Not that this is the right forum to re-try her case, but I'm actually shocked she got 11 years and I might even argue that is far more than she deserves if she was acquitted on the patient side. The problem appears that these statutes are based on dollar amounts of the fraud -- $140 million according to https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/elizabeth-holmes-senten.... Yes that's a lot of money but the investors themselves, how many of them were really damaged in any meaningful way? A few billionaires -- DeVos, Murdoch, Walton -- lost many millions, but what is that, 2 or 3% of their net worth? I'm sure there are some less-wealthy people on the investor list as well but I'm guessing nobody got their life savings wiped out. Defrauding the public, as opposed to some very wealthy investors, seems like a lot more serious crime.
I feel like I'm missing something here. It's really just a single sentence? Why would so many sign their name to this? It's like signing your name to "Keep children safe" but providing zero remarks, feedback, suggestions, etc for HOW and with WHAT and by WHO.
Why would so many academics / industry leaders sign their name to what amounts of marketing fluff?
The last thing Elon engineered was a website about 30 some years ago and when he hired developers, they rewrote everything he did.
He's always been pretty bad a managing a business, too. This is why he doesn't actually run any of them. You'll notice SpaceX and Tesla both have adults in charge.
It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money and people get paid to manage him_ inside of his companies. Twitter just showed what it looks like when Musk tries to manage things himself.
>It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money
He started out after college with negative net worth and from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry. I find it amazing people can look at that and say he's just a rich idiot.
> He started out after college with negative net worth
He did not. Maybe "on paper" in a very specific way you could say that, but that ignores everything else like how he had very, very rich parents and connections. His very first company, Zip2, had his father as the first investor like come on.
He would have had to try NOT to fall into money.
> from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry
Tesla existed before Musk. He provided investor money then a couple of years later lead the charge to unseat the founder as CEO which eventually led him to becoming CEO. Up until about 2016, Tesla would have gone bankrupt without government assistance, and they have an entire management team that deals with the day-to-day as well as managing Musk.
For SpaceX Musk did found the company but it was essentially engineered by the CTO down. Musk isn't out here making rockets himself.
Now that him and his yes men are running twitter, you're seeing his true management style in action. This kind of stuff has been said / reported about him for decades. I knew multiple people who worked at Tesla and all of them quit without a year and just talked about how terrible it was (especially the multiple times when they found out they were delivering things they had never discussed and hearing it first from Musk when he said it in public / social media).
So I've watched the Eberhard interview [1] and the Musk counter-interview [2] and I'm still not decided on this. Did Eberhard do a bunch of useful early-day heavy-lifting only to get elbowed out by Musk once things were ticking along and it was time to take credit? Or was he incompetent and un-invested, forcing Musk to reluctantly take back the reins? I'd love to hear an insider opinion, but I don't know where to look next and I've already spent far too much time today litigating other peoples' bullshit founder drama, lol.
Scalpers are always a short term thing. None of them ever order supply that will last years, usually 3-6 months at most. If you end up being caught holding the bag with a normal amount of demand, you then break even at best or likely lose a little re-selling them at the prices you paid for.
A year from now nvidia will have new GPUs and the 3000 series will be relatively easy to buy.
Considering encrypted messages have to both be encrypted and decrypted, I don't think his statement is necessarily against encrypted. I assumed he meant preventing the sending of known materials like that and / or the opening of it (which wouldn't interfere with end-to-end encryption at all).
Would it be a map of unacceptable things, or an on device model like GPT3? Would you allow someone to type the offending thing and just disable the send button, or would you block it at the keyup event?
I don't see any way this could be implemented without kissing freedom goodbye.
I like the other commenter's take that this idea was just a bit out of exasperation.
Well, Apple just stated that they are one of the best in privacy oriented AI because their AI could run on-device. And I suppose the detection of such things would be a good example.
But I see your point: you would need to inform the user without restricting his or her freedom.
He's not some random out of touch congressman though, he personally should know better than to make such an unspecific attack on encryption. The way he said it, everyone will hear that he wants the government to limit encryption which essentially means to ban it.
And they wouldn't be wrong. If the same thing came out of someone else's mouth I assume you wouldn't be seeking out an unreasonably charitable explanation like this.
And if such a plan was introduced by Trump you probably wouldn't even think of this charitable version as a good plan at all because at the end of the day, things like censorship and mass surveillance are tools of oppression in the wrong hands, and you have no control whose hands it will end up in once it's normalized.
This really reminds me, it's been two decades now since I've taken _any_ Algebra. I'd really love to go re-learn it from the basics on up. I mean, I still remember a lot of it here and there but some sort of refresher course up to doing more advanced would be awesome.
