Platformer

3 that I always watch for: - Lenny's newsletter. While lately it's become mostly about how to succeed as a PM in Big Tech, he occasionally covers juicy startup tactics. For example, "What is good retention?" was solid gold. - Casey Newton's Platformer. Balanced and insightful coverage of breaking industry news - Data Analysis Journal. Goes deep on many growth topics, with tons of real SQL code from an experienced practitioner, which is extremely hard to find. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/ https://www.platformer.news/ https://dataanalysis.substack.com/

This is not why she was fired and wouldn't have been a plausible reason in 2020 when it happened. >Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google. This is Google's side of it; I think the following is a fair piece of primary-source journalism if you want to go deeper: https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical/

The Verge's article here is the least compelling. They report it with the same confidence and style as their original article when the Reddit post first made waves. I recommend reading https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/ instead. It offers better reasoning, and an honest reflection about how close they were to getting taken in by the original Reddit post.

Watermarking I think is supposed to be the goal, but I don’t think anyone can think that the web is in anything but managed decline. The AI feeding itself AI will just end it all. I think Platformer describes it best: https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-pichai/ The question is what comes next, and I don’t think anyone has an answer to that.

Today's issue of Platformer explains it as the following: >The Supreme Court has previously held that Congress can’t ban foreign propaganda, including propaganda from China. In Lamont vs. Postmaster General, the court considered a law that required the postmaster general to detain “communist political propaganda” sent through the mail. The Post Office was then required to send the addressee a card asking whether they wanted the propaganda to be delivered, in what the court ultimately ruled had an unconstitutional chilling effect on speech. https://www.platformer.news/tiktok-ban-bill-senate-legal-challenge-fir…

From last month[1]: > Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed. Is Elon really going to make things like this public? Although he has refuted this, so maybe it never existed or has already been removed. > People will discover many silly things , but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found! So few employees are left, and Musk is increasingly fielding demands from his friends and followers for changes to the recommendation system. Maybe this is an attempt to just crowdsource the bugs. 1. https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-special-system

Very well put. Somebody once pointed out to me that the reason Instagram became so much more popular with celebrities than Twitter is that Instagram has filters to make you look prettier, but Twitter doesn't have anything to make you look smarter or funnier. Musk is clearly desperate to be The Best At Social Media. But he's just not. Which should be fine! We can't all be good at everything. But he can't let it go. So much so that he spent $44 billion to win at Twitter. And when that wasn't enough, he ordered people to fix it for him: https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-special-system I saw the Twitter purchase described as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory" and that gets truer by the day.

Mine is https://www.platformer.news/ – trends overview. What do you have?

It's unprofessional regardless, but I don't believe it was ethnic names in particular: > current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch. > Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist. [1] [1] From the link dang shared, above: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp

Given the employee's general attitude, I find it easy to believe her manager was already not happy with her. See her previous (potential) legal troubles with Google that she even acknowledges herself. > I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical

I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation. Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves. Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK. If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear. And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do. As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company. Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation. Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service. https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-representat… https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-surrender/

Your immediate acceptance that a timeline that represents the best spin of a deep-pocketed company in full crisis PR mode proves the story "false", full stop, no caveats is... I wouldn't say mind-bending, but quite credulous at a minimum. The timeline they present could be accurate but the full picture could still be quite damning. As Casey Newton wrote today [1]: > Of course, this explanation only goes so far. We don’t know whether anyone involved in choosing Sky’s voice noted the similarity to Johansson’s, for example. And given how close the two voices sound to most ears, it might have seemed strange for the company to offer both the Sky voice and the Johansson voice, should the latter actor have chosen to participate in the project. [...] And I still don’t understand why Altman reportedly reached out to Johansson just two days before the demonstration to ask her to reconsider. They absolutely have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Just look at their reaction to the NDA / equity clawback fiasco [2], and their focus on lifelong non-disparagement clauses. There's a lot of smoke there... [1] https://www.platformer.news/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-voice-he… [2] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam…

I disagree, this reeks of cheap solutions and ill thought HR managements. To me banning politics from company chat feels vague and confusing at best. Another post from a few days ago got this from a worker[1]: > “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.” At worst it feels like you are being silenced. In technology topics of diversity and inclusion tend towards the political (it doesn’t have to be; but it most often is as witnessed on HN). Does this mean if you feel like the company is not being inclusive that you cannot speak up? Tonnes of companies deal with issues like these in a better way IMO. Options include a code of conduct which prohibits escalating emotions in a political debate (i.e. by talking about genocide) while allowing (and even encouraging) talks about DE&I. Reprimand people that are found to use hostile language in public forums. Provide channels (echo chambers) where people can opt into and have a more heated debates (without breaking the CoC). Etc. 1: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp

> And if you did and someone pointed out how it can become problematic to have foreign names in the list and they tell you why, you don’t self-immolate. This isn't accurate. DHH openly admitted that the list circulating was a big failure that fell on the founders and the company, an admission that was positively received by most employees. The explosive part of the scandal starts when some employees insisted that the list contributed to genocidal attitudes and DHH rather aggressively pushed back on this point, saying that this is an unproductive escalation of the discussion (and then DHH himself ironically escalated the discussion even further). > He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive. Pointing out the problematic nature of the list was not the trigger for this. The trigger was a specific accusation made about the political impact of the list. The founders were clearly trying not to be a company that maintains a list of customer names to…

