Falling Down

AKA Data Miners Go on Strike

Amazon targets 10,000 fake review Facebook groups

Jul 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62214752

 

Amazon is taking legal action against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups, the BBC has learned.

It says the groups are generating fake reviews on Amazon marketplaces in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

The tech sector has finally started to cannibalize itself. 

First ever sales fall for Facebook owner Meta

Jul 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62322862

"When you look at the ad space right now...growth is deteriorating at a very fast pace, much faster than most people had anticipated," Mr Zino said.

Meta's reliance on small and medium-sized businesses - which are "spooked" about the economy - makes it particularly vulnerable to any market slowdown, said Nikhil Lai senior analyst for performance marketing at Forrester Research.

The company's fine-tuned model for targeting adverts was also disrupted last year when Apple overhauled its privacy settings.

Let's just accept it now, in a pretty unexpected turn of events, the Roe decision has pushed the American populace off the privacy cliff. 

Let's also recall the 2014 paper that followed the disease model on a social network and predicted Facebook would run out of users by 2018 (which then happened, although the balance was being replaced by bots at the same time so nobody cared to acknowledge it).

-Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics, John Cannarell, Joshua A. Spechler. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. arxiv:1401.4208v1 [cs.SI] 17 Jan 2014. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

The Beginnings of the Mass Transference Device

AKA Metabots, Mindborgs, and Organic Computing

source

This now makes three-people babies the second scariest thing I've ever heard.

Wiring Monkey Brains Together Has a Point, Say Scientists
WIRED, July 2015

"Today, researchers at Duke University announced they have done nearly that, wiring animal brains together so they could collaborate on simple tasks. Network monkeys displayed motor skills, and networked rats performed computations.

"That’s right. They made a botnet out of brains."

"To build the monkey network, Nicolelis’ team first implanted electrodes in rhesus macaque brains, positioned to pick up signals from a few hundred neurons. Then they connected two or three of the macaques to a computer with a display showing a CG monkey arm. The monkeys were supposed to control the arm, directing it toward a target like a boat crew rows forward. When the monkeys got the arm to hit the target, the researchers rewarded them with juice. (“Each monkey had different juice preference,” says Nicolelis. “We had to do a preference test beforehand.”) To be clear, the monkeys don’t think “move my arm” and the arm moves—they learn what kind of thinking makes the arm move and keep doing that—because monkeys love juice.

"The rat study was even weirder. For this one, the neuroscientists directly wired four rats’ brains together—using the implants to both collect and transmit information about neural activity—so one rat that responded to touch, for example, could pass on their knowledge of that stimulus to another rat. Then the researchers set the rats to a bunch of different abstract tasks—guessing whether it might rain from temperature and air pressure data, for example, or telling the difference between different kinds of touch-stimuli. The brain collectives always did at least as well on those tests as an individual rat would have, and sometimes even better. And in a successful effort to squidge people out, the researchers called these rat-borg collectives “organic computers” or, even worse, “brainets.”"

Animal brains connected up to make mind-melded computer
New Scientist, July 2015

Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains
Nature

Computing Arm Movements with a Monkey Brainet
Nature