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Emily VelascoMLE_online@social.afront.org
Oct 19, 2026, 4:27 PM
Had dinner with a friend last night who is moving from Salt Lake City to LA to join a startup. Over dinner she told me that the startup intends to buy a massive US corporation. She's confident that's going to happen.
I was skeptical that was going to be possible to begin with. Then she told me their CEO used AI to design some major parts of their plan, and that the company's engineers are looking at what they're supposed to build and saying it doesn't make any sense.
She's drunk the kool-aid though. She's a true believer. She's gone into debt to buy equity.
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Replies

Emily VelascoMLE_online@social.afront.org
Oct 19, 2026, 4:34 PM
I wonder how many other "AI-forward" startups are there out there, promising the moon like this while offloading all the critical thinking to an LLM
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saarmullersaarmuller@mastodon.social
Oct 19, 2026, 5:01 PM
@MLE_online Critical meaning telling you what you wanna hear ...
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JWcph, Radicalized By Decencyjwcph@helvede.net
Oct 19, 2026, 5:03 PM
@MLE_online I guarantee that the number is "far too many"...
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SiliconFarmerSiliconFarmer@mastodon.social
Oct 19, 2026, 9:59 PM
@MLE_online all of them...
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Bitten Mitten 🧛‍♀️mitten@social.lol
Oct 19, 2026, 5:34 PM
@MLE_online Oof. That's probably not going to work out too well for her. For the last decade or two, start-up financing was basically at 0%, so it was easy/cheap to start a new thing. Now it's much, much more expensive to borrow and thus much, much harder to make a go of a new start-up (or to buy a major corporation). They need to find marks who are willing to invest in the hype, because outside/bank financing is too hard/expensive to get. I suspect your friend is one of those marks, which is truly unfortunate, of course.
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Emily VelascoMLE_online@social.afront.org
Oct 19, 2026, 5:56 PM
@mitten supposedly they have some big VCs backing them. Could that just be snake oil? yes. could the VCs also be marks? yes
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Steve Herseyn1xnx@tilde.zone
Oct 19, 2026, 5:58 PM
@MLE_online
EJECT, EJECT!
There are so many red flags here that I expect to see a Chinese military parade roll by.
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Emily VelascoMLE_online@social.afront.org
Oct 19, 2026, 9:48 PM
@n1xnx she already gave them a bunch of money for stock. She might as well try and collect some paychecks
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vxovxo@digipres.club
Oct 20, 2026, 3:10 PM
@MLE_online @n1xnx yeah I hope she gets a windfall out of this before the whole AI circlejerk becomes a dead spooge vortex
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b3lt3rb3lt3r@mastodon.b3lt3r.com
Oct 19, 2026, 8:32 PM
@MLE_online that sounds terrifying :-(
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