Hell yes! I love hearing about people interested in abstract algebra and wholly support your endeavor! Here is a pretty decent resource on relevant texts:
That page in general is pretty gold for math texts in general.
Also, #math on freenode has lots of algebra-strong users on it, though depending on your luck some can be less helpful than others. I love chatting about this kind of thing with people, so if you would like an ad hoc mentor/study-buddy I would be more than happy to help. Feel free to email me at the address in my profile.
I think Linear Algebra is traditionally recommended, since you can readily apply a lot of geometric intuitions while picking up the mathematical ones. The drawback is that you have to make sure you're not cheating yourself of the mathematics by over-relying on the geometry.
Sheldon Axler's acclaimed "Linear Algebra Done Right" is freely available as a download [1] through July due to the pandemic. I've not read it (yet!), but I've heard so many good things about it I feel comfortable recommending it off the cuff. :)
(Recommendation: try not to focus too hard on the matrices! They're just convenient representations (syntax!) for the actual things we care about: linear transformations. It's less geometrically intuitive, but it lays a much better foundation for algebraic widgets other than vector spaces. Use the wealth of geometric intuitions to jump-start your mathematical sense.)
I don't have a lot of recommendations for other algebra topics, unfortunately. My class textbook for abstract algebra was Dummit & Foote, which I found very dry and lacking in intuition. Aluffi is perfectly servicable if you feel good about your linear algebra; just don't feel like you have to complete every exercise.
Also, I'm a sucker for order theory, so if you're up for something a little less algebraic, pick up Munkres' Topology. I'm consistently surprised at how often topological and order-theoretic intuitions come up in software development. There's a close connection between topology and logic, so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised -- but I haven't studied Stone duality at all, so it shall remain surprising for now.
I wonder whether HN has heard of "Linear Algebra" by Hoffman and Kunze. I learned from it as an undergraduate and remember it being told that it was a classic. Another more abstract book is by the great Halmos: "Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces". Both books will stretch and entertain you.
> Why develop a vaccine for a disease that is now non-existent?
I think the idea here is since both SARS and Covid-19 are part of the coronavirus type, a vaccine for SARS would make modification and rapid deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine significantly better.
Really, any existing coronavirus vaccine would have helped research efforts tremendously.
> SARS-COV-1 infected people for 2 years, then it was gone. There's certainly a chance that SARS-COV-2 disappears before a vaccine could make it to market.
Highly unlikely. SARS ended up infecting an order of magnitude less people _in its entire 2 year run_ than Covid-19.
We will have this virus around for at least 5+ years, possibly forever.
> I think the idea here is since both SARS and Covid-19 are part of the coronavirus type, a vaccine for SARS would make modification and rapid deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine significantly better. Really, any existing coronavirus
vaccine would have helped research efforts tremendously.
do we know that's the case? It seems to me that the bottleneck is testing, which need to be done specifically for each vaccine.
- Sars-1 and Sars-2 (COVID-19) are related enough to bear the same name, thus having researched a virus for the former would be incredibly informating to finding a virus for the latter.
- As it stands, we know so little in that regard that we do not know if there is a possible vaccine for COVID-19. If I take an average between 3-10 years (the range of guesstimates floating around in some circles apparently), that's 2026-7 to have a definitive answer on that (it also depends a lot on the behavior of the virus, and we are only 10 weeks into this mess, we just don't know).
- human testing on Sars-1 may have been impossible or rather unethical, but models on animal species are just about the way we do it for everything all the time, so having a 15-year body of research + associated datasets would have been the reasonable, cautious thing to do. Having a vaccine for e.g. mice on Sars-1 available now would help a lot.
- There is no valid reason to have stopped Sars-1 vaccine research, especially given the fact that numerous experts were certain that new coronaviruses would cross again to the human race in the future (this is still true today).
- Because of all this, we are now forced to rush tests on "best guesses" for vaccines, with nowhere near enough data to make a really "educated" guess, far from the usual. Meaning, increased risk to the patients in those trials, but most dramatically for all: we have cornered ourselves into making moonshots in a hurry in the quest for a vaccine.
There is a possibility that we've gotten so good at molecular biology and modelling that we'll actually overcome these obstacles that we've created for ourselves, but the gist is that had we been a little more forward-thinking (including hoarding stocks for medical supplies, etc), the ultimate death count could have been orders of magnitude smaller, possibly anecdotal.
There is a valid reason to stop Sars-1: the researchers working on that could go on other other things. On hindsight we know differently, but there was no reason to expect this even 6 months ago.
