Surviving Business

This Economist story touts the cleverness of Duolingo as a business that is under direct assault from ChatGPT and the like but are still coming ahead. Apparently, that is the model to follow for others who haven't been quite as lucky:

Duolingo, a language-learning app. ChatGPT can imitate a half-decent French tutor and the cost to users of an AI-induced error is low. Nevertheless, shareholders are starting to think of Duolingo as an AI winner. In September it unveiled a video-chat feature that lets customers practise their language skills with an AI-generated character called Lily. On November 6th this sarcastic, purple-haired avatar joined the firm’s earnings call and presented its results. Analysts and investors swooned; the firm’s share price rose by 6% over the next few days. As AI upends more industries, clever innovation is the best way for would-be victims to escape their fate

Goes to show that if your product is indistinguishable from free AI offerings, your business model is vulnerable. However, if you can differentiate through unique features, superior user experience, privacy, or human expertise, you can still build a viable business, even in an AI-dominated landscape. The challenge is to deliver enough additional value to justify the price, not just to match what free tools can do.

Kicking Tires

 A few weekends ago Lovable was available for free to everyone to build anything they wanted. I tested it with the concept I am am developing as part of next year's product roadmap. To get a user interface design to the point where its good enough to get feedback traditionally takes weeks and months. The process is tiring and friction-prone. There are too many opinions and not enough data that leads to sub-optimal outcomes, even with rather mundane features. This is a complex multi-feature thing with a lot of UI components.

I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I started, giving Lovable a summary of my concept. In a couple of hours in which I also finished cooking dinner while the AI worked per my instructions, I had a fully clickable prototype that was good enough review with users. There are no novel elements in what I had asked for. Just putting things together a certain way to solve a specific problem. Nothing others have not done million times before. The fact that I got from start to a logical point this fast and this painlessly left me in awe. Getting from here to building something that will be enterprise grade is still a distance but the time saved from concept to a visual representation of that concept that users can react and respond to is absolutely fantastic

Tragic Hero

Farewell My Concubine was on my bucket list since it was released and caused such a stir. I watched it a few weeks ago and found myself thinking about it for days after. The details of the story and what it means in a very different time and place from where it is set. There was the obvious killing of a child's spirit to the point they no longer have an anchoring sense of who they are. The movie shows this unfold in ways that are specific to the era and the characters but there is a certain universality to the idea. If you want guarantees of performance and compliance then no better way than to subsume the child's mind into whatever those objectives are until they are no longer able to separate what they want and what is wanted of them. As parents, we are all likely guilty of this to some extent. We pass on our hopes and dreams to our kids. Sometimes, with that comes a tactic obligation to fulfill them and guilt is a natural byproduct of failing to do so. 

The loss of agency of the protagonist Cheng Dieyi is depicted in a raw, unvarnished manner. He simply cannot escape his fate because even resolving to escape requires agency he does not have. You wonder who or what he might been in other circumstances. Those are infact the questions anyone could ask about themselves. While not in nearly as tragic or barbaric conditions as he had to be grow up in, most people are victims of the hand they were dealt as children. The movie is visually gorgeous, every scene a work of art. It is long but flows at a pace that keeps the viewer engaged and interested. I found it hard to decide wish character I empathized with most - all three were tragic in their own way, even if Cheng Dieyi's sufferings were the worst. 

Sick Dog

This article about the mixed attitude towards street dogs in India brought to mind the one that was fixture for ever in the stairwell of my uncle's home. 

While working-class people and warriors often admired and depended on them, elite Brahmins and ritual specialists sometimes regarded dogs as impure or associated them with lower castes. This duality persisted into medieval times, with literature often looking down on dogs even as they remained essential in society. The article also notes that Indian dogs were exported and admired abroad for their strength and hunting skills. Today, while some elite Indians seek to remove street dogs from public spaces, many ordinary people view them with affection, reflecting a long and complicated shared history

The dog in question was jet black but his coat was dusty from neglect. He was skinny, sickly and depended on scraps of food from people in the neighborhood. My uncle's family did not feed him but the stairwell was the dog's shelter from the elements. No one tried to evict him from there. Then he started to get sick and smelt really bad. You could tell the dog was there from afar and it filled you with trepidation as that foul smell intensified as you got closer. We avoided contact with him and went into the house. Even in those days, no one felt compelled to get the dog out of the way. At some point he died. 

