I really want this to be true, but the founder launching AGI 9 months ago doesn't help their credibility a lot. And drip-marketing test results seems like a super weird thing to do, whether it's real or it's not.
Don't forget that a lot of scams aren't initially on purpose. Eg Theranos by all accounts very gradually morphed from a mild "fake it till you make it" scheme (mild by Silicon Valley standards at least) into a full-blown scam over years of growth and funding, the lies needing to be deeper and deeper over time to cover up the earlier ones.
I guess all I'm trying to say is the fact that it's a bad strategy for a scam, doesn't really mean it's not a scam.
Those Verge motorcycles appear to actually exist and work though, so that's a data point in favour of this being real.
Yes, I want this too good to be true battery to be real and that's why I'm looking into such things but this claim is false.
He apparently launched "Artificially Superintelligence", which appears to be a marketing term for some architecture this company was working on. The "AGI" term seems to come from people who are going after this CEO.
I wasn't able to come up with people who claim that they were actually scammed, i.e. paid for a product that wasn't delivered or made an investment into something that doesn't exist.
This appears to be a much cleaner slate than the titans of AI. I'm inclined to believe that those alleged scams are not scams by SV standard.
> I wasn't able to come up with people who claim that they were actually scammed, i.e. paid for a product that wasn't delivered or made an investment into something that doesn't exist.
I'm gonna ask the other way around. Name one successful product by the CEO that has reached mass production and you can get it right now.
See my other comment [1]. There's dozen of failed products. That one AppGyver product is from 15 years ago. Since then, he hasn't created any other product. The motorcycle however is real. The battery may also be. The issue with Solid State Batteries is that it's almost impossible to scale them.
The guy changes the industry he's in as often to match what's currently popular.
Failed startup isn’t a scam, to be a scam it needs to be presented in a way that is designed to collect money but that money be used for something else.
Otherwise YC would have been scam center, very few of YC companies don’t fail.
That’s ridiculous, neither making your first product nor failing is scamming.
In this particular case you can buy motorbikes and sport cars made using electric motors from the same company that makes this battery. So at least 1 real product that I know of.
You cannot buy them. Have you visited their website? The way this works, you pay a non-refundable fee. And if this motorcycle turns out to be real, then you get to pay the rest amount (or cancel and lose some money). Because they manufactured a few units doesn't mean it's scalable (or profitable).
The motorbikes are not new, there are people who bought them and are using them. Switching to the new battery is new but those bikes with motors from this company exist. I think you need to do your research before arguing further.
If your research is YouTube then I'm sorry to disappoint you but those people are affiliated with Verge (or Donut). I don't think there's a single video where someone gives a review and they paid using all their own money, is there? Have you done your research before you started arguing the CEO is legit?
I’m pretty sure if I keep pushing you enough eventually you’ll will make your life about going after me accusing me of who knows what. This means that your opinions should not to be taken seriously as your motivations are unclear.
Yea sure Immich taking zero responsibility for possibly causing damages in hundreds of dollars and not warning their uses is fair, yeah, let them go. Maybe actually read the issues before judging? (oh noes, he blame them so he must be bad!)
I don’t care about immich etc, you just gave me the impression of someone who loves going after people. Your primary participation here appears to be for claiming that people committing scams, so I guess it’s your hobby. Maybe I am wrong but I also don’t see why we should argue as those scam claims are your opinions.
> I don’t care about immich etc, you just gave me the impression of someone who loves going after people
Man I don't want anything else but success for everybody. Once someone fs up, there's nothing bad in improving. Dismissing people because they are pointing bad things out doesn't help (referring to Immich).
> Your primary participation here appears to be fir claiming that are people committing scams
If their website makes fun of their "scam mark" (idonutbelieve.com), then maybe it's not just me? Maybe all other people from YT, Reddit, X are reasonably skeptical? If the battery turns out to actually be real, that's great! (I actually mean it.)
Having said all that, despite our disagreements, have a nice day. Maybe we just set off on a wrong foot and the future will be brighter.
I don't think you're going to see investors crashing out on the internet that they got scammed. The ASI video by the CEO shows exactly that he has no idea what's happening. Seems like an investor pitch scam. I wish that the battery was true tho. It's always amazing to see progress in the world.
