These were not private individuals. This was an official cash/good transfer between Austrian bank and Ukrainian bank.

> tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups

It's just friends buying from friends.

I would put the upper bound on the population relevant to _the_ tech sector at 28000.

I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.

Long time ago when I was managing ISP email relay and customers asked "Where is the message I've sent?" seeing in the logs message accepted by receiving SMTP server was the end of the debug for me: I just handed the customer the part of the log and suggested talking to the receiving side IT administrator.