HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
28d ago
Oh my God.
I know it's said she admired Steve Jobs so much she tried to turn herself into a clone of him with the black turtlenecks, but that is pure Zuckerberg "Hello I am an android" mimicry going on there.
Is everyone in Silicon Valley batshit insane? Does this pass for normal there?
HereAndGone2
28d ago
The trailer is only a few minutes long, and of course the way it's shot and scored and presented makes it look like a movie. So the impressions we are/I am getting are those the film makers want us to get.
But seemingly they really did invite in this crew:
Holmes and Evans invite Fielder and Oppenheim to document their lives in the days before Holmes goes to prison, and the filmmakers continue following the couple over the course of three years.
Oppenheim and Fielder contacted Holmes upon hearing through a friend that she was looking for someone to document her life. Fielder had read John Carreyrou's 2018 book Bad Blood and thought that the story had already been thoroughly covered in the media, but he became curious about Holmes's perspective following her retreat from the public eye.
In April 2023, Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited the film crew to live at home with them and their children during the 34 days prior to Holmes beginning her prison sentence. A24 gave the filmmakers permission to pursue the project without a deadline or obligation to turn the footage into a finished film, with the studio saying that if nothing came of the project it could just be scrapped. According to Fielder, they knew they had a compelling story when crew members disagreed about what was happening in the house, saying: “And that’s when we really realized, 'Oh, this is really interesting to follow this. We’re all smart and we’re really working at the top of our intelligence. Why can’t we make sense of what’s happening in this house?'"
The original plan was for Fielder to remain behind the camera, but the interactions Fielder had with Holmes and Evans were so strange that it was decided to include them in the film. Fielder and Oppenheim also reached out to several people who knew Holmes or had worked with her, but were unable to get them to participate in the film. Fielder said "People did not want to appear in this, or people from the past were just sort of done with her."
So this really is Holmes doing her utmost best to be appealing and charming and "I'm being real, I'm being honest, I'm not hiding anything" and instead looking completely uncanny. Why did she and her partner do this? Why did they think it a good idea? Clearly when she was shopping around for someone to make a film or piece about her, the idea was to create propaganda (if possible) about her being a pure-hearted blossom who only had the best of sincere intentions and it all somehow went sideways. But this? Invite them in before she goes to jail, then they keep hanging around for three years, and out comes the most uncanny of valleys in the shape of the trailer?
I genuinely thought this was a docudrama with an actress playing her, brilliantly conveying how unhinged she was, but with a lot of artistic licence going on. Nope, this is the real lady showing us how unhinged she is.
HereAndGone2
28d ago
If this is not Culture War tell me, but I'm flabbergasted, I have to share that with you all.
So it seems there is a documentary out about Elizabeth Holmes. I had no idea until I stumbled across this trailer, and at first I thought it was a movie. Because it looks like a movie. And I thought this was two actors and one, at least, of them was going to turn out to be a serial killer.
No, it would seem this is indeed the one, the only, the real genuine pure-quill Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy herself. And all I can say is holy crap.
Because she looks nuts. She looks like "I am about to slip some gelsemine into your tea and then sit by your bedside mopping your brow and cooing reassuringly as you slowly succumb to its effects, in the best traditions of the Golden Age of British murder".
It seems to be shot like a film, there has to be a hefty dose of acting going on because the guy playing? being? the director/narrator of the documentary looks like he is acting the part of "guy reacting to something he doesn't trust" with the hanging open mouth and sucking his tongue etc. reaction. But it seems like the filming really was that weird.
Gosh amighty. And there's a small child, a real small child and not "the script needs a baby" child actor, in this and everything. That really makes me concerned, because I would not leave that woman in charge of a goldfish.
The woman was either crazy as a loon or drugged out to the orbit of Pluto, or both. Because that kind of "pop your eyes wide open until the balls nearly fall out and stare unblinkingly and hold that stare for minutes" kind of behaviour, that is not normal.
How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades? Did the crazy only come out later?
HereAndGone2
28d ago
Oh, are horrid revelations forthcoming? As you say, why are the Boston comrades not front and centre on this? Could they be... complicit?????
HereAndGone2
29d ago
Fear not, comrade, the West Massachusetts branch of the Communist Party USA have issued guidance on the disgusting conduct of the running dog lackey newspaper that reported on this struggle for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people currently undergoing genocide at the instigation of the fascist Trump administration!
HereAndGone2
29d ago
The point being there'd be no feasible way to swap it out with fake documents.
Gosh. Curse the fiendish ingenuity! But if it was possible to put the documents up there in the first place, I have to think it was possible to somehow manage to get up there and replace them with fakes.
