[weird e-mail] hey there sexy

edited 2015-11-24 02:41:23 in General
The following was found in my e-mail inbox, as sent to the general chat e-mail list of an MIT dorm.  The unshortened URLs linked in the message are shown below the pasted message.



yeah im talkin to you!

I know you is ready to go on teh vacation, but before you do ... how about taking a moment to ponder the future of your children.

and their education, and what it might mean if we don't do shit about it today.  ur thinkin "here we go 😕"

stanford economist Eric Hanushek estimates that if we close even 1/2 the performance gap between the US and Finland, we could add $50,000,000,000,000 USD to our GDP over the next few decades.  thats a lot of zeros ... "shit! 😨 "

and if we replaced 5-8% of the lowest performing teachers with today's average teachers, thats like worth, $100,000,000,000,000 USD ... like "woah 😵"

so how do we get there?  

Well, a lot of educational data is being thrown away (literally).  Think about all the worksheets and papers and psets and tests that you've handed in, got some scribbles, and then got back, and thrown away.  that data, over time, across classrooms, between districts, at a national scale, and international scale, is valuable beyond imagination.  

We're two MIT dudes in SF, backed by top VC's who you've probably read about, bringing Deep Learning and AI into classrooms, making SATs, scantrons, report cards, textbooks, etc, all of it obsolete.  Our goal is to quantify education at scale. 

We think the education system should learn, all it possibly can, about you.

If you're passionate about education, and want to make big impact, and build great team culture, we're in search of people who share our mission.

so reach out!  

batman

ps.  we hacked SF's housing market, what does that mean?  Free Luxury SF Housing!!
pps.  some folks on campus know us pretty well, you can ask them about us.

1. no
2. stop hiding your shit behind goo.gl RLs
3. your style of "we have a better way of doing things >:P and we're so awesome and you should ditch your stupid party and join us" is why people hate tech startup entrepreneurs.

By the way, those four goo.gl URLs resolve to the following webpages:


Comments

  • You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
    I broke the links just in case they lead to something nasty. But I left the <a> tags in there so you can at least see where they were.
  • edited 2015-11-24 02:41:46
    You may wanna re-break those since I've been editing the formatting of my OP.

    In any case, the four links are:

    "Eric Hanushek" http://goo.gl/33gHrT => http://hanushek.stanford.edu/
    "$50,000,000,000,000 USD" http://goo.gl/Wcx870 => http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%2 02011%20EdNext%2011(3).pdf
    "$100,000,000,000,000 USD" http://goo.gl/TlrR9p => http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%2 02011%20EER%2030(3).pdf
    "Free Luxury SF Housing" https://goo.gl/TDOaus => https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cmot56d1aon3hob/AACj52jKPWTjVzKJEc-TZhjIa?dl=0 (a photo album)

    Edit: actually let me just go put these into the OP
  • edited 2015-11-24 02:47:26
    BTW, before anyone gets on my case about publicizing an e-mail message:

    This was sent to sponge-talk at mit dot edu.

    That is the general chat e-mail list for Simmons Hall, an undergraduate dorm at MIT, wherein about 350 students live.  Said e-mail list is used to discuss all manner of everything, from house policy matters to lost-and-found help with homework to requests to recover one's dignity (literally) to cross-campus spamwars and other manner of running jokes.

    sponge-talk is not just a list for residents of Simmons (who may remove themselves if they so desire).  It is also a list for any other interested persons to join, as far as I could tell when I added myself years ago.  I never lived in this dorm, yet I have been a member of said list for about a decade now.  A number of alumni are on the list.  Far as I remember, you don't even need an mit.edu e-mail address to be on it -- I certainly don't.

    On that basis, I presume this counts as public information.
  • You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
    The links seem innocuous enough, so you can keep 'em in.

    I just got a bit worried when I saw what appears to be a spam message with obscured URLs in it, naturally.
  • Also, the sender did indeed sign the message as "batman".  (I will not reveal her/his real name, nor e-mail address.)
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    dammit don't share my secret emails with everyone!!!1!
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    This is the strangest spam email I have seen in a looooong time.
  • THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
    1. I'm not sexy, I'm cute if anything
    2. god damn tech bros. SF looks enough like Rapture to begin with; you fuckers are not helping
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    It's like the perfect reverse of those supremely formal and highly educated Nigerian scammer messages.
  • They just want to educate you about TIMECUBE.
  • image Wee yea erra chs hymmnos mea.
    Jane said:

    emoji is the future

    Well, an emoji was recently declared the word of the year. Which predictably caused certain groups to whine about it.

    (The crying from laughter emoji, for the curious.)
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