The most important part of your reputation is admitting fault. Sometimes your product isn't perfect. Lying to your investors about automation rates is far worse for your reputation than just taking the L.

The key is to at least be believable. Anyone with any sense realized that Theranos' claims were literally impossible.

It’s tens of millions of dollars lol.

The emperor just took off his socks and is starting to do a little uncoordinated “sexy” dance

We ought to just view and treat them as defense contractors and 3 letter agencies!

Monopoly? IPO? Exit and leave the bags with someone else?

This is bloody absurd

So it's doubly surprising to me the government chose (criminal) wire fraud, not (civil) securities fraud, which would have a lower burden of proof.

Government lawyers almost never try to make their job harder than it has to be.

You might argue this is a flawed example, but we've automated huge workflows at work that turned major time-consuming PITAs into something it wouldn't occur to most people that a human has anything to do with it.

You could try to convince a jury of this argument, sure. Do you think it will work? And if you do go with that argument then are you actually convincing the jury of your guilty conscience- often an important part of a white collar crime where state of mind of the defendant is very important?

a good example is O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901, also known as the Maine Dairy oxford comma case. the District Court followed the intent but the Appeals court followed the law as written.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-com...

from the Appeals Court ruling

> The District Court concluded that, despite the absent comma, the Maine legislature unambiguously intended for the last term in the exemption's list of activities to identify an exempt activity in its own right. The District Court thus granted summary judgment to the dairy company, as there is no dispute that the drivers do perform that activity. But, we conclude that the exemption's scope is actually not so clear in this regard.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-190...

https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/06-03-2018/the-mystery-...

Interestingly this was a task that could probably be done well enough by AI now.

Not that these guys knew how close to reality they turned out to be. I assume they just had no idea of the problem they were attempting and assumed that it was at the geotaging a photo end of the scale when it was at the 'is it a bird' end.

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic in assuming people who do this are honestly attempting to solve the problem and fudging it to buy time. In general they seem more deluded about their abilities than planning a con from start to finish.

> But despite Nate acquiring some AI technology and hiring data scientists, its app’s actual automation rate was effectively 0%, the DOJ claims.

Sometimes people are just dishonest. And when those people use their dishonestly to fleece real people, they belong in prison.

AI stands for "Actually, Indians."

>Apple's AI/ML group has been dubbed "AIMLess" internally

The article: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/10/chaos-behind-siri-revea...

"Our bleeding edge AI/MT app..." does not sound bad at all.

Even of you replace 'reality' with 'true' amd 'truth' the logic doesn't quite work out.

If I replace "reality" with "truth", it does not work out because it makes no sense: "truth cannot be racist" makes no sense whatsoever. In relation or correspondence to what? It does work with reality, however.

As a comment on "Reality cannot be racist".

FWIW my best friend is South Indian. In the North, he is hated for unknown reasons, different caste or whatever, I do not know. He usually tells me everything about Indians that I do ask.

Another FWIW, he likes a barista (he is currently studying in the UK where he does not face any racism), and he came to me with help as to how to approach her. It is a good thing he did (he admitted it) because he would have ruined it by seeming so desperate, which seems to be a common trend among Indians, too. This is reality, too. To what extent? I do not know, but enough to notice. He is otherwise (despite being an Indian) a very well-mannered, curious, and smart person. He does seem to care much less about hygiene than one should, and blames things on diet, rather than just lack of hygiene. We discussed it in detail and he agreed, eventually.

While we are at it, I dislike Indian accents, too, generally. This is a preference. It does not make me racist. Do you think it does?

At any rate, if you have any questions, I am willing to answer (with his permission if it concerns him), but ultimately, I do not think it is racist.

Elsewhere in the world, we'd all it xenophobia, or Indophobia if one has something against Indian people specifically.

Though in this case, it's driven primarily by economic stereotypes, coming from the country becoming a cheap services outsourcing destination for the West, so there should be a better term coined for it. The anti-Indian sentiment in IT seems to be the services equivalent of the common "Made in China = cheap crap" belief, and because it applies to services and not products, it turns into discriminating people.