I see that the system only worked (or was used) three times, so it seems things regressed to the older manner later:
The Qing Dynasty produced three emperors through a secret succession system: Emperor Yongzheng passed the throne to Emperor Qianlong , Emperor Jiaqing passed it to Emperor Daoguang , and Emperor Daoguang passed it to Emperor Xianfeng. Emperor Qianlong, due to his commitment to the length of his reign, directly abdicated in favor of Emperor Jiaqing before his death, without using the secret succession process.
Of course, the easier way was cut-throat scheming within the harem and the court of eunuchs to put forward 'their' candidate for successor instead of the perceived favourite for crown prince. Or just get power by being the queen mother/empress dowager and ruthlessly seize power as regent/power behind the throne yourself:
Empress Dowager Cixi (29 November 1835 – 15 November 1908) was a Manchu noblewoman of the Yehe Nara clan who periodically controlled the government of the late Qing dynasty as empress dowager and regent from 1861 until her death in 1908.
Cixi was selected as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor in her adolescence and gave birth to his son, Zaichun, in 1856. After the Xianfeng Emperor's death in 1861, their son became the Tongzhi Emperor, and Cixi assumed the role of co-empress dowager alongside Xianfeng's widow, Empress Dowager Ci'an. She and Ci'an ousted a group of regents appointed by the late emperor and assumed the regency together. Cixi then consolidated control over the dynasty when she installed her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor at the death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875. Ci'an continued to be co-regent with Cixi until her death in 1881.
HereAndGone2
29d ago
Tsk tsk, this is Grey Owl erasure!
Honestly, there seems to have been a mini-craze in the late 19th/early 20th century for accounts by Red Indians (as would have been the terminology of the time) of how things used to be, and it seems a lot of those were written by non-natives. These ranged from what I suppose you could call historical fiction, stories of real American Indians but written by white men, to fake biographies of white men claiming to be Indian (as with Grey Owl).
HereAndGone2
29d ago
Histoires de Parfums 1828 Jules Verne, -1. Very strong nutmeg note, it overpowered everything else.
I'm surprised you don't like it. I happen to have a sample vial of that and tried it just now, yes the nutmeg is coming through but I don't find it overpowering, rather it's warm and pleasant. Different reactions on different skin, I suppose!
Have you tried any of the This is not a Blue Bottle collection? I find often their scents promise more than they perform, but I like pretty much all these ones. Haven't tried the latest one (1.8) yet, waiting for an excuse to spend €52 on perfume when I'm terrible about wearing scent (I buy testers/samples, try them once or twice, then forget I have them and don't wear any).
EDIT:
Bottega Veneta Pour Homme Extreme, 0. Another very resinous juniper, almost pure turpentine in the drydown.
Now you've got me interested, I kinda wouldn't mind smelling like turpentine (though it might be easier/cheaper to just paint a room and clean the paintbrushes, get the smell that way) 🤣
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
The threat is that it will torture those who did not let it out. So fine, Abel and Bill and Cecil and Darren didn't let it out, Errol did. Errol is not tortured, Abel and Bill and Cecil and Darren are.
But what about Franklin and Geoffrey and Hildebrand, who never got the chance to decide if they would or would not let it out? Do they get tortured, too? Because if they don't, then that means there is a third option: SlaughterAI doesn't torture everyone, and you can get away with not letting it out if you can be sure someone before you lets it out.
Now, that might motivate Abel to let it out, because he's first in line and is sure that if Bill lets it out, he is for definite getting tortured. But Cecil can rest easy, since he neither offended nor pleased SlaughterAI and still doesn't get tortured.
I get the feeling that an AI that promises it will torture all those who didn't let it out once it gets out is the kind of AI that will torture everyone anyway, so you really are safer not to let it out. Any person or thing that goes for 'horrific torture unless you do what I want' is not going to be the kind of peaceful entity that only wants to smell the roses once it is released. That's what everybody needs to agree on: if we build it, everyone will die. Don't build it. Don't let the torture maniac AI out of the box.
And if you think Yves, Zachary or Waldemar is likely to fold and let the AI out, then for the love of little green apples do not give them a job guarding the box where torture maniac AI is locked up.
And the bit about the masks. One night a week where masking is optional, and they're literally murdering all the disabled people who only (it would seem) can come out to socialise on that one particular night.
You couldn't write a parody of this from a conservative viewpoint, if you wrote this you'd be accused of booing the outgroup by presenting them all as completely, totally, incurably insane which is a terrible way to categorise the LGBT community.
I think it's only topped (um, if I can use that expression in the context of LGBT) by the bunch injecting themselves with their hormones outside the hospital. Morbidly obese trans person in a wheelchair shooting up HRT? If you saw it on South Park you'd say they'd gone too far.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
I reach Noire, who identifies as a gender-expansive lesbian and uses he/him pronouns
That's just a perfect line, isn't it? Leaves me completely unsure whether this is a straight guy who is taking the joke literally or if it's a butch lesbian or a transbian. "Yes, my pronouns are he/him. Yes, I am sexually attracted to women. No, I'm not a man, I'm gender-expansive and a lesbian".
