End Times
Man Who Created The Facebook ‘Like’ Button Now Warns Your Mind Can Be ‘Hijacked’ Through Social Media
Justin Rosenstein was one of a small group of Facebook employees who decided to create the least resistance, a very addictive single click ‘like’ button.
Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough.
“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” Revelation 13:15 (KJV)
EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s very interesting to understand that the very people who created the highly-addictive ‘like’ system have now installed extensions on their devices to block those same features from being active. What does that tell you about how enslaving social media can be? Just imagine how it will be in a few years when AI is fully rolled out, and the devices are doing our thinking for us. The “brave new world’ is a very scary place to be, and I honestly don’t think any of us really know what we’re playing with.
In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies. Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.
He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.
A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
In 2007, Rosenstein was one of a small group of Facebook employees who decided to create a path of least resistance – a single click – to “send little bits of positivity” across the platform. Facebook’s “like” feature was, Rosenstein says, “wildly” successful: engagement soared as people enjoyed the short-term boost they got from giving or receiving social affirmation, while Facebook harvested valuable data about the preferences of users that could be sold to advertisers. The idea was soon copied by Twitter, with its heart-shaped “likes” (previously star-shaped “favourites”), Instagram, and countless other apps and websites.
It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.
“One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
It is revealing that many of these younger technologists are weaning themselves off their own products, sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads and even laptops are banned. They appear to be abiding by a Biggie Smalls lyric from their own youth about the perils of dealing crack cocaine: never get high on your own supply.
One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.
Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.
“The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”.
He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.
Less than 5 minutes after posting this story on social media, Facebook banned me for 6 days in retaliation for daring to expose them.
Attendees of the 2017 Habit Summit might have been surprised when Eyal walked on stage to announce that this year’s keynote speech was about “something a little different”. He wanted to address the growing concern that technological manipulation was somehow harmful or immoral. He told his audience that they should be careful not to abuse persuasive design, and wary of crossing a line into coercion.
But he was defensive of the techniques he teaches, and dismissive of those who compare tech addiction to drugs. “We’re not freebasing Facebook and injecting Instagram here,” he said. He flashed up a slide of a shelf filled with sugary baked goods. “Just as we shouldn’t blame the baker for making such delicious treats, we can’t blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them,” he said. “Of course that’s what tech companies will do. And frankly: do we want it any other way?”
Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”.
Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.”
But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?
Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.” source
End Times
Get Ready For ‘No Scan’ Smart Checkout Technology Powered By AI That Greatly Accelerates Our Immersion Into The Mark Of The Beast System
Customers in 7,000 Circle K and Couche-Tard stores will soon experience near-instantaneous smart checkout via AI computer vision technology.
I walked into my local Circle K gas station earlier today to buy a couple of bottles of water and a pack of peppermint Altoids, and when I got up to the counter to make my purchase, I was surprised to find that there was no one behind the counter. Nobody. But what I did see was an enormous bright red display compelling me to place my items into the Smart Checkout system, which I hesitantly did. What happened next? All three items were immediately totaled and rung up, with a screen directing me where to place the microchip in my debit card, and in the blink of an eye I was done. What on earth just happened? Oh, you know, and it’s happening so much faster than you think it is.
“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:17 (KJB)
For those of us that were raised at the ocean and have experienced the power of the undertow in rough waters, we know exactly what’s happening right now. The Mark of the Beast System, which just celebrated it’s 30th birthday on April 30th, you call it the internet, is going through a major paradigm shift as the technology advances, and it’s pulling us deeper into it. The next time you go shopping anywhere, a WalMart, a grocery store, a Circle K or whatever the gas station convenience store is called where you live, look up over the glass doors of the refrigerated section and see the scanning and tracking devices. If you don’t see it yet, you will in the coming months. The Smart Checkout that I used today worked beautifully as advertised, all I had to do was set my items down and the AI did everything, the whole thing happened in under 5 seconds. Tick, tock, Christian…it’s almost flying time on Flight #777.
No Scan Smart Checkout Coming to 7,000-plus Circle K and Couche-Tard Stores
FROM RETAIL INFO SYSTEMS: Convenience retailer Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. said it will deploy more than 10,000 Mashgin Touchless Checkout Systems branded as “Smart Checkout,” to over 7,000 of its Circle K and Couche-Tard stores during the next three years. The AI-powered self-checkout system will improve customer checkout times as much as 400%, driving customer experience forward while allowing store staff to focus their time on helping customers.
