> Tools For Humanity is actually partnering with Thirty Seconds to Mars on their 2027 European tour. While TFH has not disclosed the actual reason for the false Bruno Mars announcement, it looks a bit like a case of mistaken identity. Pretty ironic, since the company’s whole shtick is supposedly verifying human identities.
That was like living out and episode of Arrested Development in real time. I have a hard time recalling it without mentally casting Jeffrey Tambor as Rudy Giuliani.
This really sounds like an AI voice agent transcribed "Thirty Seconds to Mars" to "30 seconds for Bruno Mars" and then no one actually proof-read the thing.
Probably like the children game "Broken Telephone" or "Gossip" where after a long chain of word of mouth input does no longer match output. Sprinkle communication between different companies on top of that.
Thirty Seconds to Mars -> "The Mars band" -> ?? -> Bruno Mars
I routinely have to correct product managers repeatedly on key details of how their products work and how their customers operate so this doesn’t surprise me at all. It is totally a mistake I could see a product management director having been corrected on a dozen times but they keep making it.
I have to ask you for coaching advice here, as I may or may not be experiencing similar things. Does the correction impact your political capital? I am a firm believer in critique in private, but in key meetings where capabilities are the inputs to other discussion, it is difficult to bite my tongue
Lately I’m realizing what an absolute drain imposter syndrome is. I see things like this and I think maybe I could jump three levels up into a completely different department and be just fine, at least for a while. Then maybe fail up?
You might not have the right core incompetence here. Like could you have honestly (from your point of view) reported that you had a Bruno Mars collaboration? You might have double checked.
Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies. Somehow we have adopted this corporate mysticism that tells us that people with CxO or SVP in their titles are somehow smarter, more skilled, more qualified than the rank-and-file, but I don't think it's true. They eat and shit just like we do.
> Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies.
I'm not so sure about that.
When I do a thought exercise and put myself in our CEO's shoes, I think "ok, which decisions do I need to make today to keep the company thriving in the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?"
For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
Here's the trick: the CEO doesn't know either, but they make decisions anyway. Knowing that they don't know is a good skill for a CEO to have, it freezing when they don't know is not.
You would also have a whole team of consultants, advisors, lawyers, and VP+ people specializing in each area telling you what the problems and possibilities are if you actually had that job. They're not operating in a vaccuum.
I do agree here. Being a CEO is in fact stressful. I think as someone pointed out, your first problem is you're thinkin 3, 5, 10 years. Unless you're a founder building your company, my observation is think in quarters. A year at most. You just need to survive long enough to move on to bigger things. The mess you leave is the next guy's problem. And I don't know how to live like that.
Nah, even if you fail miserably, you'll still get a nice payout and retire comfortably. Hell, you can even commit crimes and the company will pay the fines for you!
> For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
The issue I have with it is it's completely unsurprising. They just don't care and are testing the waters with the consequences or the lack thereof for these types of lies. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
What is frustrating to me is the IRS was scammed. They sent my refund to some identity thief. This from an institution that if I owed them 10 cents, they could track down all of my financial accounts but they decide to deposit in some rando's account.
Sorry that happened to you, but these verifiers won't solve that problem. It's pretty easy to get a picture of someone's face and irises. Especially once a few more data bases inevitably leak so the government can get the data for free use.
That doesn't solve anything when the fraudster is filing a fake return. They are under no obligation to include all of your carefully chosen income and deductions that get you to $1000 owed.
What? In order to get a refund, that means you have to overpaid what you owe. It's pretty simple. If you are not putting in enough, the fraudster cannot get a refund as you still owe. Like, where is the break down? They would have to know how much you have paid, and then file so many deductions that it'd probably trigger an audit. If you file that many audits not with an account signing off of them, I could only imagine that would trigger an audit as well. Then again, the IRS has been beaten so badly that they barely have enough employees to function.
In DK they just send it to your "nem konto", the same bank account that also gets your wages. More or less a sym link, so even if you move bank it will follow. Makes life easy.
In a sane world, this would just be a case of fraud between the IRS and the fraudster, and the person whose information was used would have nothing to do with it. It's unfortunate that we have this need to call it "identity theft" in order to try to shift the responsibility to some unrelated third party.
