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.
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.
>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.
in "we should expect",
1) "should" means "would" or
2) "should" means Anand "should if only he saw the bigger picture of hush money / cloack of charity" ?
if 1) this assumes Anand has the same interpretation I have (that its not prestige-for-cash but hush money), but as I wrote in my text it mostly seems like Anand does not realize this at all.
it 2) of course the hushers, but also the hush money enablers, which would include Ito & Co, if no one lets Anand know of this hush money interpretation one can not expect Anand to focus on the hushers! I don't have twitter, again could someone mention this to Anand?
>If I am, we should expect him to put all effort into bringing down Ito.
Anand's prediction goes further than just Ito: he also predicts MIT will investigate itself and absolve itself, so he doesn't just condemn Ito as you claim, and given Anand's own admission from the start that he used to respect Ito largely explains his disappointment in Ito specifically!
Yes, surely the villain here is the guy trying to hold people to account for knowingly associating with and taking money from a convicted child predator, and shining a light on all the ass covering they are now engaged in, and not the people who did all this heinous stuff in the first place. Truly a case of cancel culture run amok.
I can't imagine how confusing the world must be when one only sees things in the world such childish black-and-white terms, where the existence of evil automatically means that anyone in opposition is a morally-unimpeachable angel.
To be clear, there's no comparison between the parent comment's model of Ghiridaradas's actions and those of Ito et al, and AG's telling of their actions is pretty damning regardless of his motivations.
But responding to someone trying to flesh out a better understanding of the situation by mentioning his motivations (without excusing one iota the far-worse actions of others) with "NO THERE CAN ONLY EVER BE ONE SIDE DOING BAD THINGS" is about as simple-minded a take as I can imagine.
could you clarify Anand's supposed ulterior motives? He resigns and he proposes Joi Ito cede his position to one of the women in the group?
If one does not want to be associated with the scandal, because he has nothing to do with it, surely he should have the liberty to distance himself without having to also play the secret keeper for others? He never signed up to be their secret keeper. He tries to give the benefit of the doubt, and begs for explanations of their silence, for explanations of their decisions. So when none are provided, surely his right to free speech permits him to speak about whatever he witnessed from his perspective?
Sometimes the only identifiable "ulterior motive" is the freedom one has maintained by not becoming complicit...
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.
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.
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.
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.