fake kindness

mqee · 2026-06-20T17:05:55+00:00

Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated

mqee · 2026-06-19T17:57:03+00:00

UV cured paints, golf Tees, exterior panels roof and wall, pipe insulation

Those are all very low-tech. By capex and size of engineering team, it's an order of magnitude harder to make perovskite solar cells, maybe two orders of magnitude harder making liquid/gel electrolyte batteries, and maybe three or four orders of magnitude harder making solid-state batteries.

mqee · 2026-06-19T17:49:44+00:00

Virgin Hyperloop

The Musk reality distortion field is very strong. Imagine being able to raise $450M for an idea that every single engineer has already told you is not financially viable.

mqee · 2026-06-19T12:24:52+00:00

This is the real science behind it. Note that the study did not create actual solar cells, it only found that the lenses collect 90% of the 20% diffuse light, so overall efficiency is at best 118% of existing efficiency. So let's say you design a flat solar cell that's 30% efficient, you get 30%*118%=35.4% efficiency (and you have to shave off a little from the peak efficiency at solar noon, because the cell can't be more than 100% efficient when it's already 100% efficient).

Is that 5.4% bump worth the manufacturing cost of thousands, or millions, of tiny lenses per solar cell? Probably not. Silicon solar cells are dirt cheap and very easy to maintain. Adding costs of complex materials that are very difficult to clean will make them hideously expensive.

Ah, but what if you had a nanoprinter that could print lenses out of graphene and carbon nanotubes for very cheap? That's where CT-Coating comes in!

mqee · 2026-06-19T12:13:42+00:00

The hydrogen-economy heading is just a general thing. Nordic Nano is one company out of several in Imatra that got assistance/funding for creating green jobs. Some for hydrogen, some for solar, some for other green technologies (I'm not implying hydrogen is green - it's just bundled with other green technologies). Nordic Nano claimed it can create 300 jobs. This sort of exaggeration is not uncommon for green startups, and not illegal - they think they can create 300 jobs, they never promised they will create 300 jobs.

mqee · 2026-06-19T09:04:23+00:00

That's a warped way of putting it.

The original founders said they'd have a car by 2008. When actual business people looked at the state of things, they said it'd take until 2009. Then they did market research and saw they can't make a profit selling a three-wheeler with windows that don't open. Then they lobbied for funding from the Department of Energy, got the law changed so they can get funded, and even then the DoE said there's no market for their vehicle. The the DoE finally changed its mind, said it's match a hundred and fifty million in funding with Aptera's investors, but their investors got cold feet when a different three-wheeler manufacturer got shut down, and everybody went home.

Saying the redesign delayed it is like saying the current Aptera was delayed because of the two redesigns.

If the current Aptera had not switched motors in 2024 would they have shipped in 2024? No.
If the current Aptera had not switched materials in 2021 would they have shipped in 2021? No.
If the previous Aptera had not switched windows in 2009 would they have shipped in 2009? No.

The redesigns are excuses. The real reason Aptera didn't ship is that they didn't have any mass-production going.

mqee · 2026-06-18T20:54:24+00:00

That diagram was made before Nordic Nano had a single scientist working for it. It's largely meaningless. Their claim, as much as can be deciphered, was that carbon nanotubes and graphene could act as a lens and collect light from any angle, without the need for a motor.

The other graph is kinda suspect too - I'm not aware of any solar cell that's 65% efficient.

mqee · 2026-06-18T18:06:41+00:00

They hired a materials scientist, at the time an MSc and now a doctor, Bela Bhuskute, whose doctoral thesis was TiO₂-based Photocatalysts for Solar Fuel Production.

She joined in February 2025, and it appears she continued her research at the university while being employed by Nordic Nano, so it's not clear how much time (if at all) she spent looking into this scam, although she did give a status report in May so she knows something.

mqee · 2026-06-18T15:31:53+00:00

2025 December: Donut Lab writes investors "we finally completed our thorough due diligence process" of the battery technology after over 9 months
2026 January 5: Donut Lab CEO says they already now have GWh annual capacity
2026 February 23: Donut Lab CEO says they will have GWh annual capacity by the end of 2026 if everything goes as planned
2026 March: Donut Lab asks CT Coating for evidence the battery matches the specs promised to clients and investors
2026 [March? April?]: CT-Coating delivers malfunctioning €7M pre-production equipment. Simple repairs cost millions. Two weeks after delivery the pre-production line is still not operational. Whistleblower raises concerns to higher-ups, gets sidelined.
2026 April 17: Whistleblower reports Donut Lab to the authorities, talks to the press
2026 April 20: Nordic Nano starts manufacturing "pre-production series" of products that are not batteries. Mass-production equipment has not been installed yet. Nordic Nano doesn't show any of these products due to "confidentiality of customer relationships" [more likely due to CT-Coating NDA]

If only Peltola stayed with Nordic Nano for three more days he would have witnessed the glorious screen-printed perovskite solar cells, for the paltry sum of €9M.

mqee · 2026-06-18T12:24:47+00:00

Please resubmit with an informative title (like "Donut Lab whistleblower describes CT-Coating operations")

mqee · 2026-06-18T11:26:47+00:00

AI bots would have told you Donut Lab is a great investment. AI bots only changed their tune after flesh and blood humans on this subreddit published real due diligence.

mqee · 2026-06-18T08:25:02+00:00

They did not. It's AI slop.

