notahacker

No, but it would mean that they were overhyping how useful electricity was to and it was worth pointing out that if they actually believed what they said, they'd be trying to do everything they said they could do rather than just being a utility company...

afaik Siemens Energy never pushed the argument that electricity would be able to do everything humans can within a year or so...

Yes, obviously there's a whole lot of relationship building and effort and judgement which matters at least as much as infrastructure in building businesses, but the whole schtick of Big AI is to insist their product is better than humans at planning and market analysis and building and sales and marketing and especially at effort and concentration, and they're obviously better capitalised than startups using AI to do something in a particular vertical, so if they believe their own hype, why not?

And yet many parts of Germany have a much more thriving tech scene than Tennessee...

The complicating factor is that whilst it's certainly true that Starshield answers to the US chain of command, not to Elon and highly unlikely he is authorised to exercise any direct control of it, the claims that Elon personally spoke to the guy at the top of the US chain of command and persuaded him that this would be a good idea are pretty credible (and whether credible or not, US officials have been trying to place the blame on Elon rather than their own chain of command). Plus of course Ukraine absolutely does use regular Starlink, and Elon doesn't actually have magic ability to tell which terminals are being used for offensive operations and which for defensive

Mistral isn't even close to the most used AI services in the EU, there are very few industries where EU sourced/hosted models are required (mostly ones where the US also either mandates US models or is seeking to...) and the potential behaviour of the US government (rational and irrational) is at least as big a contributor to European companies being cautious about dependency on US cloud models as EU regulation. Regulatory hurdles exist to building datacentres in the US and basically everywhere else, and don't favour Mistral over any other company, and European states and the EU are busy funding [notional] competitors

It is not, even really stretching the definition, a state sanctioned monopoly.

Lack of capital, datacentres and GPUs being the barrier to competition in European AI giants is the exact opposite of a "government sanctioned monopoly"...

Nobody is preventing other Europeans from setting up AI companies

Also rejecting kings is part of America's founding mythology, whereas if anything America seems to embrace oligarchy more than most democracies...

Oh yeah, I have no doubt there was a lot of knowledge compartmentalization and to many/most employees that seemed like normal practice in an IP sensitive industry. Just wondering how she dealt with the people that started to be mildly pessimistic or suspicious

tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)

> Also I would argue the people that are obvious in their lying and manipulating aren’t the dangerous ones - those that aren’t obvious, that you don’t spot easily off the cuff are much more dangerous.

Yeah. The person that's constantly bragging about fantasy stuff or reflexively claiming nothing was ever their fault might warrant cutting off because they're tiresome, but they're not likely to undermine you never mind pull off this level of scam because they're so unconvincing, and that might make them more harmlessly amusing than anything else. The manipulative person who's constant spreading false rumours might raise red flags, and definitely isn't someone you want to spend time with once you've spotted that some of their claims simply don't line up. But a large part of why people are often good at covering stuff up even if its the most heinous shit is that they manage to be plausible and likeable most of the time and generally tell the truth on other subjects.

Holmes likely fell into that category, though she didn't exactly downplay her lies in the way someone covering their deep dark secret usually does.

And yeah, in practice whether you cut someone off after learning their deep dark secret probably depends a lot on what it is and how it relates to you (and usually it's more "I'm hiding my affair" than "my billion dollar enterprise supplies fraudulent medical tests")

I think particularly in the case of investors it's that they're pretty comfortable with founders that straddle the fine line between bullish and bullshit, because the ones who back up their claims that seem too good to be true make them money, and the ones who don't are priced in. And some who make them lots of money tell a lot of "white lies" on the way. FOMO is a way of missing red flags too.

Holmes' mistake was to massively overdo the "fake it til you make it" in a regulated industry where the implications of the lies appal people, as well as to have a product that was never going to work so the lies were more "this car definitely isn't just rolling down the hill" than "the person at the wheel is only for regulatory reasons". If she'd settled for fantasy metrics and self dealing in a real estate play rather than faking medical tests she'd have investors lining up to fund her second venture...

I'm more intrigued by how she managed to keep customers and at least some of her employees believing and how often that mask slipped.

True, but gently slowing down on a residential street near a school feels unlikely to lead to other drivers attempting high speed tailgating, undertaking or other aggressive manoeuvres that might result from, say, hogging the overtaking lane without actually overtaking because you're sticking to the speed limit, even before the obvious downsides of speeding near schools are considered...

(Also, the second case is something a car manufacturer should probably be resolving more by not hogging the overtaking lane than defaulting to going 20mph over the limit for extended periods because everybody else does)

FDR had the folksy charm to directly address the public and acquired a lot of power, but in most respects he seems the opposite of a populist. He was a party insider with a complex technocratic response to the Depression voters believed actually worked, not someone who spent his time picking fights and arguing he needed more power to defeat enemies (or making complete fantasy promises like Huey Lewis), he picked up a broad voter coalition including lots of minorities he neither scapegoated nor actually defended, and was a conventional moderate for the time on foreign policy and [future] culture war issues. He was more radical and centralised than previous Presidents when it came to economic policy and the role of the executive, but it wasn't a shouty type of radicalism, especially not compared with how socialists and fascists elsewhere addressed the subject of the Depression...

77 million voters voted for Trump after he'd shown them exactly who he was. I don't think you can blame the voter sentiments and information environment that leads to that outcome on the voting system.

A fragmented party system driven by Parliamentary coalition building might actually mean less accountability, since right-leaning independents and ex-Republicans disgruntled at the erosion of democratic and social norms under Trump suddenly have to worry about actual socialists being part of the alternative, and options that genuinely aren't MAGA to vote for who in practice will need to ally with MAGA