- It can make kids "overconfident when they see material they think they already know, so they end up not engaging."

- Some programs, particularly RSM, are criticized for valuing speed over depth. Current culture for K-8 math teachers is the opposite, they value depth over speed.

Left unsaid:

- It can make the teacher's job harder when the class has a wide span of abilities.

- Current teaching culture is skeptical of accelerating and/or skipping grades in math.

Notably, we've never heard English teachers be upset about a kid reading a book outside of school that's above grade level, or using advanced vocabulary in an essay. They tend to praise it.

Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school.

Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!

So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities. Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of background -- were all eliminated.

Which people are you referring to?

They did the same thing for gpt-5.1-codex-max (code name “arcticfox”), delaying its availability in the API and only allowing it to be used by monthly plan users, and as an API user I found it very annoying.

Why doesn't the macOS App Store game search include results from Steam? That would be a very consumer-friendly thing for Apple to do, right?

The answers to both questions are related.

I think this is about Netflix's model reflecting a fundamental technology shift; any company not participating fully in that shift will be operating less and less efficiently compared to those that are. Look at the inside history of HBO's attempts to build a streaming platform; in the early 2010s their leadership knew they probably should, but were their hearts in it? Did they have executives with competence in this area? No, they outsourced it and mismanaged it. Repeatedly. But like you said, my view includes being a former Netflix employee so maybe I'm biased.

I don't have current information on whether or to what degree studio production capacity is a constraint. Content spending was publicly projected to grow, so studio capacity had to grow, which is why Netflix decided to build giant new studio facilities in New Mexico and New Jersey. Those were referenced in the Q&A Netflix held Friday morning [1]. Wild guess: Netflix's own studios run at full capacity, which is why they're continuing to expand them. I'd love to know if WB studios run at capacity.

> I assumed their interest was strictly a content play and the extra studio space might actually be an anchor they were willing to drag along to get the content/IP.

Doubt it. Like I said, I'm not an insider on that question and I'm 6 years out of date. But if I had to guess, it would be that WB studio capacity will be a highly productive asset for Netflix -- most likely, it will be more valuable connected to Netflix's global distribution model that it was when operated under WB's model.

[1] Q&A transcript https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_events/2025/Dec/05...

Perhaps the judgement about Netflix being anti-consumer might be hard to sustain if you could more fully inspect the details of what Apple requires.

Netflix was a silicon valley start-up with a tech founder (Reed) who teamed up with an LA movie buff (Ted). They tried to solve a problem: it was too hard to watch movies at home, and Hollywood seemed to hate new tech. The movie industry titans alternated between fighting Netflix and making deals. They fought Netflix's ability to bulk purchase and rent out DVDs. Later, they lobbed insults even while taking Netflix's money for content licensing. Here's Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, in 2010:

"It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so." [1]

Remember: this was the same movie industry that gave us the MPAA and the DMCA. They were trying to ensure the internet, and new tech in general, had zero impact on them. Streaming movies and TV probably wouldn't exist if Netflix had not forced the issue.

Netflix buying HBO is significant, but also just another chapter in this story of Netflix's internet distribution model out-competing the Hollywood incumbents. Even now in 2025, at least 12 years after it was perfectly clear that streaming direct to the consumer would be the future, the industry is still struggling to turn the corner. Instead, they're selling themselves to Netflix.

I was at Netflix 2009-2019. It was shocking how easily our little "Albanian army" overthrew the empire. Our opponents barely fought back, and when they did, they were often incompetent with tech. To me, this is a story about how competent tech carried the day.

Netflix has been rapidly buying and building studio capacity for a decade now. Adding the WB studio production capacity is a huge win for Netflix. It makes those studios more productive: each day of content production is now worth more when distributed via Netflix's global platform.

Same with WB and HBO catalog and IP: it's worth more when its available to Netflix's approx 300 million members. Netflix can make new TV and films based on that IP, and it will be worth more than if it was only on HBO's platforms.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13bewkes.h...

If one your past managers did something recommended in this article but it caused problems, that's ok! It just means you have seen another failure mode that the author didn't experience.

I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the best managers at a former company. "Why did you originally want to be a manager?" was one of the first questions passed around the circle. The most common answer was, "I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."

You can be confident there is a non-zero rate of errors and defects in any complex service that's moving as fast as the frontier model providers!

Maybe. What would you rather have?

A) rock solid Sonnet 4 with Sonnet 5, say, next April

B) buggy Sonnet 4 with Sonnet 5, say, next January

Seems like different customers would have a range of preferences.

This must be one of the questions facing the team at Anthropic: what proportion of effort should go towards quality vs. velocity?

They recently resolved two bugs affecting model quality, one of which was in production Aug 5-Sep 4. They also wrote:

  Importantly, we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors, and the issues mentioned above stem from unrelated bugs. 

One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.

Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.

So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."

This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.

Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.

Yesterday evening's peak demand was between 7-8pm at 30.7 gigawatts. Supply breakdown around 8pm:

  Batteries: 8.4 GW
  Natural gas: 6.0 GW
  Renewables: 5.4 GW
  Large hydro: 4.4 GW
  Imports: 4.1 GW 
  Nuclear: 2.3 GW

“Digital-first production” can mean lots of things, so when you say Disney, Paramount, etc did this a decade ago, you’ll have to be more specific. Do you mean an end to end digital process? That’s not what this is about. Have you worked on a Netflix production? It’s night and day different from the studios you mentioned.

More interesting to me is who had the motive and opportunity, and this podcast makes a compelling case for who was behind it.