downer70

It used to be possible. I had college professors that did it for decades from the 60's until the mid-90's, when computers started killing off previously imaginable ways of life.

Acting, or according to your context merely "betting" against an adversary is fine, but this assumes the capacity to act against an adversary, and that the actions taken will be big enough to have an effect.

You can't realistically take actions against a belligerent force that has an overwhelming capacity to watch your every action and imprison or execute you. You can't take actions against forces that exist outside a legal framework and the juridictions you are subject to.

Placing bets is not taking direct action. It means sitting on the sidelines, and hoping that legal mechanisms take their natural course in a civilized society.

One could also refrigerate contained gases.

Not all people carry the same degree of influence over a market.

Not all people act according to or within the rules of a market.

Not all human behavior can be scoped to a form of market activity.

What would the bald destruction of a market, or set of markets, represent to the context of such narrow minded economics?

The point being that it assuredly is trivial, but also potentially a gaping hole left open across a wide array of software.

In these sorts of situations, as with the Y2K bug, the problem is more often the product of social circumstances than technical circumstances.

Nonetheless, this doesn't prevent technical adversaries from preying upon the flaw, and taking advantage of social patterns of behavior, such as the casual tendency to presume barcodes are intrinsically safe.

Or maybe human behavior and personality consistently resists the enforcment of technical rules, and watches for, and then willfully denies attempts to restrain behavior it (subsets of the collective population) instinctively desires to engage in.

Maybe some of us know that we're being watched, and simply defy any stupid egghead's function curves, for the sheer amusement of seeing disappointed faces.

Maybe there are sadistic people roaming free, and they feed on the souls of the damned.

How would that fit in with modern quantitative economics?

Or more likely, the flowery language is just so much feel-good journalism, paired with the whimsy of a film editing audio technician enthralled by his own doings.

Bah! Cargo cult is a much more nuanced concept. That primitive peoples would blindly imitate in pantomime, the behaviors of an industrialized society, disembodied from the original roots of said behaviors is a deeply shocking outcome. There are so many perverse implications to that, that one almost hates to admit it happened, and still continues to this day.

This on the other hand is like profiling someone's personality based on their choice of ringtone, t-shirts or bumper stickers. It's not very interesting to learn that such choices map well with demographics.

Fair enough, maybe the development team for this particular component is much larger than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm being naive about the head count at work behind the scenes on a project like this.

It's not really good news either way though. In my mind this would have been a smaller team, tasked with pulling the data over and then working on it to construct recognition scores, and passing a message back to prompt the user. This would have been a smallish team of 20 or 30, to do it quick and dirty.

For on-device processing, the project grows much more complicated, not just to develop, but also to test and prove end-to-end. So time and human resources are both more costly. And so too, come trade-offs. Network bandwidth, versus device battery/procesor/memory resources.

But all of this to push the envelope and solicit the user to expose more data to a for-profit service. Is it really something more convenient? Another nagging reminder, to do something the user doesn't need much prompting for?

The more weight thrown behind these sorts of projects the more curious the motives become.

It honestly doesn't matter which company is pioneering these technologies. I simply no longer look forward to the future that awaits.

    "Scores": {
      "Anger": 0.0,
      "Contempt": 0.0,
      "Disgust": 0.1,
      "Fear": 0.1,
      "Happiness": 0.0,
      "Neutral": 0.9,
      "Sadness": 0.9,
      "Surprise": 0.0
    }

Pffft! Yeah right!

Like you've ever met a developer who would risk the extreme likelihood of platform incompatibilities across a disparate menagerie of hardware platforms and mobile devices, instead of simply base64ing some images and JSONing them into a restful webservice, where they gain explicit control of the computation environment, and get to conveniently crawl the entire dataset in a high availabilty data center.

As if you've ever met anyone who would trade that, in favor of re-developing the same features 20 times for 20 different compiles, and risk the inability to deploy those builds to unreliable nodes, across throttled mobile contract pay-as-you-go bandwidth, to achieve a goal that doesn't align with the company's bottom line. As if you've ever seen any company anywhere do that... for privacy.