I mean, the US is the country that doesn't want a national id.
So instead the defacto ID is your SSN. This was never designed with that in mind, lacks all security mechanisms/checksums and all.
And if you were born before a certain time, all digits except the last few were determined by where you were born. And those last digits are the ones they frequently ask for...
That may be true. If they use LLms to write up all of their internal documents, it may have just pulled a "partnership" out of thin air, and no one bothered to check. "I guess we have one!"
"the company’s whole shtick is supposedly verifying human identities" - that as PR means that from the next year forward you can expect official government services to require you to use that company. This is just observation from how the tech world works.
Something I don’t understand, how does that verify identity? Couldn’t a third-party person simply save the pictures taken by the Orb (especially by modifying the firmware)?
What’s with this crypto-coins that goes with it ? That doesn’t make sense, seems like a pretext
Perfect - I have removed all of them. Once again, I apologize I should have been more careful. I've also erased the database and the email server on the off chance that any trace of this remained there. And no need to worry about the backups, I got those too.
I can modify the script to make this sort of thing easier to do in the future. The change is minor and it can be quite revealing. Would you like me to do that?
As funny as this is, there is a serious side. This is a case of an unintentional hallucination propagating and amplifying through human social and incentive structures. This is also how probably how religious miracle stories work.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Sam Altman’s unfettered attention to quality and details.
This one is up there with Palantir in the list of companies that I hope will soon fail miserably and painfully.
Things are hacked together, extremely difficult to change (without a pile of more hacks, Palantir is most interested in embedding itself deeper and manipulating RFPs than helping orgs operate more effectively, they waaaaaay overpromise during sales and can’t deliver, costs and timelines overrun by a lot, they’ll shift the goalposts by trying to sell the next Magic Fix before the first thing is finished (because they oversold/botched implementation) or has delivered value commensurate with its cost.
Perhaps. But they made $1.6 billion in net income in 2025, which, from a business perspective, makes them about $10.6 billion more competent than OpenAI.
Bombing a school is the sort of "accident" that happened a lot before Ai and Palantir. Its as believeable an excuse as Ai is for the latest round of layoffs.
:)
I’m trying to imagine the series of events that could lead to this happening and I’m coming up woefully short.
Thirty Seconds to Mars -> "The Mars band" -> ?? -> Bruno Mars
I'm not so sure about that.
When I do a thought exercise and put myself in our CEO's shoes, I think "ok, which decisions do I need to make today to keep the company thriving in the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?"
For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
Neither does your CEO
And media loves outliers or bullshitting on the self made part.
Turned out you can ride far not only despite it, but also thanks to it.
What is frustrating to me is the IRS was scammed. They sent my refund to some identity thief. This from an institution that if I owed them 10 cents, they could track down all of my financial accounts but they decide to deposit in some rando's account.
How does that currently work?
In DK they just send it to your "nem konto", the same bank account that also gets your wages. More or less a sym link, so even if you move bank it will follow. Makes life easy.
if someone else can file for you they can put in whatever info they like, so.
So instead the defacto ID is your SSN. This was never designed with that in mind, lacks all security mechanisms/checksums and all.
And if you were born before a certain time, all digits except the last few were determined by where you were born. And those last digits are the ones they frequently ask for...
This is all just choices guys.
Brought to you by - Looks Good To Me(tm).
> “You’re right, I got these two artists mixed up because of the name. I’m really sorry” — ChatGPT
> OpenAI CEO's company announces partnership with The Mars Volta
https://humanidentity.io, https://protocol.humanidentity.io
Disclaimer: I am the author, feedback appreciated
What’s with this crypto-coins that goes with it ? That doesn’t make sense, seems like a pretext
I can modify the script to make this sort of thing easier to do in the future. The change is minor and it can be quite revealing. Would you like me to do that?
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13865555/thirty-seconds-to-mars-ja...
See: the crypto argument that it’s successful because number go up when it is almost entirely pump and dumps and money laundering.
I don’t view that as success, but people do.
Sheeeeesh
Fitting partnership. They should call it Hitler Brotherhood, or something like that.
Maybe even Thiel would join and others.
Still hilarious given the company's mission, but the comments here make fun of the wrong technological aspect.
Don't fall for it.