Up until late January I was saying I want a vaccine for the common cold which was more impact on my life and something these researchers could switch to. (I'd like a better treatment to prevent heart attacks even more, but it is unlikely the researchers could switch)
> “there was no reason to expect this even 6 months ago.”
You might want to re-think that perception.
I've recently heard Ralph Baric, an epidemiology Professor from UNC School of Medicine[0]. He's arguably one of the world's foremost experts on the topic — which makes it easy to at least listen to the man, you'd think... Have a look at his publications:
- Dec 2015 ⇒ A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.[1]
- Mar 2016 ⇒ SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence.[2]
Few sentences from the abstract of the latter:
> Outbreaks from zoonotic sources represent a threat to both human disease as well as the global economy. Despite a wealth of metagenomics studies, methods to leverage these datasets to identify future threats are underdeveloped. [...] Focusing on the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like viruses, the results indicate that the WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) cluster has the ability to directly infect and may undergo limited transmission in human populations.
I mean... What more is there to say?
You may listen to a (great but rather technical) podcast[3] featuring him, among other experts, and there's even a layman-friendly companion post made by a listener[4] (whom I fully credit and thank for sharing the knowledge).
It's pretty amazing that a company in the financial sector that holds a lot of people's money doesn't have the ability to, say, cut to a backup system.
Considering all of their past fumbles (like thinking FDIC covered brokerage accounts and the multitudes of technically issues) I wonder if their user-base will finally start migrating elsewhere. It's clear they're don't have the talent to handle this.
Do we know how much emissions can be attributed to Amazon / AWS? I'm curious if this $10 billion fund could offset that or if it's too small to cover their own use.
Though, to be fair to Amazon, this is at least a good goal:
> Amazon expects 80% of its energy use to come from renewable energy sources by 2024, up from a current rate of 40%, before transition to zero emissions by 2030.
It all depends on whether you're comparing to a counterfactual or not. If you compare the emissions caused by AWS to those emissions simply not happening then that's a pretty severe source of carbon. If you compare it to companies hosting all that computing themselves then I think it's a pretty clear economic win. If you think that a lot of that would be self-hosted but many of the uses simply wouldn't exist then it's hard to say.
For Amazon I really feel like I have no idea about it. With warehouses instead of big box stores you've got a lot less volume being lighted and heated plus a lot of individual cars driving to a central place are replaced by a few large delivery fans then that's the same sort of win you get from people switching to driving the bus. But two-day shipping for rare items that involves flying them across the country is terrible for the environment. So I don't think that I have any clue what the net environmental impact of Amazon has been.
The purpose of the CDP is precisely for this kind of public shaming or praising, for keeping track of which companies are reporting what. Amazon is really bad for not disclosing anything.
Attributing emissions to Amazon/AWS is not a trivial problem. What you'd really want to estimate is AmazonEmissions-CounterfactualEmissions, which is the emissions caused by companies that would jointly provide the services demanded by consumers from Amazon, in the counterfactual world where Amazon didn't exist.
If Amazon reported their emissions, we can corroborate their Scope 1 emissions with other companies' Scope 3 emissions and get an indication of just how much Amazon is directly responsible for.
Amazon, however, discloses nothing. This is the kind of thing that regulations are for. In other countries, disclosure is mandatory, and I would say for our survival as a species, absolutely essential. We need data before we can know what direction to take.
When we do our GHG assessment at the company where I work, we estimate our Scope 3 emissions based on what has been leaked about the location of Amazon's data centres and what we know about the electricity grid in those locations. We look at our CPU usage on the AWS console and estimate the energy required with some assumptions of the hardware.
It introduces a lot of uncertainty and we could do better if Amazon disclosed their emissions.
It's kind of irrelevant how much harm a single company does, since that company exists to serve a demand that would simply be filled by other companies if it didn't exist. Maybe those theoretical other companies would have marginally better business practices vis-a-vis the environment, but it's not like they would operate in a wholly alternative economic system.
simplifying down complex issues to fit "the curves" narrative often misses a lot of really important nuance.
to wit, let's imagine there's an incumbent company that serves out the demand in an incredibly efficient but environmentally harmful manner. further suppose this is a large national player that's willing to eat some losses in order to crowd out the whole "efficient allocation of resources" type new businesses that may spring up and serve that demand in an environmentally friendly manner.
according to "the curves", there's no room to displace that incumbent because they're stuck in a local maximum when it comes exclusively to satisfying demand. but it's pretty clear that there are externalities that, when considered, make it an attractive target for change by different players.
It's not irrelevant: a single company can undertake different economic activities that produce the same economic outputs with different ecological results. I've seen this first-hand in my line of work. When you make companies publish their greenhouse gas KPIs, they start to reduce them.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/01/03/elizabeth-holmes-tria...