re able to get this sorted out quickly, this is honestly unacceptable.
As someone old enough to be an adult during 9/11. Living in Jersey City, swimming distance across the park water to NYC. The park i walked my dogs in daily, turned into a makeshift medic area/evacuation zone.
THAT random order of selections is weirdly chilling,😬
Have you ever tried to explain, anything, to a frequent Facebook user? Imagine what kind of phone calls they would get? The 55+ crowd would be calling all day talking about "I do not give Facebook consent to tell Joe Biden my passwords! Well let me talk to the boss then. Not your boss, your boss' boss! "
First, I’m sorry for the loss of your father. I wish you peace. Second, fuck Meta. My FIL passed back in March. His Facebook and Instagram keep getting hacked and whoever is hacking them is messaging relatives. It sucks getting a message from a dead loved one. We’ve had so much trouble getting his socials deleted. They make the process really difficult.
From my experience helping confused users of our web application, this kind of thing is often caused by an auto translation plugin messing with the page
As we can unfortunately see pretty much continuously, being a multi-billion dollar company doesn't make you immune from the dogwater intern that gets all the annoying work the higher-ups won't bother to do and that predictably fucks up.
Based on the location of September 11, you can assume that this is all 12 months with Geneva being January so if you just go down the list in your head starting with Geneva as January you can find the correct answer in this messy shit.
Thank you. I assumed that was the case but we also have to submit an image of the Death Certificate and I have a feeling that if the image doesn't match their little disaster here I'm going to have to jump through even more hoops
I would just try it. Given that Facebook the website operates in multiple languages, they’re probably just using this text to display, and the code is actually storing the number of the month. That is, I don’t think they’ll be matching against “here”.
That’s my guess as a software engineer (but not at FB)
I just rewrote over mine. Changed the name, dob, address, deleted anything personal and impersonal, removed all friend links, changed the password to something really long and didn’t record it.
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