Is your problem that their phrasing invites stereotyping, or that the stereotype it invites happens to be negative? Because if it's the latter, do you really think that's the semantic intention here?

Regarding Germans, if the news was, "AG deportation private company is a scam, they were sending people to forced euthanasia"

and someone came and said, "AG stands for Actually Germans". I am sure no German would want to be associated with that.

I would also note that OP merely posited a thought experiment. They’re not policing anyone. “Get a life” is perhaps a little harsh?

Here’s another thought experiment. If you had a job interview for a senior position at Microsoft and your interviewer was Satya Nadella, would you make this joke?

That's why the persons, intent and context makes all the difference between something being funny and something being ofensive. And you could tell that statement wasn't in bad faith or meant to be derogatory.

>If you had a job interview for a senior position at Microsoft and your interviewer was Satya Nadella, would you make this joke?

Please don't move the goalposts to bad faith arguments, The casualness of the HN comment sections very different than the context of a job interview, hence my comment above on context mattering. Do you talk to your friends the way you talk to HR at work?

And yes, I'm sure graybeard Microsoft employees who worked with Nadella for a long time also make such jokes and banter with him behind closed doors and they all laugh, people are still people and don't maintain their work persona 24/7 or they'd go crazy.

You obviously disagree, which is fine - I'm not calling you a racist - but to me, "get a life" is a pretty harsh reaction to someone raising a concern about a joke they find in poor taste.

The point I was trying to make about the job interview and Nadella, which I may have made clumsily, is not that we ought to use the tone we use in job interviews everywhere. My point is that Nadella is an extraordinarily accomplished Indian person and this "joke" would likely fall flat with that sort of audience. I think that's a decent barometer for whether the joke is in poor taste or not.

Again speaking personally, as a white dude, I avoid making jokes about minorities. That used to be pretty much common sense, although I recognize that there's a certain culturally ascendant viewpoint that disagrees with that. But my decision to treat people respectfully isn't about what's culturally in vogue, and I'm still willing to bet that a lot of the people of colour who laugh along when white people make jokes at their expense are thinking something else entirely.

I can’t even count the number of of times I have shut down “AI” projects where the actual plan was to use a labor pool to simulate AI, in order to create the training data to replace the humans with AI. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a terrible idea for some cases, but you can’t just come straight out of the gate with fraud. Well, I mean, you could. But. Maybe you shouldn’t.

Yes, I did. By repeating someone else's apropos joke, I get to reap the sweet, sweet internet points.

they 100% use this AI "Actually Indians" technology

In that case, I believe it's a scam. 0% isn't some edge case.

Neither of these solved the problem that our stack is a pile of cat shit and needs some maintenance from people who know what the hell they are doing. It’s not solving a problem. It’s adding another layer of cat shit.

Tesla robots and Taxis enter the room...

See:

> As SANIGER knew, at the time nate was claiming to use AI to automate online purchases, the app’s actual automation rate was effectively 0%. SANIGER concealed that reality from investors and most nate employees: he told employees to keep nate’s automation rate secret; he restricted access to nate’s “automation rate dashboard,” which displayed automation metrics; and he provided false explanations for his secrecy, such as the automation data was a “trade secret.”

> SANIGER claimed that nate's "deep learning models" were "custom built" and use a "mix of long short-term memory, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning."

> When, on the eve of making an investment, an employee of Investment Firm-1 asked SANIGER about nate's automation rate, that is, the percentage of transactions successfully completed with nate's AI technology, SANIGER claimed that internal testing showed that "success ranges from 93% to 97%."

(from [1])

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1396131/dl?inline

I'd argue the opposite. AI typically generalizes very well. What it can't do well is specifics. It can't do the same thing over and over and follow every detail.

That's what's surprised me about so many of these startups. They're looking at it from the bottom-up, something ai is uniquely bad at.