It seems that everyone interviewed about this story has their own red flag moment -- the point where they knew that something was way off, and that they should stay far away. Silicon Valley VCs being the prime example. It is incorrect to say that Theranos was a VC company, it was more funded by angels who were incapable of objectively judging what was being proposed.

At Stanford a prof (important to say: a woman) who knew that the idea was technically infeasible. (And interesting to contrast with another very senior prof -- a man -- who left his tenured position to join Theranos). I remember reading a New Yorker profile of EH years before Theranos blew up, and the story described how she had all of these extremely powerful old men on her board: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger. That was my red flag moment. Yes, they are brilliant and powerful, but they are also clueless about biotech and medical tech. So why get them involved? Something seemed very off to me. Lots of people knew that something was very off, and yet ...

I agree. The EH portrayed in this movie is much more sympathetic than the one portrayed in the Carreyrou book, and in Dropout. Fielder obviously knows all of this, and he is consistently interested in the "meta" levels of storytelling. So I don't think the point of the movie is as simple as "but wait, maybe she is actually innocent!".

One point seems to be mindfuckery -- EH making Nathan unsure of who she is, and when she is being honest; him doing the same to his audience; even Amanda seems to get in on it. For example: when Amanda and Nathan are in front of the fireplace talking about Nathan's visit to EH in prison: was that scripted? Or was it a genuine conversation? Or an improvised conversation (with an agreed set of points to be made)?

I want a computer dammit, not an appliance.

I was always cobbling together ad hoc network access, to get from one machine to another. Access to my Mac Mini while traveling was a pain. Bringing it with me is ridiculous, and network access was a PITA.

Tailscale is wonderful magic. Free (for my usage), so easy to set up, and now no matter where my various computers are, they are all accessible trivially via a single ssh connection.

So get a beefed up desktop Mac, set up Tailscale, and then use any random laptop, anywhere, to use it headless.

I had to leave the IMAX showing of 2049, it was deafening (and I'm already hard of hearing!) Saw the whole thing in an ordinary non-IMAX theater, which was much more tolerable.

Ridley Scott's idea of the scifi future being as gritty, ugly and dysfunctional as current times led to his creation of his two scifi masterpieces -- Blade Runner and Alien. The sequels have been disappointing, they had to be.

Their preferred working style was to not make decisions, and to hire consulting firms to make the decisions for them. So they hired these even younger consultants, who would work for a few weeks, and make their recommendations, and then those recommendations would not be put into action. No. Instead, more consultants were hired to review and then discard the work of the previous consultants. Rinse and repeat for a few cycles.

I cannot resist one story. The initial HBS/management consulting CEO was replaced by a new CEO, someone who had run one of the early search engine companies, and had a similar background. He turned out to be no better. What I found very entertaining about CEO2 was his business past. He was known for two decisions. 1) Declined to buy the very early Google for high six figures, when he had the chance. 2) Decided to buy Blue Mountain -- think Hallmark cards but online -- for $780M. Greeting cards. 3/4 of a billion dollars. 1000x the cost of Google at the time.

Yes, hindsight and all, but still. If I had made both decisions by flipping a coin, my expected value would far exceed what this business genius accomplished.

I think there are probably two reasons for the hate that SPs get. 1) Come on, I learned SQL, isn't that enough? I have to learn SPs too? 2) Architecture astronauts love them their tiers, and logic belongs in the tier above the database, not the database tier itself. (I expressed this opinion in a job interview -- without disparaging any group of techies -- and I believe this is the reason I was not invited back.)

- As a grad student in the 80s, I read a lot about "database programming languages", which aimed to provide persistence and query capabilities to conventional programming languages, in a seamless way.

- The next step to putting those ideas into practice: Participated in a research project on adding database capabilities to a programming language (anyone remember Ada?)

- I designed and developed most of the modeling and query language features of one of the major object-oriented database systems, back in the early 90s.

- I also designed and contributed to a SQL interface to our OODB, as well as an ORM, taking our model and query language, and mapping it to SQL.

- Turned down an offer from a software giant of the late 90s, to add database capabilities to one of their main languages, (basically bringing to their language what I had built at the OODB company).

- Designed and built a Java ORM (late 90s).

And after working on this stuff for something like 20 years, I concluded that it's all misguided. For all of its ugliness and weirdness, SQL was designed to address a certain set of requirements, and has succeeded wildly. New database programming languages face huge problems of acceptance, and needing to solve the exact same problems that SQL handles now. (This was easier 30 years ago since it was still early days for SQL. Now it's basically impossible.) ORMs are a terrible idea, in the "now you have two problems" category. Not only do you need to write high-performance queries, but you have to get your ORM to actually issue those queries. (Yes, ORMs have escapes to raw SQL. The existence of these escapes proves my point.) And schemas change, and the mapping to your language model has to change, and it's a mess.

Just use SQL. It's the right tool for the job it was designed for. Use a database driver to integrate with your language. It's just not that hard.

We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.

Sadly, that is real out-of-the-box thinking.

I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.

Every month, when I got my BYTE magazine in the mail, the first thing I would do was to find the Gateway 2000 ad, admire the cheezy graphics and copy, and then devour every detail of the specs of their high-end machine, tracking the increase in power and decrease in price. I bought several of their machines over the years.

> ... It revealed that the process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age. Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery? Forget about accuracy or even attribution. Something fundamental to the experience of mathematics is being taken."

These passages resonated with me, as someone who has been enchanted by writing software for almost 60 years. It crystalizes something that has been nagging at me for many years: I like writing software. Reviewing, testing, spec-ing, designing, etc. are all important, but they are all incidental to the actual creation of software. They are all necessary for me to do if I'm going to write software, but they are peripheral. I didn't latch on to computer programming because I got into flow state reviewing code, or spec-ing it.

And this is happening in one profession after another. For example, fighter pilots. I suspect that a fighter pilot feels about flying jet fighters the same way that I feel about programming. And he or she will soon be exactly as useless: Doing things related to flying, from the sidelines, but not doing the thing him or herself.

AI is stealing all the fun parts.