Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

presumably from a poor person

harvested fresh and 100% hand-cut organic artisinal organs

concierge medical normally means something like a subscription service to a GP and you can call and get seen immediately

Sounds great, and also evil! See: Private Schools.

c’mon yanks get one (1) national health service ffs

oh so it's like going to the doctor was when i was a kid, only fancy

don't mean to be all like captain-save-a-greedy-dr. but I pay an extra 300/yr to go from a pcp who didn't have a computer to join a company where I can text them and send them photos of my rashes and visit any number of their locations in multiple cities and other such conveniences. It sucks that everyone can't have it so good, but it's worth it for my family.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/contractors-holiday-party-employee-benefits_n_5c2c335ae4b0407e9085e368

Tech work sucks

That is pretty weird to me, I'm used to contractors losing the usual social and workplace benefits (time off, sick days), but counter balanced by being paid considerably more than the employees.

alexa, play the world's smallest violin...

actually, a lot of the testers here are contractors, but not massively overpaid (maybe even paid less than the other technical staff). but we do treat them like normal human beings, at least as far as invites to things go. not that there are any 'flashy perks' like google.

Contractors are seemingly paid more because they’re not getting benefits. Generally their hourly fee, if multiplies out by the year, SEEMS like they’re making so much more money but minus the benefits it’s supposed to be the same and is often worse.

A typical scenario in my history would be to make like 50 or 60 an hour, which if you work 40 hr a week come out to over 100k, and then get offered a salary of 60 or 70k a year if they want to convert you to full time. I think the standard is something like 30% more if you freelance.

Of course that assumes you work everyday and never get sick or take a vacation or leave work early to visit a doctor. And you’re paying considerably more for healthcare. Before going fulltime I was looking at paying over 500/mo for mediocre healthcare for myself. Now I pay 400 for a good healthcare for a family of three.

And if you are working 40 hours a week as a contractor, odds are you and you’re employers are breaking independent contractor 1099 laws and that’s a whole other thing.

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.