I thought the same as gp, that putting teachers at high risk invalidates the whole visualization. If this is intended to be useful for future career planning, with meaningful gradations between specializations, than it should exist in the probability space where human agency still matters. And in that space, from a Riccardian and political economy perspective, high human-touch jobs with strong public unions should be among the safest.
Any time you use the word startup you are already ceding ground. Startup as a term solves the problem of the VC: given technology is inherently risky, how do I get good returns? Answer: make sure the winner keeps doubling down. Create a culture around valorizing the few big, big winners and writing off-- financially and mentally-- the losers.
I have used the quiz-making learning tool within gemini. It is very good for things that would exist in a typical K-12 textbook. The first 30 or 40 multiple choice questions on a subject are usually pretty good and useful. But then it will tend to repeat multiple choice answers, give strictly wrong answers, repeat questions, or offer multiple valid answers. The answer explanations are what you'd expect with little human QA. Still a useful tool for people who sanity-check the given answers, but it might do more harm than good if people don't follow up on their confusion.
I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device, with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening.
Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
A CEO has the power to do anything, but employees have the power to collectively, quietly sandbag if they don't like the leadership. I think the AI effort led to a broad disillusionment, causing an unwillingness to put extra effort into their work. Across the company, everyone starts to take the path of least resistance. The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral. So situations can arise where a CEO would like a cleaner product (no one likes to ship garbage), but has lost the political capital to make it happen.
> The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral.
If you read the article you’ll see how the CEO wrote a memo about how productivity expectations will rise and started cutting contractors in favor of AI.
To suggest that this CEO was afraid of reducing morale by asking employees to put fewer pop-ups in the app is completely backward.
I don’t understand why you’re so intent on defending this particular CEO as trying to maintain morale when we’re quite literally in a comment section for an article where the CEO made a drastic anti-employee move that everyone could have seen was a morale destroyer.
It’s also hard to imagine a situation where the people making the app really, really want to pollute it with pop-ups and other junk, and they have to band together to resist the CEO’s efforts to make a good app, and then on top of all that the CEO rolls over and lets them do it despite wishing they wouldn’t.
The simplest explanation is that the employees are building the app and setting direction as mandated by executives. The app we see is the result of what executives are rewarding and asking for.
Maybe you are right that I give too much benefit of the doubt. I have been following the saga and I believe the AI turn was a bad move on every level. That's why I stopped using the app. But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app. I think the pop-ups are a net-negative even purely financially with churn outweighing subscriptions. So my model for the situation is that he spent his credibility on AI, which was bad, and now doesn't have the credibility to spend to change the metrics that guide every team's behavior, so the company decays entropically. Maybe the clutter comes from the CEO trying to up subscriptions, but based on the first 10 years of the app, I believe he has better taste than to do that, so I look for a more complex explanation. Again, may be giving too much benefit of the doubt.
[edit: thinking about it more, I think I have built up a lot of goodwill with the app over the years, and it's a strange mental process for years of goodwill to evaporate over the course of a few weeks]
> But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app.
If the CEO truly wants this he should resign because he is at best a completely ineffectual leader. The reality is he wants more money so he wants to pack as much engagement bait into the app as possible to juice numbers as please investors
Totally agree with poor plot and dialogue. But if you had read it on publication in 2008, viewing the aliens as US and Earth as China, you would have been one in a small minority to foresee something like the Oct 2022 Biden order to revoke citizenship from anyone working in the Chinese semiconductor industry.
I don't know whether this is true, and I'm writing this out of curiosity and not bad faith, but the most parsimonious explanation for this being the top comment is that both the writer and voters assumed (as I did before reading) that the essay was about time-of-day work rather than time-of-project-lifespan work.
But it's a good point! Faith fluctuates by day, and those low-faith days are when a small project is abandoned. I think graham's solutions (supportive friends, ambitious city, historical examples) are a good way to hold the faith when the general public and the project itself don't seem to warrant it.
Tim Sweeney is really interesting. He coded Unreal Engine 1 and is controlling shareholder of Epic. He gave a speech[0] January at a game conference arguing against the App/Play store 30% mark. I think he has internalized Ben Thompson's FAANG strategy concepts and created the best denunciation of the mindset, in this speech attacking the concept of "owning the customer." He joins Shopify in trying to create platforms in the Gates sense where most of the money goes to consumer and 3rd party. And a lot of his actions, in the short term, are against Epic's financial interests, commodifying and cannibalizing their own dominant market position for the sake of growing game industry TAM and a vision of future interoperability[1].
As far as 'getting into programming' goes, Sweeney is probably second only to Anders Heljsberg. Where the latter got me into 'proper' programming, until well into my late teens I was more interested in level editing and modding and whatnot.
In the same way that it was amazing to find out that the same guy was behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi and Typescript, it was amazing to discover that ZZT and UnrealED, years apart, were also just one guy. I spent so much time with these tools!
I recently finished Brad Stone's The Everything Store, written in 2013. In the last chapter, brands complained about Amazon pricing below the their Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), to the detriment of physical sellers. Stone used the German knife company Wüsthof as an example. Wüsthof at one point around 2010 stopped supplying Amazon, but its products were still sold by third parties. Looking at Amazon now, there are at least 100 in-house Wüsthof products being sold by Amazon at prices that seem lower than the mid-hundred dollar price ranges cited in The Everything Store.
Does anyone know what happened generally to Amazon's relationship with brands over the past six years? Presumably over this time, Amazon has only gained in bargaining power over brands at the expense of physical locations, in accordance with Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory. As an outsider, it seemed like Amazon and brand buyers have done well at the expense of brands and retail stores.
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