Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

there need to be some serious public interest articles on how image recognition “ai” works in practice

I had a few misconceptions, even as a software developer and after doing a couple workshops my perception of the whole thing shifted. Any company that has tech that seems to be getting incrementally better is using your data to get better. Because terms of service are vague and public perception is low

The Ring doorbell/camera articles this week made me think of this, but it’s been on my mind. any image recognition thing at this point is trained — meaning the dumb captcha images on the web, or stock photos of a thousand garbage trucks, or a comapny’s pictures of its products

it’s literally just “smash image data into component parts” and then comparing those parts to what is known. a car is some curves and reflectivity, maybe motion, that match up with things that have been tagged as “cars”. and it’s more abstract than that!

Have you seen the dog / trombone example? They trained an AI to recognize dogs and a few other things and then changed just enough pixels to flip one picture from being seen as a dog to being seen as a trombone.

Other examples:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/30/fool_ai_image_classifier_by_changing_single_pixel/

Late to the Theranos story - just finished Bad Blood which is great but I want to see/know more!
What on earth were all those people who worked there actually doing? It sounds like literally nothing was invented, innovated, no new research, just janky combinations of robot arms messing up blood samples.

That one-pixel-change magic is seriously weird and also funny, but it really brings home that these algorithms simultaneously work on some quite alien level to human understanding, but not because they're smart, just a multi-dimensional numerical soup where you change one number by 0.01 and suddenly the main coefficient wipes out all the other dimensions

for a more mundane angle on the same thing, I like this article
http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.html

(sorry kinder, I don't know, hope someone else will answer! I did read a good article on Theranos a while back but I haven't read Bad Blood so I'm p. sure nothing in it would be new to you)

I enjoyed that blog and then oh god the comments

i think something underplayed in bad blood is how much of what they did was just expected behavior from a startup. also underplayed -- mattis leaping from one blustering charlatan to the next.

That one-pixel-change thing is also reminiscent of this: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13507542/facial-recognition-glasses-trick-impersonate-fool

there's a william gibson book (zero history) where he postulates that there's a pattern (the world's ugliest t-shirt) that all the world's image recognition software is programmed to ignore, rendering you invisible to cctv, the same way photocopiers won't copy bank notes because of a five dot pattern.

towards the bottom, here: http://jesse-pearson.com/interviews/william-gibson/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

(maybe this is something for the algorithms thread)

I dunno how mad to be about sponsoring without due diligence (or maybe it passed all the due diligence checks), but those quotes from the speaker, what the hell

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/google-facebook-and-microsoft-sponsored-a-conference-that-promoted-climate-change-denial/

i'm shocked. shocked!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/bezos-health-venture-has-no-name-yet-but-is-already-embroiled-in-litigation/

should I start a standalone Theranos/Holmes thread? seems like we might have enough material now that there's the book and upcoming documentary

as much as i love lolling at the shamelessness and incompetence of theranos' scam and plan to continue to do so as much as possible in the future, i do kinda prefer the idea of making this a megathread of roffles at the expense of silicon valley disruption assholes

(i didn't realise there was a theranos doc on the way btw, i am psyched)

tbf theranos was only SV-like and not really SV in practice

elizabeth holmes, on the other hand, is an otherwordly golem manufactured from SV soil

fair

feel free to start a thread ofc, i'm not gonna turn down an opportunity to dunk on theranos across multiple places on ilx

maybe I'll wait for the doc

recommending the book again, though. it's just so ridiculous

oh it's a pageturner alright - watching holmes and her partner paint themselves into an ever-tighter corner is great, but reading about the corporate rubes who were terrified of missing out on the next big thing despite it being obviously fucked from the start is even better imo

like, so much for the myth of the omnicompetence of corporate decisionmakers

that sunny guy seems like a motherfucker with some dark secrets

Yeah even more so than Holmes herself, who seems like a straight-ahead con artist out for money, power, and fame.

start a thread! I'm fascinated by the machinations of all of it.

