Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
That’s true. But this idea was unworkable because of basic biology/physics. It doesn’t matter how good the sensor is if you’re dealing with bad samples.
For most of the tests they wanted to perform, a finger stick will always provide an unrepresentative sample. And not in a predictable way.
The thing is experienced people knew this. All you had to do was to talk to anyone who knew the biology and they would have told you this could never work. Not this can’t work with today’s technology, but this is fundamentally at odds with reality.
But the implication is that others weren't banging their heads. The amount of money invested in this particular domain is in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions. There are so many companies whose lives, whose workflows, product lines would be made vastly easier.
The thing that calls her out as a scammer is that Theranos probably invested more money in the faking it, the deception, with Siemens equipment than they did in actually trying to solve the problem itself.
> To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable.
Sure, but also lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable regardless of how many times heads get banged, due to some fundamental limitation, like perpetual motion machines or homeopathy. It's a spectrum, but from what I understand Theranos was closer to the "unworkable in theory" side of things than the "currently unworkable in practice" side of things.
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
AI research takes physical space and physical prototypes. Even if you can simulate a lot, the simulation is never going to be accurate enough to go from simulation to perfectly working prototype. Especially not with a single rack of GPU servers.
But let’s say that a rogue AI already had plans for a perfect killbot, setting up a factory to build them takes time, iteration, space, and manpower as well.
And you would have to do all this undetected.
It’s possible to imagine technology that would allow a rogue AI to take over the world, but we’re nowhere near that yet. We may never get there.
AI drones can’t wipe out humanity without being able to replicate.
AI could mostly destroy civilization if you gave it sole launch control of ICBMs. It could also cause a lot of damage to society with no physical presence.
But realistically we’re nowhere near AI powered robots being an existential threat.
> AI drones can’t wipe out humanity without being able to replicate.
Totally agree, and it should be pretty trivially easy to see how they can do that. One of the authors of the independent METR report about the Hugging Face incident put it like this:
> Compared to these reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself.
> Another jump like this along these propensity dimensions — scale, cooperation between agents, ambition and horizon length of misaligned goals, deceptiveness — seems like it could motivate agents to try very hard to maintain a covert, persistent rogue deployment within the AI company. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities and think frontier agents will likely be capable of establishing such a rogue deployment in six months.
I really, really encourage folks to read the AI 2027 paper. It's fine to disagree with some of its conclusions and timelines, but I see so many people "stuck" in the current state of the world (i.e. where AI is still pretty dumb, and has few connections to the physical world), unable to go a few steps further along AI capability growth to see the dangers.
> But realistically we’re nowhere near AI powered robots being an existential threat.
I would agree only if "nowhere near" means less than 10-15 years.
It's baffling to me that people think that timeframe is too short. Basically, I don't think you've been paying attention to what is actually going on in the AI world.
People much smarter than I believe we'll see fully automated, soup-to-nut factories coming online in the next 5-6 years. Here's one such post from Ajeya Cotra, one of the METR researchers who did the independent Hugging Face investigation: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/six-milestones-for-ai...
If alien spaceships with tech more advanced than ours suddenly appeared in Earth orbit, you would conclude I'm sure that they're a potent threat to us even if you couldn't guess what weapons or what technologies they would use to destroy us. AI more capable than us is the same way: the threat is the capability to invent weapons and technologies (including weapons and tech none of us has ever imagined).
Have you never used a garden hose? Do you know that a regular, average hose left running overnight can waste like 5,000 gallons of water? My HOA enforces a rule - you must keep at least two trees per household. Trees need water. Not that much, of course, I shared the overnight hose number just for the sense of measure. Now you do the math - couple of trees, bathrooms, showering, drinking, cooking - that water usage adds up.
If you live in what sounds like the desert and you're constantly watering your trees, it might be the case that you've picked non-native species that don't handle heat well. Check out the crime pays but botany doesn't on YouTube, he does a lot of videos about this, people in Texas etc planting English oaks and needing to water them all the time while native species are ignored or cut down because they're "messy".
Trees don’t grow otherwise in that area? Like if you would stop watering, will they die? Future proof solution could be selling and buying somewhere where climate change won’t hit as hard, eg north, but I guess not everyone can afford that, and cooler regions may not offer sufficient sustenance or infrastructure like schools and jobs.
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
No, I meant exactly in the petrol sense. Darn americanims - you never know if gas is gasoline, or poison, anesthetic, or flatulence, or you're just being gaslighted.
A sheet of plastic floating in the surface while you don't use it could help to reduce the evaporation. If is a big pool put some holes here and there to allow air access if somebody or a pet falls into the pool.
Some marginal plants strategically placed and Nymphaeas can shadow the water (reduce the amount of heat that reaches the water), but you would have a very different kind of pool then and they have their own maintenance issues.
If your area allows the culture of columnar cactus and succulents, use it near the pool to provide shadow. They will rarely trow anything into the water and may be beautiful to see by itself. Look for the less vicious species like Euphorbia or Pilosocereus azureus that are strongly vertical while young, refreshing to see (blue is blue) and will not pose any problem if cultured in a wooden raised bed.
The idea would be to make a short wall using the cactus as logs placed a few dm apart to allow the wind passing trough. You will need to avoid the access to cats protecting the dirt with a mesh, aizoaceae, gravel or rocks. Allow a lot of space for the roots. A small pot will not really work.
Cactus or succulents allowed to grow on the roof or near the house will act also as fire retardants (but not fire supressors) as they accumulate water.
Haha. I guess you imagined "Deep Dive Dubai" or something? My pool is basically an oversized bathtub. We would've called it exactly that if it was installed inside the house.
Well historically the consensus was that it was harder to read code than to write it, but that leads to uncomfortable conclusions these days, so that bit of common wisdom has mostly been ejected.
> I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
I’m not trying to be mean, but this comment is basically “I have no experience with this topic, but it can just be boiled down to this one simple question right?”
I don't think that's being mean at all, and it's valid.
Yes that's literally why I asked it. Simple questions, here, regularly elicit long form explanations. I was interested in this topic and have no experience. So I thought I'd try a broad overview type question to see if I could learn something today.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
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