In my uncle's home no one ever talked about the dog when he was alive or after he passed. It was understood that he was sick and there was nothing anyone could do about it. I guess we respected his right to be as he was, where he was.

Low Bar

How this story unfolds will be interesting to watch. Apparently, a lawsuit was filed by Nan Zhong and his son, Stanley Zhong, a Palo Alto teen who was rejected by 16 top colleges, including MIT, Stanford, and multiple University of California campuses, despite having a 4.42 GPA, a near-perfect SAT score, and founding a startup. Stanley’s story, and his subsequent hiring by Google as a software engineer, became a focal point in the national debate over college admissions. He seems to have most of the checklist completed except he did not end poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and/or find a cure for cancer. Just those two things could have put him above the line. The level of ridiculousness in the process has well exceed the bar though. 

If this kid makes over three hundred thousand (give or take) without having had to step into college, it begs the question what purpose would college serve anyway if the only intent was to land the job similar to the one he already has. Most of what he learned in college would prove irrelevant anyway. I have an intern right now who is graduating from one of the colleges that rejected Stanley Zhong. He is bright and well-intentioned but he is hardly performing at a level that inspires any awe. He was given a pretty well-defined problem to solve and he decided in a couple of weeks he would not be able to get it over the finish line and have something good to show at his end of internship demo. So he will do what is possible to demo well. Not the outcome I was expecting but that's how it turned out.

I have also had interns in prior years that came from colleges way down in the pecking order that would have done just as well and kids from community colleges that would have gone above and beyond to solve the problem because they are motivated to prove their value. Based on personal experience, I am more inclined to pick my interns from unknown, unremarkable colleges if they have the burning desire to excel and can show me evidence of it. 


Bird Lessons

Loved this story about warbling baby finches and how they sing for no other reward that to sing better:

In the study, the scientists found that the more mature the bird’s rendition of the song relative to their age, the more dopamine was released in the basal ganglia, a cluster of nuclei in the neocortex involved in control of movement as well as reward and cognition. When the birds performed less well relative to their age, dopamine levels dropped. And when the scientists blocked dopamine release, the birds’ performance relative to their age also declined. Dopamine was always elevated above baseline levels when the birds sang, regardless of song quality, the scientists found, which suggests it may help to reward spontaneous warbling.

Parents of young children could learn some lessons from the fathers of baby zebra finches who drive this self-directed learning. Encouraging children to explore and practice skills on their own, without relying solely on external rewards, can help them grow intrinsic motivation and long-term mastery. While we know this to be true, it is not always easy. The answer seems to be that they could lead by example and show kids that repeated practice is essential, even when there is no immediate payoff, much like the finches who rehearse their song thousands of times. This active engagement model (similar to the father finch singing to his hatchlings), seems to be worth emulating for humans too.

Boat Theft

Reading about the boat theft theory immediate brought to mind the dynamics of a dysfunctional team, the inverse of what the theory is all about, but there are common threads that are worth considering.

The dysfunctional team dynamic and the Boat Theft Theory of Consciousness both revolve around the strategic management of information in ambiguous social environments. In the Boat Theory, consciousness is proposed to enable tacit coordination through omission, such as avoiding direct questions about theft to maintain plausible deniability among group members. 

Similarly, in teams with unclear responsibilities, individuals exploit ambiguity to avoid blame or seize opportunities, using back-channeling and covert communication much like the Yanomamö’s unspoken agreement not to incriminate each other. In each case, the lack of clear rules or roles creates a space where people rely on subtle, often unspoken, strategies to navigate the situation.

However, while the Boat Theory focuses on cooperative deception for mutual benefit, like group members tacitly agreeing to break a rule together, dysfunctional teams often shift toward zero-sum competition. In such teams, conflicting incentives and the absence of shared goals mean that back-channeling and back-stabbing become tools for personal gain rather than collective advantage. This difference highlights that, although both scenarios depend on the ability to separate actions from explicit social labeling, the team context often turns these mechanisms into sources of division and mistrust rather than cooperation.

Surviving Business

This Economist story touts the cleverness of Duolingo as a business that is under direct assault from ChatGPT and the like but are still co...