See also this new podcast about the Theranos con: http://abcradio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/

are there any interesting bets on who the current theranoses are?

wework

i mean any businesses applying a startup #growth mindset to medical technology is prima facie a concern, but i can't think of anyone operating on a theranos scale in that sector. maybe ubiome? they just fired 50 people https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/22/ubiome-job-cuts-more-than-50.html.

but wework seems like a ponzi scheme.

the core concept of wework isn't absurd and it seems like there's gotta be a way to make the business model work. I think the question is if their ridiculous overexpansion / stupid side projects are gonna make the reasonable part of their business completely impossible to sustain even if they shutter half of them and raised prices. (and I think the answer is yeah probably.)

I'm amazed by how many coworking spaces exist in my small city tbh

the premise of coworking spaces is sound. i'm talking about wework's financial structure in particular.

is it... like of like a three-dimensional triangle, perhaps one commonly with four sides?

the guy next to us on this flight straight up brought a plain dodecahedron as his personal item pic.twitter.com/ZjWuwkpwsj

— kimmy (@ka_waltz) June 8, 2017

ffs that's an icosahedron.

is this the thread where we talk about Munchery?

Please do.

Let me help!

https://medium.com/@lenoreestrada/munchery-how-a-venture-backed-startup-swindled-a-group-of-women-and-minority-owned-companies-out-e64ee610511b?mc_cid=27ec9eb158&mc_eid=aa9d9f0811

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/24/after-an-abrupt-shutdown-muncherys-small-business-vendors-are-the-ones-picking-up-the-bill/

if only I had a local munchery

I’m having trouble articulating just how deeply angry this one makes me. Partly bc the entire category has always been bullshit, partly bc of a VC culture that dismisses skepticism as a character flaw, partly bc jesus fkn christ the specific managers flying this particular zeppelin knew what was coming way in advance.

I’m sure there’s a bridge loan that didn’t come through or whatever and steady as she goes and blah blah blah but leaving employees and vendors holding the bag while setting 150 million dollars on fire... I hope none of these people ever work again, and I guess I’m also furious bc they’ll just fail upwards.

yeah fuuuuuuuuck those assholes. i would contribute to a gofundme to pay off these businesses, would go gangbusters in "fuck those assholes" circles i bet.

following this clusterfuck live:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

tl;dr version: facebook was using a VPN company they bought as a way to figure out what people do, by watching all of their traffic. apple dumped their app, so they've been pretending it's something called "facebook research" and paying people to install it manually.

shit got real earlier today when apple invalidated their app-signing certificate. a no-brainer, considering they're supposed to be only used for companies to have in-house apps that aren't publicly available, or for internal testing.

it turns out the geniuses at facebook had exactly one enterprise account, and now none of their internal company apps, including one they use for transportation (?) are working at all

story on that latter point

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-blocked-internal-ios-apps

love imagining thousands of software devs milling around not knowing how to get lunch

aw yeah this is extremely my shit

using their enterprise cert... I don't even know what the fuck they were thinking. it's just a dumbass move of epic proportions

this is an unusually good scoop from fundamentally unserious fool josh constine

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1003329836574654464/pDmyoRm9_400x400.jpg

that’s... a lot of looks

caek otm, I was in awe that he did some decent reporting without sounding like he was firmly wedged up the ass of a new startup that sells electric propeller hats

ou sont les biddles d'antan

lol: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/googles-also-peddling-a-data-collector-through-apples-back-door/

After we asked Google whether its app violated Apple policy, Google announced it will remove Screenwise Meter from Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program and disable it on iOS devices.

oh shit guys they saw us, run!

https://undark.org/article/junk-science-or-real-thing-inference/

Several articles on the site argued against the theory of evolution, for example, and at least one dismissed the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. Later, through tax documents and interviews, I would learn that all of Inference’s funding came from a surprising source: Peter Thiel. Since Inference’s start, Thiel, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has donated at least $1.7 million to the outlet.

Peter Thiel has been funding a junk science publication that whitewashes their bad takes on evolution and global warming by paying legit scientists and writers to contribute real content