Fascinating that the only communications with Tyler Schultz, which was the main insider confronting the fraud, had all of ~4 exchanges with her. All in the same day.
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
Sunny's response to Tyler's email, the one full of sincere concern for the well-being of the company:
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
The key idea, perhaps, is that in questions of fact, tone is noise.
... and that doesn't mean one gets to discard the message because its tone is noisy. Especially when the message is warning of jail-time-worthy consequences for one's actions.
If someone says "Hey asshole, stop standing on those tracks, that's how idiots get dead..." Their tone makes it hard to accept their message but one is still standing on the tracks.
Sunny's interpretation of the tone is another way of saying "you come here acting all superior". This is very different from accepting someone is superior, so it has the opposite effect of wanting to listen.
If someone is coming off to you as "all superior" you would only listen if you genuinely agree they are, and it's not an act. Otherwise you'll just see a person trying to make you feel inferior. Nobody listens unless they are truly convinced of that superiority, or else it's just an insult. Sunny of course chose to see this as an insult. The opposite, just listening to anyone who sounds superior is no better. There are many more signals to take into consideration before deciding whether someone's opinion is worth considering or taking into consideration.
I read the book (Bad Blood) and watched the mini-series (The Dropout) -- both absolutely great! and yet I still don't completely understand how Sunny & Holmes were able to fool experts inside their own company for so long.
Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
Whoa. With a lidar scan of my house, a drone-captured point cloud of my neighborhood, and a backup of my icloud, I could create an immersive 3D snapshot of my life. And then what if other people did the same and we networked them together, so that we can actually interact in the snapshot. It'd be like second life except actually cloned from real lives. weird
I had a thought the other day that you could probably divide up the world into cubic miles and with a few thousand codex subscriptions make a high fidelity blender model of the entire world based on google maps, street view, and tagged location photos.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s world map covers the entire Earth at approximately 1:1 scale: about 510 million square kilometres of surface, including roughly 149 million km² of land
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
If only google could use their AI to generate a wiremesh model out of their google maps streetview data, and make it public. And then another model to generate texture.
It's so strange to see this here. I remember when this site was nothing but foaming-at-the-mouth fawning adoration of Elizabeth Holmes long after her scams were exposed.
My first memory of her being mentioned on this site was the dawning skepticism followed by the big expose. But it's possible I missed the fawning because it didn't sound as interesting
A lot of the comments on that thread are about how the board is full of military/CIA it smells like a cover company. It had Henry Kissinger on it of all people.
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
One of the unspoken secrets of research is that a lot of people are doing it to keep themselves in a job. It is perfectly possible to do research for years which goes nowhere, just goes over old ground etc. As long as the money rolls in, someone's making a living and not necessarily dishonestly if they're at the lower levels.
I have a theory! They saw all the other security state people involved, and figured this was something it would be a good career move to support without knowing exactly why.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
I think there was a lot of resentment here because of how easily it appeared she was raising money and how quickly the company grew at first without having a working product and a murmur from experts that their miniaturization play may not be able to work at all.
I remember before the expose a friend that did blood draws for a living was just like, “huh? It’s impossible to do the tests without a larger sample, it’s just not how it works”.
I recall there were plenty of people on here going into bat for Theranos way after others were calling it fraud.
The thing is, she expertly rode a belief system that was already prevalent: that SV was going to change the world and that SV and what was happening there was different. Plenty of WeWork fans as well. Plenty of fans of firms that actually did something as well, but most of those "did something"s were a website.
In the "Notes" app on the iphone, there is a note which says "msg me on X". Back then, it was Twitter. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
I need to delete that key again. I keep recreating it with the same value, but nothing seems to work. I want to use this key with the value but in a way that nobody else knows the value. Sigh. Security is difficult.
Unfortunately the OS itself won't be the be-all / end-all, crossplatform (web) apps and a lack of care for optimization are the other major issue. I just timed how long it takes to open the 'calendar' tab in Teams - 8.5 seconds. MacOS' own calendar app takes <2 seconds (unrepresentative test due to factors) and does not show a screen with a spinner.
178 comments
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
See my comments in red below.
This is a good reminder that arguments on morality and wisdom are used and abused.
... and that doesn't mean one gets to discard the message because its tone is noisy. Especially when the message is warning of jail-time-worthy consequences for one's actions.
If someone says "Hey asshole, stop standing on those tracks, that's how idiots get dead..." Their tone makes it hard to accept their message but one is still standing on the tracks.
If someone is coming off to you as "all superior" you would only listen if you genuinely agree they are, and it's not an act. Otherwise you'll just see a person trying to make you feel inferior. Nobody listens unless they are truly convinced of that superiority, or else it's just an insult. Sunny of course chose to see this as an insult. The opposite, just listening to anyone who sounds superior is no better. There are many more signals to take into consideration before deciding whether someone's opinion is worth considering or taking into consideration.
Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?
https://www.spacejam.com/
https://github.com/sv1sjp/flash-swf-to-html5-toolkit
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Ref: https://flyawaysimulation.com/ask/answers/microsoft-flight-s...
(Borges)
eg. https://www.nianticspatial.com/products/capture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-S-x0b9TrE
I wasted a lot of hours in it when I was a teen.
Crazy how my gut feeling was more than vindicated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
The thing is, she expertly rode a belief system that was already prevalent: that SV was going to change the world and that SV and what was happening there was different. Plenty of WeWork fans as well. Plenty of fans of firms that actually did something as well, but most of those "did something"s were a website.
(for some of us)
like come on... it was so good before
Their name is probably Claude.
I would love to have the machine "function" up to a point (except, actually doing the analysis results in a "NotImplementedException" of some kind.à
I also initially looked around the desk for a physical cartridge, such was the effectiveness of the rest of the “game”.
Although I bet Lizzie used a Pro..