I never said that. If I did, prove me by quoting me.
This aside, all I said is that you don't get to hear that on the internet, because such stuff is unpopular and doesn't usually bring attention. And if they signed an NDA, the lawsuit may be not public.
All links were obtained from the CEO's LinkedIn page. The last one is definitely a scam. They ask for your money and promise that their magical algorithm will give you profit.
The first one has fake "featured in", Privacy Policy does not exist and almost all those websites were using Wordpress (perhaps made by the same guy?).
My Eufy claims to do all processing locally. I admit I never verified this (eg turn off the wifi while it's running - I should actually). But they were the only Chinese manufacturer that at least bothered to write anything about data locality and privacy in their marketing materials, and that got them my money.
Obviously at any point the brand can send a firmware update down the wire that does send a realtime video feed from my home right to Chairman Xi's bedroom. I'm aware of that, but the reality also is that the European/US brands currently don't get anywhere near the Chinese price/quality ratio, and I didn't want to muck about with Valetudo, I'm not courageous enough for that.
I'm not super happy about this situation but I am super happy about the robot. It's really very good.
that said, this being 2023 and them being properly shamed might be why their site now says it's all local and TÜV certified (which i doubt means much, but still)? like outrage actually forced them to get their act together?
It's standard practice and it freaks managers the fuck out, esp if they're not familiar with hacker culture. Maybe the standard practice needs some work? I'm not sure, I understand the perspective of security researchers who want to force action on a fix. But I also completely understand how a deadline is perceived as a threat.
Don't forget that there's lots of gray hat / black hat hackers out there as well, who will begin with an email similar to this, add a bitcoin address for the "bug bounty" in the next, and will end with escalating the price of the "bounty" for the "service" of deleting the data they harvested. It's hard even for tech-savvy managers to figure out which of these you're dealing with. Now put yourself into the shoes of the average insurance company middle manager.
For completeness, I don't think this company's behavior is excusable. I'm just saying that maybe also the security community should iterate a bit more on the nuances of the "standard practice" vulnerability reporting process, with the explicit goal of not freaking people out so bad.
They almost certainly did not. They likely just hired a cheap contractor to get their service up, and went with it when "it worked".
The contractor (who was certainly incompetent) probably looked at a bunch of nightmarishly complex identity API's and said "F** it!", combine that with being grossly underpaid and you get stuff like this.
It's a bad situation, of course, and involving threatening lawyers makes it even more ugly. But I can understand how a very small business (knowing nothing about IT other that what their incompetent contractor told them) might get really offended and scared shitless by some rando giving them a 30-day deadline, reporting them to authorities, and demanding that they contact all affected customers.
Most likely, the insurance company handles the actually insurance policies, claims, payouts, etc themselves, but uses a contractor to build their website, user portals, etc.
Web Components are amazing for distributing frontend libraries. But they're awful as building blocks to replace a framework like React, Vue, Svelte or Lit with.
I blame the Chrome people for the misleading naming. The entire term "Web Components" is ridiculous. If only they'd stuck with the technical term, "custom elements", then none of this confusion would've happened. It's pretty obvious to me that custom elements are a great idea for distribution (add a script tag, poof, magic new HTML element exists!), but the term doesn't imply anything about how to best build the internals of your app.
Thing is, Web Components are a needlessly painful abstraction. There's properties and attributes, they're kinda sorta the same but not really and you gotta sync them up manually, the naming is global so you get zero modularity, really it's all a mess. And at the same time, you get no support at all for things like props handling, event calling, data binding; none of the stuff frameworks give you.
But Web Components are also what enabled my company to distribute a single UI library that works with all web frameworks. It's a fantastic technology for that.
tldr:
- distributing UI components: web components
- building an app: just pick a framework already
I'm not sure it's about money. This maybe be increasingly hard to imagine in this age of AI-slop, but some devs actually don't want to publish code that is a terribly embarrassing mess, and prefer to clean it up first.
I know, but not everybody knows or agrees with this. The idea that when someone doesn't put their code online it must be because they want money seems way off the mark to me, and that's the only point I was making.
Fwiw the sensibilities of the --yolo AI-maximizing "I vibe coded a Hospital Information System this afternoon" crowd isn't really representative for the greater dev community I think
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