amsilprotag

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

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.

amsilprotag

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

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.

amsilprotag

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

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.

amsilprotag

letztes Jahrdiscuss

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]

amsilprotag

letztes Jahrdiscuss

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.

amsilprotag

letztes Jahrdiscuss

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.

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