Gebru also publicly accused Jeff Dean of being complicit in "silenc[ing]" female researchers over a year before she resigned/was fired [1], and the "email complaining about the process to a mailing list about diversity and inclusion work" also included a brief reference to past legal tussles between herself and Google: > I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting. From the outside, it looks like whatever relationship Gebru and Google leadership had was extremely strained well before this paper. It looks like Google leadership had gotten tired of Gebru (for good or bad reasons) and took this as a good time to cut ties. [1] https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1193238414742548480?lang=en [2] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical

Let's be even more clear - they pushed out someone in their Ethical AI department because she wanted to have human conversations to determine the basis for being asked to soften critiques. It's one thing for reviewers, even anonymous reviewers, to reject a paper on its merits; it's another, in Timnit's own words [0], to be told "'it has been decided'" through "a privileged and confidential document to HR" despite clearing the subject matter beforehand. In light of a more general frustration, it's very reasonable for Timnit to escalate the situation by putting her own career on the table, simply to request that people engage with the paper rather than flat-out rejecting it. And if Jeff wants to respond by immediately cutting ties, and by putting out a document that doesn't even address the situation at hand (edit: much less the underlying issues of unequal treatment for women that Timnit describes)... that's a reflection of his ethics and the ethics of the company that stands behind him. [0] For those who haven't read Timnit's memo that Jeff references in the OP, it's worth reading: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical EDIT 2: follow https://twitter.com/timnitGebru to see more of her side of the story. She retweeted https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-says-google… as a good explanation of the situation for laypeople.

Dean writes: Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication. But Gebru writes that HR and her management chain delivered her feedback in a surprise meeting where she was not allowed to read the actual feedback, understand the process which generated it, or engage in a dialogue about it: Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week... And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. (from https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical) I've been through the peer review process at Physical Review Letters, SIGMOD, and VLDB. You get a document containing all the reviewer's comments, plus a metareviewer's take on the overall decision and what has to change.…

I have to say, this idea that we should assume the best of the large corporate entity to the detriment of the very real human person until "we know more context" strikes me as shockingly and painfully naive. Is the assumption here that Google is somehow better behaved than other corporations? I don't think there's any factual basis for such thinking. In my experience, corporations are laser focused on money, quarter-by-quarter, with little to no concern for the human cost. Google has been asked for comment and has consistently declined, in my opinion we should give much more weight to the real person here. We all have much more in common with the AI researcher than the large, faceless corporate entity. If we are at all principled, it's easy to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. Why the hand-wringing over this email they sent, the suspicion that it was all "hardball negotiating" and "bluffing"? The email to the mailing list pretty clearly outlines their concerns and reaction to Google, it seems a pretty safe assumption that their email to Google management covers much the same information.[0] This idea that they are bluffing strikes me as insulting: is there any reason to suspect they are bluffing? I don't see that in any of the coverage, by my reading this person felt this back-and-forth over the publication of this paper at the last minute was the last straw, their exasperation and frustration with Google is clear. It seems to me they were entirely willing to…

I don't completely follow here. The article says: > In an email to Dr. Gebru’s team on the evening of December 2, 2020, Google executives claimed that she had chosen to resign. This is false. Is this false, though? Her tweet [1] says: > I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here. "Work on a last date" unless I'm missing a colloquialism, means "quit with notice", right? The ultimatum here seems pretty direct, and since management did not choose to meet the conditions, then this sounds like a threat to resign that was called. I guess management could have attempted a more conciliatory approach of saying "we don't want to lose you, but we can't meet these conditions, maybe we can negotiate", but I'm not reading a retaliatory firing into this. [1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334343577044979712 [2] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical

This seems to be the email she sent to the internal "Women and Allies" mailing list: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this: > A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company. > Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed? > And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for…

Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1] Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection? [1]. https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-ai-backlash/

This was debunked by Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/

https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/ It's fake.

See also the incident ca. 2021 when a third of 37signals employees left the company over heavy-handed policing of employee speech[0]. 0. https://www.platformer.news/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp/

Sam Altman said in an on-the-record dinner interview with Platformer[0] that besides R&D ChatGPT was breakeven and Brad Lightstep, head of ChatGPT, corrected him by saying they were close, but not yet break even. I assume Sam and Brad both understand the unit economics of their product. Article is pay-walled for me, but I heard it on their podcast[1]. Which somehow I heard fine, but that page is getting pay-walled for me. [0]: https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-gpt-5-interview-lightcap-turley… [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/podcasts/hardfork-gpt5-perplexity.h…

Apparently they consider platforming hate speech to be beneficial because it could bolster sympathy for the groups being attacked. I wish I was joking. https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-speech/ Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.

A lot of the content of that book has been thoroughly debunked. A good starting point if you’re curious: https://www.platformer.news/anxious-generation-jonathan-haidt-debate-c…

Has anyone posted this one here? https://www.platformer.news/marissa-mayer-sunshine-shine-app-design-co…

Weird, I saw this article about Pitchfork being merged into GQ [0], which points to this stats page on Pitchfork [1] only to see Amon Tobin is one of the select few to receive a perfect 10 for Bricolage in 1997 to then having him reaching the front page of HN. All that in the span of 30 minutes. [0] https://www.platformer.news/why-pitchfork-died/?ref=platformer-newslet… [1] https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/25-years-of-pitchfork-…

Who gives a shit. Every freaking article is just about Twitter and Musk https://www.platformer.news/archive?sort=top Guess there is nothing to say about other 7000 US billionaires than some autist workaholic on drugs.