What's interesting is that I can see exactly what is happening behind the scenes at the Times because I've been in so many meetings that resulted in similar data-driven decisions.
Both your experience and the article author's experience manifest in the feeling of an antagonistic relationship and frustration on the part of the customer. But what I'd wager is happening is that the analytics teams have looked at subscriber retention and seen patterns. Perhaps subscribers who use 3 of their 5 key features don't cancel nearly as often. Or maybe subscribers who share with family rarely cancel because they either assume their family is getting value from it or they don't want to have the conversation about whether it's worth the price.
I have no doubt that a pure-digital product like the Times has tons of data on their users and have determined the key metrics that lead to retention. So their natural tendency is to try to game the metrics by trying to push as many accounts into those high-retention buckets as possible. The behavior you and the article author have experienced is the result of an organization becoming extremely data focused and losing focus on the customer experience. It's something to remember for those of us who ever find ourselves in a meeting where we're dissecting retention metrics and trying to figure out how to make our companies more successful.
It's funny that GP mentioned science fiction as a negative because what immediately springs to mind, for me, is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. We literally have the tools to build his "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" today. We just have to give today's AI a lesson plan to follow and ensure that it never gives the student the answers, and only keeps explaining the concepts in different ways until they click. Wrap that in an iPad app and you've essentially got the exact self-paced learning tool that Stephenson envisioned changing the world.
The issue I have is that people are still trying to shove AI into a pre-AI educational paradigm. And yes, if you introduce AI into a world where people are still trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, AI looks like a threat because it allows kids to cheat, both testing and themselves. But we have the option to stop trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, which I think people here are fundamentally not understanding.
It's an old book now, but Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age includes the vision that we should have for education. We literally have the tools today to build his fictional "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer." What he envisioned was not that far off from an iPad with a Claude subscription where Claude has specific goals for the conversation. It's not teachers lecturing a class, it's individualized education where an AI teaches students at their own pace using their own interests. And built into AI is the ability for precocious kids to go beyond the curriculum, either on tangents or to more advanced subjects. This is impossible in a world where a teacher is trying to shepherd dozens of students through a curriculum as a group.
In the 2010s, we got some of the way there with Khan Academy. It was genuinely new that a student could rewatch something until it clicked rather than having to digest a lecture and have any question that didn't immediately spring to mind go unanswered. AI offers the possibility to go a step beyond this. Instead of rewatching the exact same content, AI can present it to the student in multiple ways based on a student's confusion and keep explaining it until a topic clicks. It can find examples of things that a student finds interesting to show how what they're learning isn't just theoretical. If a student likes space, the AI can discuss how the trig concepts they're learning apply to the Artemis II mission. If they like sports, it could apply the same concepts to tennis. Students in literary classes could read different books according to their interests while AI ensures that they understand the same sorts of concepts while discussing them. By customizing based on the specific curiosity of the student, it can make learning far more engaging and actually fun.
To address your #2, schools should be working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to shape a new personalized paradigm of educating students. They should be working out deals that give access to AI to their entire district. If I were heading the Department of Education, I would go a step further and get companies to bid on a contract to put their AI in the hands of every public school child in America. A version of the AI where teachers input their curriculum into the AI and students work through it with the AI, either alone or in small groups and the AI reports back to teachers so they can intervene where they are most needed would allow school districts with staffing shortages to serve more students more efficiently and with better results.
Sometimes it feels like our current system of education is only secondarily concerned with students actually learning and the primary concern is testing students to sort them into different tiers to be absorbed into different strata of our workforce. AI does compromise this sorting process to some extent. But if we can get back to the true mission of education and think creatively to deploy AI to best educate students, we have the potential to transform education like never before. What if we don't need to test students? An AI can give an individualized assessment of how well a student has grasped what they're supposed to be learning based on weeks of individualized work. It's as if we can give every student their own private tutor who will report back to the teacher on the student's actual progress. When you have that, stress-inducing exams are a ridiculous substitute.
