Linked List: January 4, 2022

Tuesday, 4 January 2022

Peer Review of Marc Andreessen’s Theranos Tweets ★

Don’t know why he deleted this gem from 2015.

How Much Fraud Can a Fraudster Fraud? ★

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column for Bloomberg:

And so when Holmes was charged with wire fraud, it was for a mix of investor fraud and patient fraud. “Jurors heard Theranos patients testify their blood-test results falsely led them to believe they had unhealthy conditions,” but found Holmes not guilty on those counts. I don’t know why — I was not at the trial, and I certainly wasn’t in the jury room — but it seems plausible that Holmes was less personally culpable for those tests than she was for her own pitches to investors. But never mind that.

Instead, my point here is that if you do a fake blood test on a patient, you have arguably defrauded him (though Holmes was acquitted of that), but how much have you defrauded him really? Arguably the answer is quite a lot; arguably he is quite badly harmed by thinking he had a deadly disease and taking drastic steps to fight it, or thinking he did not have a deadly disease and missing the chance to fight it. But arguably the answer is $14.95, or whatever he paid for the blood test (I made that number up): You were doing fraud for money, and the money you got from any one patient is fairly small. Whereas the money you got from Betsy DeVos was $100 million.

Dithering ★

Dithering is back after the holiday break. If you’re not listening, you’re missing out. Best $5/month you’ll ever spend, trust me.

What Hi-Fi: ‘Is Bluetooth Holding Back Apple’s AirPods?’ ★

Tom Parsons has a good interview with Gary Geaves, VP of acoustics at Apple, providing some insight into the design of AirPods 3:

Everything points to Apple taking sound quality very seriously with the AirPods 3, and all of its modern-day audio products for that matter, and the recent launches of Lossless, Hi-Res Lossless and (in a slightly different way) Spatial Audio point to a real push towards higher audio quality. But there’s a catch, as far as I can see it — a bottle-neck that’s been preventing real qualitative leaps in the sound of wireless headphones essentially since wireless headphones came into being. I’m talking about Bluetooth, of course, which almost all wireless headphones, including AirPods, rely upon and which doesn’t have the data rate for hi-res or even lossless audio. I ask Geaves whether the use of Bluetooth is holding back his hardware and stifling sound quality.

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about”, he says, “but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and ... I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”, he smiles.

A rare exception to Betteridge’s Law. I sincerely hope Apple has something proprietary in the works, perhaps for AirPods Pro 2.