HN user
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.
14 years ago now: https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Of course, this culture is less helpful for individuals and cities, who have to live with the volatility.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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 how well this would hold up in arbitration, but he has repeatedly cited the existence of bots as a reason for buying and fixing twitter.
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!
April 21 900K likes
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.
Preferred stock? Priority?
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].
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.
I think Giridharadas is very good and says good things and picks good targets. But there is a strange attitude here and on twitter that he is guileless, when clearly he is making very calculated moves. This is especially apparent in seeing the Hoffman comment as a threat but not the resignation letter. Maybe the gp came off as harsh, but I'm trying to explain why the ggp should not expect the husher line of attack to be immediately adopted.
From your text: Then Anand shares the thoughtful and profound email he sent to Ito & Co and others at MIT Media Lab, from which it is crystal clear Anand is unambiguously trying to do the right thing.
You're giving Giridharadas way too much credit. His e-mail resignation is an implicit ultimatum (if you don't fire him, I will go public), to which Hoffman counters by saying how he will try to frame Giridharadas as trying to personally gain from this scandal (which, clearly he will).
By publicly stating Hoffman's weak threat, while reserving the future threat of revealing their correspondence, Giridharadas makes it harder for Hoffman to follow through on the threat without public backlash.
So Giridharadas targets this tweetstorm to inflict maximum damage to Ito supporters and MIT admins. The hush money line is harder to prove and channels frustration towards the hushers more than the facilitators. The cash for prestige line places all the blame on Epstein and Ito. Then he publicly shares the list of Ito supporters [0] and creates public knowledge of their thinning numbers. When the firing eventually occurs, Giridharadas will have collected the spoils of a successful cancellation, the public knowledge that he can make very credible threats.
If you are correct, we should expect Giridharadas to place more emphasis on the hushers for the sake of justice. If I am, we should expect him to put all effort into bringing down Ito.
[0] https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1170025167063605250
This sounds like what Kevin Kwok was describing[0] in his recent essay, The Arc of Collaboration. Even down to using the Discord metaphor. Kwok says that Slack ended up being more of an exception handler when normal processes break down. Contrast to Discord, which is more of a meta-layer around games and integrates within game platforms. I wonder if Tandem is what will make collaborative communication ubiquitous, i.e. sales talks to engineering talks to design all from within their various environments.
From TC: Tandem provides a virtual office for remote teams, complete with video-chatting and messaging capabilities, as well as integrations with top enterprise tools, including Notion, GitHub and Trello.
[0] https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/
From Robert Caro's The Power Broker:
Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.
Only one crypto mention, and it's a company selling banks tech to detect crypto fraud.
TRM Labs: Banks are required to trace the source of their customers’ money. TRM helps banks identify and trace cryptocurrency fraud. They charge $20K per user seat. Though they couldn’t say the name, TRM says they recently signed a top-five global bank as a customer.
I was pretty sure "say you wrote it" was an example in the original essay. Though upon review, Graham writes "almost verbatim".
Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.
The road death category is wrong. What is being reported is "accidents", of which CDC says there were 161,374 out of 2,744,248 deaths in 2016. But even this only gets you 5.88%, under their 7.68% reported in the interactive graph when hovering over 2016.
From [0]
Total Deaths 2016: 2,744,248
Unintended Injuries 2016: 161,374
From [1], a breakdown of those unintended 161,374 injuries above:
Accidental Poisoning and exposure to noxious substances: 58,335
Motor Vehicle: 40,327
Fall: 34,673
Accidental hanging, strangulation, and suffocation: 6,610
Accidental drowning and submersion: 3,786
Accidental exposure to smoke, fire and flames: 2,730
Dividing the 40,327 motor vehicle from the 2,744,248 deaths gets you 1.47%, way less than the 7.68 shown in the interactive chart.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/019.pdf page 1
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_05.pdf page 34
I've noticed the same three categories discussed in two "go west" novels -- Steinbeck's East of Eden (1952) and Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1962). It's interesting, and a bit jarring, to see the MBA translation of what, to me, existed as a literary aside.
Looking closer at the data, almost everyone is receiving small travel, lunch payments. Many of the higher earners are receiving large sums for "Promotional Speaker/Other", "Consulting Fee" or "Current or prospective ownership or investment interest".
Comparing 10 or so names in the source data with the Propublica data, often Propublica has identical amounts and trasactions as the Open data, a few times Propublica's dollar amounts and transactions are higher. This might be evidence to support arkades's claim, but I can't be sure since I don't know the exact methodology.