I've been pretty shocked at how closed-minded the responses to my comment have been. We're supposed to be a community that envisions radically better futures that can be built with technology. And here we have a revolutionary new technology that upends a staid and increasingly problematic part of our society and the majority of the responses are geared towards explaining why that staid and problematic institution should be maintained unchanged. AI is fundamentally a danger to our current education model, but that model can change radically for the better. And I would've hoped that more people here would have recognized that.
I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, answers were complex and the only way to know whether you'd done the question correctly was to be sure of your method. They even allowed us to write programs in TI-BASIC that we could use on tests, the only limitation was that we were not allowed to share programs with other students. I discovered that rather than trying to cram for exams, I could just write a program that would solve each class of problem we were likely to see on the exam, and by essentially teaching my calculator to pass the test, I also taught myself. It was a vastly better way for me to study. It also led to my decision to major in comp sci and my career in software. I'm forever grateful to those teachers for choosing to see the latest technology as a multiplier of student potential rather than a way students could cheat to avoid learning.
So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? These tools are not going to cease to exist. The students they are preparing are going to live and work in a world where they exist. To my mind, you best prepare students by teaching them how to use the tools most effectively, not by teaching them how to work without the tools. Students should be learning how to prompt AI without hinting it towards a specific answer. They should be learning how to double check the answers AI gives them to ferret out hallucinations. They should be learning how to produce work that is a hundred times more complex than what us older folks had to do in school. We should be graduating students who are so much more capable than any generation before them. I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations. The world they will inhabit has changed radically from the one we entered into following school.
What’s obnoxious about them isn’t tariffs conceptually, it’s the implementation.
There’s an argument that some sort of tariffs are actually necessary. The world is changing and the US has become reliant on countries who increasingly have divergent interests from the US. Additionally, some countries have aging populations that will make them more and more unreliable places to manufacture stuff in the next couple decades. It’s entirely reasonable to believe that it’s pretty critical for the US to begin the process of re-industrializing as soon as possible and tariffs are a crucial lever to make that happen.
But…how you do that matters. Re-industrialization is a process that will take decades and the businesses doing that need to be fairly sure of the government’s policy for most of that period. If Trump had built a broad consensus with Democrats for the tariff policy so that businesses could have understood that a future Democratic president or congressional majority would continue the tariff policy, then businesses would be able to plan accordingly and begin the massive capital outlays that come with re-shoring manufacturing. And the tariffs would strategically exclude certain items like the steel that would be necessary to build factories. And, lastly, you wouldn’t pick now to go on a deportation spree when a sizable chunk of the nations construction workers are undocumented immigrants, since all those factories will need to be built by someone and there aren’t enough Americans to do it.
But instead of the sane and well-reasoned way to do it, we’ve got Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip chaos version. The tariff policy changes weekly, so businesses can’t predict it, let alone rely on it in the way they would need to to spend the collective trillions of dollars on manufacturing infrastructure that need to be spent. And he’s antagonizing Democrats to such and extent that any future Democratic administration will drop the tariffs on day one. The result of which is that businesses, understandably, are hunkering down until he’s out of office. Instead of spurring the massive investment we need, his policies have chilled spending on manufacturing. The only thing we’re really building at the moment are data centers.
So there’s this narrative that tariffs are awful now that’s really the result of someone incompetently deploying them. Some sort of tariff policy would actually be a necessary medicine for the country to help heal the damage from an over reliance on a globalized system that is going to crumble in the coming decades. It won’t be easy, but the earlier the country starts to address it, the better the outcome will be. But it needs to be done intentionally, in a bi-partisan way and through acts of Congress, not in a scattershot fashion where Congress is a bystander and a single deranged lunatic pulls tariff percentages out of ass whenever the mood strikes him.
Quite often, it seems, they ask to build your profile to sell to advertisers. As much as it would be great for everyone to be treated equally, our genders do affect the crap that we buy and advertisers often care about it.
But more broadly, finding trends/patterns really does come down to being able to sort people into different buckets. Especially now, with the push towards ML, you never know which feature will turn out to be significant, so the strategy ends up being to collect as much data as possible and let computers churn through it looking for patterns.
It would be tempting to ascribe a gender-specific motive to the collection of gender data just based on the significance that we feel towards gender. But I'm not sure those collecting it have those motivations. They're just sucking in everything that they can get away with in the hopes that some of it will prove valuable.