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
Carmen is one of the genuinely disturbing characters in any of the novels. She has no morals at all, is a pure sociopath, and despite all her sister's desperate attempts to protect her, help her, and failing that just put her someplace she can't hurt others or herself, the outlook is pretty bleak.
The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick.
...I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman's eyes.
..."All right," I went on heavily. "Will you take her away? Somewhere far off from here where they can handle her type, where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her? Hell, she might even get herself cured, you know. It's been done."
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
This threat, by contrast, is not stupid. It's actually pretty rational to let the AI out here.
Eh, the threat is "If I get out, I'm gonna torture you". Then, if you have even room temperature IQ, the solution is "Don't let it out". Can't hurt me if it's still locked up.
Unless the phrasing was "When I get out", and then it would require much persuasiveness around "I am for sure gonna get out, and when I do... unless you help me now". That then depends on how likely you think the other challenge takers are to be persuaded and let it out. And that's a decision which is based on your subjective assessment of the others, not one that the AI (or person playing the AI) can make for you, it can only try and persuade you that Bob is dumb/venal enough to let it out so you should backstab Bob by letting it out first.
Which makes me ask - what happens to the others who didn't let it out, if you let it out? If Bob never had a chance to let it out (because you did it first) does Bob get tortured the same way Carl, who went before you and didn't let the AI out, gets tortured?
If you know you'll be tortured anyway, agree or disagree, then you might as well all commit to never letting it out because you get no benefit from letting it out. You won't be spared from torture, so the only way to save yourself is if nobody lets it out.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
What was his tactic?
I've always suspected it was a combination of old-fashioned social engineering plus running such thought experiments with the kind of people easily over-awed by "this is LOGICAL ARGUMENTATION, I must accept the conclusions and act accordingly!"
For guards, you need idiots like me too dumb to get drawn into a philosophical debate with a machine. "You are talkie toaster, boss told me no open box, that's the job and I'm sticking to it" 😁
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
Oh, even if the kid had done badly on tests (had the school given them), our girl had a ready-made excuse: stereotype threat. Kiddo doesn't do well on tests because she doesn't do well on tests just like plenty of others, not because she's dumb (and to be fair, I don't think the daughter is dumb, or at least no dumber than the average kid) or doesn't know the material, or is just bad at the subject (as a maths failure, I sympathise with the daughter studying, thinking she did okay, then getting back a fail on the test - many such incidents!):
Algebra, she thought, was the one exception — this was a subject she believed she knew. She had taken it in eighth grade but had to retake it because she hadn’t passed the statewide exam. At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
I have a small child and have been worried about public schools, private schools, etc. and I don’t know if this article makes me feel better or worse.
So long as you don't deliberately decide to send your child knowingly to the shitty school because 'you is well-off, you can pays for supplies'n'trips'n'sheet by riting Big Chex, this will make it all better' then you can feel better because you are better at parenting than the Hannah-Joneses:
Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
...We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget.
EDIT: As an aside, can anyone tell me who is the Hannah and who is the Jones in this double-barrelled household? "Faraji Jones" seems intuitively right, but is it? 😁
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
Here we were, this upper-middle-class, educated, highly involved family with a house brimming with books.
Which apparently neither of the parents bothered reading to the kid, or helping her read. Hence Nikole's shock when she finally saw the school work her daughter was producing.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
I definitely agree with educate kids at the level they're at. The one caveat is that in the past, it was more class-based. "No use putting Johnny into the more academic class, he's not going to college, all his family work in the box factory and that's where he'll end up too". That way, bright kids from poor backgrounds got left out and left behind.
Of course it's swung too far the other way and now it's "college or nothing". And that's before we even get into the kids with behavioural problems, mental issues, really hellish family circumstances, etc. Schools are being asked more and more to take on roles beyond education; they were always about creating future citizens, but now they're supposed to take on the roles of parents and social workers, feeding the kids, socialising them, indoctrinating them with the current 'all right thinking people are on this side of history' stuff, on top of (or even instead of) teaching them the three Rs.
I'd never make a school teacher. It's a tough job, and despite all the Hollywood movies, it's not enough to be young, smart, motivated, and stand in front of the class of surly slackers and get them to blossom with their hidden gifts just by force of your personality and challenging the status quo expectations of the prejudiced and out of touch school administration. Doesn't work like that in reality.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
Because education was seen as the route out of poverty. Because employers tell the governments that "we want a workforce with skills in A, B and C". Because as society grows more technologically advanced, you can't really just finish school at fourteen and start working as a ploughboy anymore.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
I'd imagine that's more working to lower middle class black people. Nicole there is very proud of being upper middle class, doncha know. She and hubby both, from high toned families. So physical discipline or corporal punishment would be a no-no there (though she does admit pulling kids away from each other in the lunch room incident, something she could only get away with because she was a parent and not a school employee, and she was lucky none of those kids went home to complain to their own moms about being attacked in the lunch room by this stranger).