I guess McKinsey erred in accepting the work from Purdue, but it seems like the consulting provided was obvious and likely overpriced. More at fault, in my estimation, is the AMA and other physician standards bodies. Propublica released a search tool [0] last year based on Open Payments Data [1] and the numbers are ridiculous. My small state shows 10s of physicians receiving over $100k over the recorded 2013-2016 period and a very long tail. Many on the list are orthopedic surgeons and psychiatrists.
Interesting video. Some advice seems person-specific over age-specific, as in, I wouldn't be surprised to hear them give the same advice five years prior or hence.
One area where I think future advice can be most helpful is in preventing hard-to-reverse mistakes. 18F's data release for college completion rates, employment rates, etc in 2012 may have helped people avoid bad decisions[0]. Another example could be increased wariness of using a drug after hearing personal stories of people trying to quit. Using the recently shared visualization of related subreddits[1] and looking at the "/r/askdrugs" graph, one can see Kratom and quittingkratom, phenibut and quitting phenibut, benzodiazapines and quittingbenzos, opiates and quittingopiates.
90% of women marry by age 56 according to this chart[0]. At 40 it's 81%. Data from 2015 5-year American Community Survey
[0]https://flowingdata.com/2017/11/01/who-is-married-by-now/
Just yesterday I watched an hour-long interview [0] from 2002 with Doug Engelbart.
On finding a wife. Engelbart moves to a university town, ditches a male-focused hobby, and finds a more gender neutral hobby in folk dancing. Echoes of Noyce and choir.
He turns down an offer from HP after asking whether he would be able to work on computers and being told "no".
He claims during his 12 or so years working at SRI before the '68 demo that most of the support for his ideas came from outside of the institution. He says that later he learned about paradigms (but claims not from Kuhn), which allowed him to understand the resistance he kept facing.
He gives credit to people with tangential skills that made the presentation possible: The machinist mouse-maker who was also a wood carver, the colleague's wife who was also a theater director.
He laments the fact that the easiest-to-learn tools out-competed tools that gave the greatest return on learning.
I'm surprised the author quoted Why Nerds are Unpopular and didn't cite what I feel like is the most relevant part:
When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.
It is nice to be in a group where people can do praise-worthy things and be praised for them. And, as the conclusion addresses, it is nice to give praise when due. This norm can be eroded by braggers. But it can also be eroded by people taking any mention of an accomplishment as a slight.
For example, the Oxford anecdote seems like the author going out of his way to feel slighted and assume malice. The excited salesperson anecdote is similar. Do others have a duty to mask excitement out of worry that it could be interpreted as bragging?
One of the best habits I have adopted is muttering "good on them" and moving along when an emotion suspiciously similar to jealously starts bubbling up.
From the end of the article:
As for the one-click payment system that helped build both their online stores, the US patent to that expired in September 2017.
I could understand allowing a months-long patent of this kind, but 18 years seems about an order of magnitude too long.
I remember reading earlier this year a commencement speech at West Point in 2010 by William Deresiewicz. [0]
I think the skill of being alone with one's thoughts has become rarer and more valuable with each passing year.
Regarding absolute quality of output, that's an interesting thought. Maybe the interconnectedness and availability of immediate consumption feedback (likes, views) made things worse. People often talk of the monoculture eroding over the past generation, but you're proposing the exact opposite. Is there a way to measure diversity of output? I think 2018 me has found diverse people with small followings whom I genuinely connect to, but maybe I would have found even better creative output via print or in person in the past.
It is my impression that youtube or instagram have a long tail of creators, appealing to niche interests, but maybe there is a falseness to this as well if everyone is playing by the same rules.
Thanks for the exchange. I don't necessarily agree, but I'll be thinking about it.
Yes, you can name shitty famous people of today. But when I was growing up, I don't think I ever followed a famous person who wasn't approved by a gatekeeper of some kind. Nor did I ever see an interview of them that wasn't presented by a major media company.
But in both absolute and relative terms, the number of genuinely passionate famous people has increased. And the amount of hours people spend watching these people perform and reading their own words has increased. I'm using Jennifer Lawrence as an effect, not a cause. She wears this faux-accessibility because she's competing with less famous, truly accessible people. Earlier celebrities didn't have to appeal to this desire because there was no one flanking them on that dimension.
Look at pictures of the highest grossing actors of 2016 [0]. Even in their facial expressions, they are miles away from John Wayne, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, or Clint Eastwood in the golden age of Cool.