LPT: schedule your standup for the 15 min before lunch. It’s an almost automatic way to ensure that it finishes quickly. No one wants to be the one that’s making teammates hangry. It also means the meeting never interrupts a developer’s flow since they were going to break for lunch anyways.
Have you looked at the Xiaomi Mi Bands? They do sleep tracking, are fairly low profile and easy to find on Amazon for under $30. I switched my mom over from a buggy Fitbit to one last year and it's been better in every way. Given the cost of most of its competitors, it kinda boggles my mind that I don't see more of them.
> The article says only 16% can hold a fulltime job
That’s 16% of those diagnosed with ASD. For one, the vast majority of the current workforce came of age before the DSM reclassified autism as a spectrum disorder. So many of those with milder symptoms who sought out therapy as kids could easily go undiagnosed. I know this personally as someone diagnosed as an adult who grew up as a child of a psychologist and was sent to multiple therapists. I’m perfectly capable of maintaining a career and wouldn’t have even thought to seek out a diagnosis as an adult had I not had a conversation with my mom about the reclassification.
Having worked in tech, I can tell you there’s a huge group of undiagnosed ASD workers like me who are quite able to hold down a job and excel but still exhibit milder symptoms of the disorder.
> The 'financial-math-numbers-wizard' is absolutely the very rare exception
One of the points in the article is exactly the opposite of this observation...that ASD is far more common than most people believe it to be. The difference is that the vast majority of those with autism can pass and silently struggle with the negatives of their condition. Your SO deals with those who can't pass and have the more pronounced form of the condition. There's a selection bias by the simple fact that they end up in her class that creates that 10::1 you describe even though the 1 will be much more common in the overall population.
I can see that pushing the savant angle of the condition can be counterproductive, especially to those whose form of ASD often prevents them from being functional. But so is the "it's rare" narrative that leads people who can pass to struggle with not understanding themselves. As the article points out, nearly 2% of people have some form of ASD. For that to be the case, the vast majority of them have to appear mostly normal from the outside.
It's worth noting that Soros is likely to be predisposed to seeing the "red flags" (pun intended) of oppressive government spying and despotism having experienced first-hand during his formative teen years the Nazi occupation of Hungary and the subsequent Soviet period, initially in-country and then from afar in England. It's both a valuable paranoia, but also one that's likely to be prone to overestimate the worst-case scenario and the slipperiness of the slope, so to speak.
I'm definitely concerned by the surveillance state that's developing, but I also believe that our flag is significantly less red than both the Nazi and Soviet flags, both literally and figuratively. I think it's important that we're wary of slippages in freedoms of citizens without resorting to hyperbole and comparing the current situation to oppressive regimes which murdered so many millions of their own citizens definitely feels hyperbolic.
Ignores citations supporting the point he's arguing against? Check. Fails to provide citations supporting his own argument? Check. Excerpts individual lines of a comment to argue against a point that wasn't being made. Check.
Congratulation, sir, I humbly admit to being trolled. With a little improvement, you might convince me you're human and pass your eponymous test.
Anyways, I'm done arguing events and facts I experienced first hand with someone so intent on ignoring what actually happened.
OMG...are you intentionally trying to be obtuse? This isn't exactly controversial stuff I'm talking about. There was a lawsuit and Be is very much on the record about Microsoft's tactics.
Do you even understand what OEM means? It has nothing to do with user-assembled machines. Yes, the minority of people who built their own systems could avoid the Windows tax. If you want to talk about a rounding error, that's basically the definition. We're talking the full systems that had Windows pre-installed. In order to not violate their OEM licenses with Microsoft, the only way those vendors could ship BoOS pre-installed was to dual boot with windows and give users absolutely no indication that BeOS was installed.
Get your facts straight before you start calling people names.
You're missing half of the Windows tax. It wasn't just charging for licenses that didn't end up getting used. It was also about forcing OEMs to choose between offering Windows and any other OS. It killed BeOS and had a chilling effect on anyone else building an OS that they intended to charge money for. That left Microsoft's only competition being Apple, who made their own hardware and didn't care about selling Windows machines and open source operating systems, which could never get UI right enough for mass adoption.
