The Metaverse is coming. Or, another attempt at Bread and Circuses for the Masses.

news.slashdot.org

FIFA Hopes World Cup Fans Want To Buy Metaverse Merch - Slashdot

In the real world, the construction of the World Cup infrastructure in Qatar has been marred by extreme temperatures and migrant worker deaths. In the metaverse, however, a digital replica of Lusail Stadium in Doha has none of that baggage -- and the virtual property can be raffled off as a...
news.slashdot.org
 
Mr. Zuckerberg has said that the Metaverse is a 10 year project. That sort of thing does not sit well on Wall Street. He should take a page from the computer game industry. Developers have to meet certain milestones/deadlines to show investors progress is being made. With the Metaverse, it appears investors lost confidence since there was little to show for the amount of money put in.
 
It is bad enough that adults pay real money to live in a virtual world now the kids are doing
the same thing. I guess real life people skills are on the way out.
 
I hope this doesn't happen but based on recent history: "Massive hack affects thousands of Robux accounts. Parents pull their kids out of payment system."
 
techxplore.com

Real AI will need biology: Computers powered by human brain cells

The time has come to create a new kind of computer, say researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, who recently led development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learnt to play Pong.
techxplore.com techxplore.com
 
Meta wants to ban a book about its business practices, it has won an emergency ruling to stop the author from promoting it:
www.bbc.com

Meta stops former Facebook director from promoting critical memoir

Social media company wins US emergency ruling preventing ex-director from publicising her book.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
Meta has won an emergency ruling in the US to temporarily stop a former director of Facebook from promoting or further distributing copies of her memoir.
The book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be the company's global public policy director, includes a series of critical claims about what she witnessed during her seven years working at Facebook.
Facebook's parent company, Meta, says the ruling - which orders her to stop promotions "to the extent within her control" - affirms that "the false and defamatory book should never have been published".
The UK publisher Macmillan says it is "committed to upholding freedom of speech" and Ms Wynn-Williams' "right to tell her story".
[...]
The book is former New Zealand diplomat Ms Wynn-Williams' account of joining Facebook in 2011 and watching it grow from a "front row seat".

Her allegations include that executives had worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government on potential ways of allowing Beijing to censor and control content in exchange for access to the lucrative market.

Meta disputes the allegations contained in the book. Regarding China, it says it is "no secret we were once interested" in operating services there. "We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored."

Ms Wynn-Williams has also filed a whistleblower complaint with the US markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), alleging Meta misled investors - which Meta also denies. The BBC has reviewed the complaint.
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Apparently, the ruling came out in favour of Meta because Wynn-Williams had signed a non-disclosure agreement, not because the book contained falsehoods.
Sales of the book are strong.
www.wired.com

Meta Tries to Bury a Tell-All Book

Mark Zuckerberg might be in his post-fact-checking-era. But that hasn’t stopped Meta from going after the author of Careless People.
www.wired.com www.wired.com
It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.

My first thought was Wow, I’ve got to read this book! And in fact I did, devouring it in a night as soon as it was published. With the benefit of attention from Meta’s complaints, I suspect Careless People might become a must-read. Meta—the company that promotes itself as an avatar of free speech—has successfully convinced an arbitrator to silence author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who was a director in charge of connecting Meta’s executives with global leaders. The ruling, relying on an NDA signed after Wynn-Williams was fired, demands she stop promoting the book, do everything in her power to stop its publication, and retract all comments “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental” about Meta. That’s pretty much the whole book. Wynn-Williams, who has registered as a whistleblower with the SEC, did not attend the hearing and doesn’t seem inclined to respect it. As I write this, Careless People is now the third-best-selling book on Amazon.
[...]
The whole effort is totally unnecessary. This is a company that has had every nasty charge thrown against it for almost a decade and just keeps getting bigger and more profitable. Its CEO now trolls critics by wearing triumphalist clothing and going on Joe Rogan to celebrate masculinity. The campaign against Careless People seems defensive and out of step. One of Meta’s big complaints is that Wynn-Williams did not undergo a prepublication rundown of the text with the company. Please pause for a moment to savor the irony. Meta, the company that recently announced an end to fact-checking in posts seen by potentially millions of people, is griping that an author didn’t fact-check with them?
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No ban on selling the book - yet.
 
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