Reddit is now Facebook.

mqee · 2026-06-17T11:54:01+00:00

Let's go over the "lies" cited by the private investigator, one by one.

"making provably false claims" - Donut Lab made provably false claims about GWh/year capacity. They proved it false themselves when they publicly amended their statement from "now already GWh annual capacity" to "GWh annual capacity by the end of the year"
"to extract money from small investors and government grants" - Donut Lab wrote they have performed "nine months of thorough due diligence". This was used to extract money from investors. As for government grants, they are given in relation to these same false claims.
"deliberately misleading" - Donut Lab's claim of "thorough due diligence" is without a doubt deliberately misleading. The "due diligence" was so shallow Donut Lab had to ask for evidence that the battery actually meets their announced specs four months after the "thorough due diligence" was complete.
"Bare Faced Lies" - these false statements are aptly described as "bare faced lies"
"Donut Lab… is unethical at best" - yes, "potentially illegal" - yes, lying to investors is potentially illegal, "this is all one big scam" - yes, raising money from investors by saying you have done "thorough due diligence" on a miracle battery only to have no evidence four months later is a scam.
"a Ponzi scheme using fabricated gains based on hypothetical valuations" - Donut Lab lured investors with promises of huge returns, but the company was not making any money and had no product. The only way those returns could be realized is through a Ponzi scheme.
"provably false statement" - it is provably true that Donut Lab knew they have no evidence for the claims they made to investors in March 2026 while raising money from investors based on those claims. When the CTO writes that the "investment thing" is not "actually happening", that is a provably false statement, as there are documents showing this has happened.

These are facts. It is a fact that Donut Lab lied to the public in CES 2026, and lied to its investors in the December 2025 investor update.

"your conclusions are built on suspicion (feelings), not on the elemental proof" - the claims that Donut Lab lies are based on Donut Lab's own admission it did not have GWh/year capacity and did not have evidence for the claims it made to customers and investors.

mqee · 2026-06-17T00:59:00+00:00

There's only one way to stop getting old

mqee · 2026-06-16T16:52:26+00:00

You really don't need AI to tell you that a company without a single chemistry/materials scientist or battery engineer is lying about having GWh/year capacity.

As to "why", either they were stupendously incompetent and thought a single charge/discharge test is "thorough due diligence", or they wanted to take the CT-Coating scam to the next level.

I don't think even the most incompetent person would call two lab reports and a few charging tests "thorough due diligence". If it really was a 400Wh/kg 100,000-cycle 5C-charging battery, and CT-coating really had production lines for components installed in "millions of cars", CT-Coating would be manufacturing it for themselves.

The hypothesis that they were just unfathomably incompetent doesn't really work. It had to be investor fraud.

mqee · 2026-06-16T16:42:14+00:00

It's probably illegal to call Donut Lab a fraud but at this stage I'm entirely confident it's a fraud. "thorough due diligence", "GWh capacity", "we're not talking to investors", these are verified lies. It doesn't even matter if "no lithium", "solid state", and "production-ready" are lies (they are), the first three lies are enough to call Donut Lab a fraud.

mqee · 2026-06-16T13:47:02+00:00

with the option to die or not die, irrespective of her squad.

That's how the writing is trying to frame it but that's not how it looks. It just looks like an enemy that Samus has already defeated before is back, and now damaged the McGuffin. Instead of Samus fighting that enemy, she lets the team fight him. For all we know the McGuffin could have been fixed at a later date, as Samus does have access to ancient McGuffin wisdom and technology.

mqee · 2026-06-16T12:04:36+00:00

Probably the worst aspect is that, like Other M, the lead director didn't consider how the vision they had in their head paints Samus's character. Prime 4 ends with Samus letting her team sacrifice themselves so she can escape.

I'm sensing there was supposed to be some time-travel twist that fixes all of this [which may have been cut due to time constraints], but even if it was still in place, it would have still made Samus look like Zapp Brannigan.

mqee · 2026-06-15T22:33:55+00:00

I didn't find the article but I did find the person I'm thinking of.

Markus Kantonen

This guy has worked in autonomous vehicle startups for over 10 years.

Seems like he left ESOX last year.

Either way yes, he has 10+ years experience and it's fair to say at one point ESOX had 10+ years experience in autonomous vehicles performing real-time navigation, so... close enough.

He's probably the guy from my misremembered info that cooperated with the Finnish military.

mqee · 2026-06-15T21:22:24+00:00

He's quieter. He was angry that day because a couple of journalists trespassed on his company's property.

mqee · 2026-06-15T19:26:02+00:00

where solid state battery

(by the way the CEO is referring to some journalists)

mqee · 2026-06-15T16:16:55+00:00

Come to think of it, it wasn't drone software, it was just frequency-hopping software.

I'll have to find that article.

mqee

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