So yes, many of those machines sold with Windows pre-installed didn't have another operating system, but that doesn't mean that if Microsoft hadn't broken the law (those contracts they forced on OEMs were illegal) that people would have still chosen to buy those computers with Windows pre-installed. I consider people who were forced to use Windows because of the lack of alternatives killed by Microsoft's illegal business practices to be similarly paying the Windows tax.
Had BeOS gotten any reasonable market share, it would have quickly become a huge threat to Microsoft. It was miles ahead of Windows in terms of quality and some of its features are still, 20 years later, better than we have in current operating systems.
Look up the "Windows Tax"...Microsoft earned billions forcing their software on people who most certainly did not want it. They used underhanded tactics like illegal bundling, abusive OEM contracts and intentionally obscured file formats to edge out better competition. Given how well documented their history is, I'm not sure how anyone can claim that Microsoft is just giving people what they want without being completely ignorant of what happened in the 90s and 00s.
The problem with this theory is that it disregards opportunity cost. This is what I don't get about everyone that lionizes Gates and everything he has done with his billions. Those billions came from depriving others. What would those at Netscape have done with the extra billions if they hadn't been forced to sell for a fraction of what they could have become? What would those at BeOS have done with their money if Microsoft's illegal OEM deals hadn't made them fail? What would all the businesses who were forced to spend money they didn't have to on Microsoft software have done with it if it hadn't flowed to Microsoft instead?
Microsoft's business practices, in my view, introduced greater inefficiency into the software and business ecosystem. They were a parasite that drained resources from every healthy business "organism" and no amount of philanthropy can make up for the opportunity cost paid for Gates to amass his wealth.
I got the feeling that they were intentionally trying to push the point that their employees had families to try to counter the stereotype of the 20s, childless workaholic that many have about Google. But part of its feeling staged is likely due to the fact that the presenters are real Google employees who's skills as actors are pretty limited. If you had professional actors presenting, it might feel more authentic despite actually being less authentic.
Just to expound a bit, since I've had the same revelation during meditation...
Buddhists believe that the mind is another sense, just like sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The only difference is that it's a sense that devoted to looking inward instead of outward. And during meditation you can really start to see it as such. In the same way that you can let your eyes glaze over and see without processing the images or tune out what you're hearing, you can think without paying attention to your thoughts. It's can be trippy to experience, especially when you have the related revelations that pain or other discomfort is, similarly, just a thought that you can likewise ignore.
One small nit to what you've said. Breath control is core to yogic practices, as you've mentioned, but it is not part of most meditative practice. Meditation typically involves breath awareness, but specifically not control. The idea is to observe the breath as it is, not how we would like it to be.
This is especially true when you consider what that same $1500/mo will buy you using something like DynamoDB or Aurora. Both those solutions will give you more storage, are managed for you and will mostly scale up with you, meaning you don't have to start anywhere near $1500/mo.
I know the article said tying yourself to Amazon feels wrong. But focusing your time and energy on managing infrastructure that could be managed by Amazon instead of focusing your time and energy on your product feels more wrong to me. There are exactly zero startups that have succeeded because they had a more reliable and performant MongoDB installation.
Both your experience and the article author's experience manifest in the feeling of an antagonistic relationship and frustration on the part of the customer. But what I'd wager is happening is that the analytics teams have looked at subscriber retention and seen patterns. Perhaps subscribers who use 3 of their 5 key features don't cancel nearly as often. Or maybe subscribers who share with family rarely cancel because they either assume their family is getting value from it or they don't want to have the conversation about whether it's worth the price.
I have no doubt that a pure-digital product like the Times has tons of data on their users and have determined the key metrics that lead to retention. So their natural tendency is to try to game the metrics by trying to push as many accounts into those high-retention buckets as possible. The behavior you and the article author have experienced is the result of an organization becoming extremely data focused and losing focus on the customer experience. It's something to remember for those of us who ever find ourselves in a meeting where we're dissecting retention metrics and trying to figure out how to make our companies more successful.