Kimberly T > Recent Status Updates

“Shoemaker and the little military delegation he was leading had been invited to Palo Alto to bless Theranos’ plans to deploy its devices in the Afghan war theatre, not to raise objections about its regulatory strategy.”

Oh boy. Tech that doesn’t work in warfare.

“With Walgreens and Safeway on board as retail partners, Elizabeth suddenly faced a problem of her own making: she told both companies her technology could perform hundreds of tests on small blood samples. The truth was the Edison could only do immunoassays…many other routine blood tests required completely different laboratory techniques.”

Elizabeth. Seriously.

“With her black turtleneck, her deep voice, and the green kale shakes she sipped on all day, Elizabeth was going to great lengths to emulate Steve Jobs, but she didn’t seem to have a solid understanding of what distinguished different types of blood tests. Theranos also failed to deliver to let him see its lab and to demonstrate a live vitamin D test on its device.”

“The company was lurching from one ill conceived initiative to another. … Encouraging someone to rely on a theranos blood test to make an important medical decision was something else altogether. Chelsea found it reckless and irresponsible.”

And she couldn’t tell anyone that she left!

Pfizer pulling out of collaboration with Theranos and this not being told to Chelsea running a study with a different pharmaceutical partner..

“Elizabeth was so persuasive. She had this intense way of looking at you while she spoke that made you believe in her and want to follow her.”

“Chelsea mentioned her job blues, prompting Elizabeth to text back, ‘why don’t you come work for me?’”

That can’t possibly work out.

"If the Theranos system was in the final stages of fine-tuning as he'd been told, how could a completely different technical issue be the new holdup every quarter? That didn't sound to him like a product that was on the cusp of commercialization."

what kinda spell did Elizabeth Holmes put on people to continue investing.. actually its manipulation and threats and all the classic stuff

Ok Elizabeth being unable to explain further about her microchip patch system that can analyze blood and make a “process control decision” about how much drug to deliver…. Girl, just out here lying

Guys, the blood test stuff of Theranos 1.0 doesn’t even work, they played a video recording of the non real time result to the investors.

“The first set of numbers he’d come up with hasn’t been to her liking, so he’d revised them upward. He was a little uncomfortable with the revised numbers, but he figured they were in the realm of the plausible if the company executed perfectly.”

Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything comes out in October! I wanted to know more about Theranos!

“The Semiotech warriors believe that Wyatt/Hayes has developed new software capable of fine tuning paralinguistic cues in order to maximize the emotional response evoked in viewers.”

Hey nice, generative AI?

“This debate isn’t just about commercials and cosmetics, it’s about determining what’s the appropriate relationship between the mind and the body. Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our natures? That, you have to agree, is a profound question.”

“Every on this issue up the same results: looks help people get ahead. We can’t help but think of good looking people as more competent, more honest, more deserving of others. None of it’s true, but their looks still give us that impression. Calli doesn’t blind you to anything: beauty is what blinds you. Calli lets you see.”

“A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences. You experience the operation of that circuitry as the feeling that a person is beautiful, or ugly, or somewhere in between. By blocking the neutral pathways dedicated to evaluating those features, we can induce calliagnosia.”

Ok I sort of get it? The great equalizer?

Liking what you see: a documentary

“.. requiring students to adopt calliagnosia as long as they’re enrolled. What prompted us was the release of a spex version of Visage. That’s the software that, when you look at people through your spex, shows you what they’d look like with cosmetic surgery… the deep societal problem is lookism.”

What in the fresh hell

Hell is the Absence of God is so wild. I have to think hard on this one and what Neil, Janice, and Ethan got from the visitation from the angel.

“For Neil the mystery was solved because he understood that everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain. So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation.

And God sent him to Hell anyway.”

Oh my god.

“Once we have human reproduction under control, we will have a means of preventing the poor from having such large families as so many of them persist in having right now.”

Oh so it’s eugenics. It’s always eugenics

Okay so the epithets / special words used to animate and automate the Golems is kinda fucked up thinking about the sexual epithets used to create… nonhuman subclass species for sex work. Oh god I see it now, they’re gonna animate the automatons to be the slave class

It’s IVF! Robert being really gung ho about improving conditions for the working class is really sweet though. He’s got a mission, even if seemingly the end of the human population is incoming.

No wait they’re doing in vitro fertilization with names? What the hell

“The human species has the potential to exist for only a fixed number of generations, and we are within five generations of the final one.”

So… Robert’s automatons will be basically uploading human consciousness into a robot?

This short story with true names and golems reminds me a little of the Bartimaeus trilogy, which I do wanna reread ! This also seems a bit like a “robots are gonna replace all humans” capitalism with Robert’s automation being able to do the manufacturing.

Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place.

“If you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?”

“Cause I wanna hear it!”
(Jesus.)

Now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

(Oh god. She knows her daughter dies.)

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all.
A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

When you are 3, you’ll pull a dish towel and bring that salad bowl on top of you.

I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead it seemed as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl: an instinct that I felt right in following.

(Oh. The memories, they’re the future, and the past. Louise sees it telelogically, like the circular language.)

The existence of free will meant we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in.

(Like the Heptapod B language! Also I’m aware of the twist, I think. There’s a time loop here.)