The agreement with Mashgin launches the global deployment of the pioneering system, and represents one of the largest scale expansions of computer vision-powered checkout technology to date, the company said. It builds upon the successful deployment of Mashgin across nearly 500 Circle K locations in the U.S. and Sweden since 2020, as well as at Couche-Tard’s retail innovation lab store on the campus of McGill University in Montreal.
Referred to as ‘Smart Checkout’ in Circle K and Couche-Tard stores, the compact countertop device fits into the existing store layout. It uses computer vision to recognize items presented from virtually any angle and instantly ring them up in a single transaction. Customers place their items on the checkout system, which uses cameras to ring up everything in under a second. Shoppers don’t need to download an app or find and scan barcodes; they simply put items down, pay as they normally would, and are on their way in as little as 10 seconds – eight times faster than traditional self-checkout.
“We’re committed to investing in and scaling technology that sets a new standard for convenience with our customers and advances our mission to make our customers’ lives a little easier every day,” said Magnus Tägtström, vice president, global innovation at Couche-Tard. “The Smart Checkout system powered by Mashgin’s game-changing technology shortens lines, improves the customer experience and frees up our teams to focus on helping our customers. We look forward to introducing this new platform to stores across our network.” READ MORE
Mashgin No Scan Touchless Smart Checkout Powered By AI
Is this a paid actor? Of course. Did we use clever cuts to speed up the checkout experience? Absolutely not. Watch to see how customers can check out in seconds at Circle K locations across the globe. Mashgin self-checkout kiosks are becoming common at Circle K locations across the country. And for good reason – Mashgin provides a fast, convenient, and user-friendly self-checkout experience. With Mashgin, customers can quickly and easily scan their items and complete their purchases without having to wait in line. This not only saves time but also helps to create a more efficient shopping experience.
Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
Please continue to pray for us, and for wisdom for me especially, as we continue taking steps to print the NTEB branded King James Bible for our free Bible and Bibles Behind Bars program. It is exciting and intimidating at the same time. If the Lord has prospered your financially, we ask you to donate to help us continue to send out free Bibles at this level, and even higher than we are at the moment. It takes a lot of prayer, and a lot of resources to do all this. Praise the Lord we are doing it, all of us together, labouring in the Lord’s harvest field. TO THE FIGHT!!!
When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.
But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)
“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB
End Times
Apple Slated To Release Stunning New Virtual Reality Headset The ‘Reality Pro’ At WWDC23 In June That Some Say Might ‘Replace The iPhone’
The next major product from Apple, the Reality Pro VR headset, is mere weeks away from launching – and an early review suggests it will live up to the hype.
In early 1994, there was a buzz about something that was going to ‘change everything’, called the ‘information superhighway’, and when it was released the internet did just that. It ushered in the personal computer age, and the world was never again the same. Here in 2023, there is the same buzz about Apple and AI and it is going to get this old sin-cursed world in line with Bible prophecy.
“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Daniel 12:4 (KJB)
I can well remember the excitement of being able to send real-time messages to people through my AOL Instant Messenger, and the thrill of being connected to the entire world. Soon, people will be interacting with holograms so realistic it will be like you are in the room with the people you’re talking to. The machines are waking up, our computers are becoming self aware, and you are stepping out of the headlines and into the pages of Bible prophecy.
Early review of upcoming Apple VR product suggests it will live up to the hype
FROM THE DAILY MAIL UK: Palmer Luckey, the 30-year-old American entrepreneur and founder of the Oculus VR platform, appears to have tried the device. Luckey, who sold his firm Oculus to Meta for $3 billion (£2.4 billion) in 2014 at the age of 21, simply said in a tweet on Sunday: ‘The Apple headset is so good.’
Official details about Apple’s device are scarce, but it’s believed it will display notifications, messages, directions and more in front of the wearer’s eyes. It’s not known how or where he got to try the device, although Luckey is a big name in the VR industry. Luckey, who began Oculus when he was just 15, is a video game enthusiast and owner of a defence company called Anduril Industries, founded in 2017. More recently, he devised a headset called NerveGear that instantly ‘destroys the brain’ of the user when they die in a virtual game.
Thankfully, Apple’s new headset – which is expected to be called ‘Reality Pro’ and released later this year – will not be quite as deadly.
Publicly, Apple has made no acknowledgement of the upcoming device, but its existence is an open secret within the tech industry. A US leaker called Mark Gurman, who has been drip-feeding information about it in his weekly newsletter for months, says it could ‘replace the iPhone’.