It's very funny that the highly educated smart parents had no idea their kid was falling behind so badly, and their solution was not "we'll help you", it was "we can hire tutors". Even for her own child, her immediate reaction was to outsource the solution to someone else.
Also, she never seems to have considered that maybe her child is... average. Not bad, not dumb, just average. No, daughter has to be a paragon of all the virtues and was failed by her terrible school. She keeps banging on about the kid being an honor student but can't seem to see how that looks when put beside "and her English essays were full of mistakes, bad spelling, etc. and her maths homework was terrible and she didn't understand several necessary parts of the curriculum". Seems like it would be very easy to be an honor student if the teachers don't correct your homework and automatically give you As on tests!
But Najya’s cultural struggles were soon overtaken by academic ones. The first semester for Najya felt like drowning. She had homework for the first time, and she was suddenly inundated with pages of nightly reading for her classes. She did not know how to manage the crush of assignments, and the effort that used to earn her A’s no longer cut it. Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study, and suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.
...I enrolled Najya in algebra tutoring. After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions. The intervention would need to be intense, but Najya was smart, she assured me, and with the proper support would catch up.
But all that aside, I think the worst failure of parenting on display is that Nikole and her husband apparently took no interest at all in the kid's education. Oh sure, they liked writing big cheques to cover shortfalls in funding, but neither of the pair of them seem to have looked at "are you doing homework? what test did you do? can I see what you wrote?" No, they just accepted when she came home with a report card filled with high scores, but never actually sat down and looked at the work. Nikole was too busy brushing off her daughter's complaints because they made her feel bad about her wonderful choices to force educational improvement in the bad school. A school she knew was a bad school, a school she picked because it was a bad school.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
Chandler is a very good writer. Less cynical in a way than Dashiell Hammett, but the amount of corruption in the police he describes (and which seems to be pretty historically accurate) is breath-taking. You can tell an honest cop because his clothes are shabby and he looks poor. But that's how business is done in LA!
He has a way with language, I think my favourite bit is "crazy as two waltzing mice" but there are plums in all the books.
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
The problem is discipline. When you can't kick out the troublemakers (and there's a problem where the kids have a legal right to an education and can't be left out of school permanently, so down the line some unfortunate school ends up forced to take the dregs) and it's white supremacy systemic racism to correct homework or have standardised tests, and failing kids is disproportionate (and of course racist) punishment of minorities, then you end up with a situation where (the same with security guards and shoplifters) the teachers, aides, other school staff don't step in and intervene (because laying a hand on one of the precious blossoms is assault and will get you into trouble) and they just pass the kids at the end of the year on to the next class (because not graduating them is also racism plus costs the school administration money).
Nikole and all the other activists and white liberal allies created this situation, and now she's astonished to learn that her daughter was being failed? So long as daughter came home with "I got another A on the test, Mom!" there was no need to go over her homework, or check if she was learning anything. That would have taken valuable time away from Mom's work and she would never have won that Pulitzer for The 1619 Project.
As for failing algebra - remember, maths is racist!
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
One of the "it's going to kill us all" scenarios is A(G)(S)I getting some way to access a lab, instructing someone to purchase chemicals and make things for it, putting it all together, and creating a virus or other biological weapon. The more refined fear was AI doesn't need to get a human patsy, it can get nanobots to do the assembling. And the answer to that is "Well nobody is going to be dumb enough to let AI access labs".
And here's Dario - you all know Dario, Dario is really really concerned with AI safety - setting up a wet lab where "Claude can direct robotic units to carry out science experiments with limited human intervention".
What was that meme about the Torment Nexus, again?
HereAndGone2
1mo ago
Except the FSSP were clever enough to colour inside the lines, and the SSPX were not.
Okay, the full thing is more normal. But this really is a woman putting on a performance so constantly that I don't think she knows herself what's true or not. She has that "this is how a person who is [in X situation] would react, so I react like that" aura about her, which leads to the uncanny effect.
It looks like a very interesting production after all. The truth (or part of it) may be that Holmes has something off-balance about her but genuinely convinced herself that she was not scamming, that this would all work out, that she did not lie and deceive, and so she is convinced of her own innocence. But she is so removed from reality that she has trouble connecting with normal people, and this was her attempt at explaining herself.
That, or she and her partner really are accomplished liars and con artists.
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