SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme

Having worked closely but briefly as a technical contractor for a firm that later turned out to be a scam, I figured this is it.

A combination of compartmentalization and churn can keep the charade up for quite a while, and if executed well you can have a pretty big operation with only one or two people being in on it.

I figured something was off but there's a whole gradial spectrum of Schroedinger's Accomplices where most people can seem to be conners or conned.

For this reason, I found the documentaries on NXIVM (Seduced, The Vow) quite interesting - the way the protagonists are framed and how everyone seems to have plausible deniability even with all the video material.

I disagree with your moral conclusion - we all have responsibility as individuals with regards to what our work contributes to. This goes for anything from military personnel to software engineers. That you don't have legal risk doesn't mean you don't have ethical responsibility.

> One effective way to do this is to isolate the responsibilities of individuals such that no one but the top few have the whole picture view.

The following is probably just an already completely debunked conspiracy theory with zero basis in fact but what you describe is precisely how special compartmentalized intelligence works. Maybe many of the corporate and government organizations in security and intelligence operate in this siloed way, possibly at the risk of a lack of oversight and accountability which helps any abuses go unaddressed. Official secrecy oaths and classification perhaps compounds this vulnerability to misuse.

And except for the public heads very occasionally rolling, it's likely nobody takes responsibility (in a justice sense) when abuses occur. How do you get people to carry our these things? Simple finance, and isolation could be one way as mentioned. Coercive control via blackmail, planting evidence, fake accusations or intimidation could be other effective methods, especially when you need to secure the cooperation of key people outside the organization, and especially when your daily work involves intelligence collection and deception.

If it occurs at a deep level under the security and compartmentalization shields, then it's unlikely checks and balances could correct it if this sort of corruption was occurring.

Kinda makes you wonder what unspeakable things Apple is doing with their culture of team isolation.

> One effective way to do this is to isolate the responsibilities of individuals such that no one but the top few have the whole picture view.

Which is what Madoff did, I believe.

They also are sitting around listening to leaderships carefully crafted justification day in and day out. I’ve had otherwise smart engineers who work in advertising tell me that people enjoy looking them, and any criticism of “user engagement at any cost” is met with bewilderment.

I feel obliged to point out that frogs, when put into a pan of water which is very slowly heated up, do in fact jump out when it gets too hot, contrary to the old story. But, perhaps humans are occasionally not as smart as frogs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

> Members of the FAANG group of companies indulge in quite egregious practices from an outsider's (wider society) perspective but insiders feel it's normal.

What practices do you have in mind?

Yup. I work at a non-Apple FAANG and there are many rooms/buildings I don’t have access to (and many chats I don’t have access to- it’s all need to know).

I recommend “The Dropout” podcast. Very well done, lots of great interviews.

https://abcaudio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/

One of my favorite non-fiction books. It reads like a thriller. I blasted through it in two sittings.

Or share a hash of everything but your personally identifiable info

A book, "Failure to Disrupt Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education", recently came out about exactly this. In an interview, the author, Justin Reich, explained that schools perform so many different functions in so many different ways that MOOCs neve had a shot at replacing it. Instead, it got swallowed up and and integrated with our existing educational system.

[0]https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674089044

A few years ago I went to a coding bootcamp. I had very mixed feelings at the experience.

It was 'run' by the local university, but really was just a package deal they bought from another company.

I gave the university some feedback that they have all the resources at the university to do WAY better than these commercial bootcamps... but the folks involved bought the package deal and are invested in it.

It's sad, the university IMO could do better, if they tried.

Meanwhile the traditional unversity system does work, but is a huge time investment, and the bootcamp system works 'kinda' for some folks ... but fails most IMO.

They have to a certain extent. As an example, half of med students attend class "rarely" or "never" preferring online prep material. The fundamental problem is that the utility of universities is more about credentialing and signalling than actual learning. The Moocs are fine for learning but have 0 credential value. Until that changes they won't replace universities.

They're useful, but I could never see them replacing small-group teaching (1 PhD student/faculty member to 2-3 students), a standard feature of my university. It lets them focus on exactly what _you_ need at that time, and can pick up on weaknesses and misunderstandings you might not have even realised yourself.

I daydream about starting a vegan coop of software developers to sell vegan software to those kind of companies.

And the patient will die if their wifi goes down because it's a piece of crap that listens on a websocket for a stream of commands to inflate or deflate.

>came up with by dorking with a 3D printer and some old parts from a vacuum...

I get the point : it's a scary proposition to have 'hacked' solutions to life-and-death medical struggles that have not yet had the time to be properly vetted for errors or bugs..

BUT

1) Most invention came about the same way, with a rough idea of the goal while attempting to use off-the-shelf/available techniques to attain it.

2) The COVID-19 pandemic was out-of-the-ordinary. If truly worst had come to the worst and there was a total break-down of society and medical care, things like 3d printers and old vacuum parts could have been appropriately re-engineered into appropriate medical care devices by those with the professional know-how to do so.

In other words : even if a "3d printed ventilator", for the sake of argument, is a somewhat hazardous idea in the hands of non-professionals, in the event of cataclysmic world-collapse i'd rather there be , even if simple and preliminary, a mediocre set of tools available for professionals to continue their work where possible.

In my opinion the benefit of these designs being available outweighs the disadvantage that Joe-Bob down the road may try to practice self-tracheostomy procedures.

>It was telling when you didn't see established ventilator makers coming up with their own ad hoc cheap-o designs...

the only thing that tells me is that the profit margins weren't 'right enough' to interest large corporate backers into helping -- especially during a time of economic recess and beginning of thrift strategies from the worlds' corporations in expectation of economic problems down the line until the pandemic is over.

The British NHS pay Mercedes F1 for 10,000 units of some whizz-bang CPAP machine during the pandemic.[0] CPAP machines certainly aren't ventilators, but Mercedes F1 certainly isn't an established ventilator maker, either.

So now we have lordstown and nikola.

Byton also seemed like vaporwesr for a long time.

I have personally done a lot of DD and I will tell you that, while I am aggressive because I assume people are lying to me and maybe themselves, 99% of the time when I’ve done a tandem DD the other technilogists onvolved basically just feign interest and give a gut feel. I’ve also been on the receiving end of DD and witnessed this.

I think you are dramatically overestimating the quality, depth and especially the diligence of that process.

I'm sure e.g. A16Z did a very thorough DD before investing. But, how much time did they invest in following up this company after every year since? Meanwhile, the VC brands were on proud display on the company's website as a mark of trust.