Reality Pro will be launched on Monday June 5, the first day of Apple’s five-day Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Gurman claims.
Apple confirmed the dates for WWDC in March but didn’t make any official mention of the headset in the announcement. However, Apple’s promo image for WWDC this year features curving coloured lines that look similar to the curved shape of a headset. READ MORE
Apple Reality Pro VR Headset Release Date and Price
Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
Please continue to pray for us, and for wisdom for me especially, as we continue taking steps to print the NTEB branded King James Bible for our free Bible and Bibles Behind Bars program. It is exciting and intimidating at the same time. If the Lord has prospered your financially, we ask you to donate to help us continue to send out free Bibles at this level, and even higher than we are at the moment. It takes a lot of prayer, and a lot of resources to do all this. Praise the Lord we are doing it, all of us together, labouring in the Lord’s harvest field. TO THE FIGHT!!!
When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.
But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)
“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB
Drag Queen Story Hour
The US Navy Hires Active Duty Non-Binary Drag Queen Joshua Kelley As ‘Digital Ambassador’ In Recent Recruitment Drive To Boost Military Membership
The US Navy invited an active-duty drag queen Joshua Kelley to be a ‘Digital Ambassador’ – as part of a recent drive “to attract the most talented and diverse workforce” and combat plunging recruitment.
With the passing of each and every day, America becomes more and more like unto Sodom, and unto Gomorrah, we are living in the ‘Vanity Fair’ of The Pilgrims Progress. The scary part is that as this wickedness rises, we are normalizing it, so comparatively speaking things don’t really look all that bad. But things are bad, very, very bad. So bad it’s biblical.
“Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.” Isaiah 1:9 (KJB)
Where is all this happening? Everywhere. “Everywhere, you say? Certainly not in the Church!”, you reply. It’s happening especially in the Church, in the Evangelical church, in the Charismatic church, and in the Baptist church. Soon it will be a crime to ‘misgender’ someone, and a crime to use the wrong pronouns. Look at this article sourced below from the right-wing and highly conservative NY Post, America’s oldest newspaper. What do you see? You see the right-wing and highly conservative NY Post referring to the non-binary drag queen Joshua Kelley as ‘they’ and ‘them’. What does that tell you? It tells you that everyone is bowing to the altar of woke in the Days of Lot, they are afraid and running scared.
Don’t you do it, this is a battle, this is a war. Occupy till He comes.
US Navy hires active-duty drag queen Joshua Kelley to be face of recruitment drive as ‘digital ambassador’
FROM THE NY POST: Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, who identifies as non-binary, was appointed as the first of five Navy Digital Ambassadors in a pilot program that ran from October to March.
Kelley, whose stage name is Harpy Daniels, has shared their journey on TikTok and Instagram, where they described how they began performing onboard and became an “advocate” for people who “were oppressed for years in the service.”
“From joining to 2016 and being able to share my drag experience on my off time with my fellow sailors has been a blessing,” Kelley wrote on Instagram in November when announcing their appointment as a digital ambassador to their more than 8,000 followers.
“Thank you to the Navy for giving me this opportunity! I don’t speak for the Navy but simply sharing my experience in the Navy! Hooyah, and let’s go Slay!” they added.
The ‘Digital Ambassador’ program that Kelley took part in ran from October to March and was “designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” as the Navy battles “the most challenging recruiting environment it has faced since the start of the all-volunteer force,” a Navy spokesperson told Fox News.
The service branch is evaluating what form the program, which included five active-duty personnel, will take in the future, the rep added. READ MORE
US Navy uses drag queen Joshua Kelley in enlistment promo as ‘digital ambassador’
The US Navy has appointed a drag queen as ‘Digital Ambassador’ to “encourage reluctant young” men to join, says Sky News host James MacPherson.
Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
Please continue to pray for us, and for wisdom for me especially, as we continue taking steps to print the NTEB branded King James Bible for our free Bible and Bibles Behind Bars program. It is exciting and intimidating at the same time. If the Lord has prospered your financially, we ask you to donate to help us continue to send out free Bibles at this level, and even higher than we are at the moment. It takes a lot of prayer, and a lot of resources to do all this. Praise the Lord we are doing it, all of us together, labouring in the Lord’s harvest field. TO THE FIGHT!!!
When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.
But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)
“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB
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END TIMES
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