To escape, each of us had to find clues in our own cell to figure out how to open the doors. We each had to find an object that solved a piece of the puzzle, and once we put them all together, the door would open. As a first challenge, it was easy enough. Everyone found a brightly colored object in their room and described it to the team so we could piece it together. Everyone but one team member.

"Come on, read it, man, we can win this."

He froze. Someone jumped in to help: "Mine was the most obvious green object in the room. Just look for something bright. Maybe blue, or orange, something that seems out of place." He didn't respond. He just sat there, frozen on camera. We figured he was having internet connectivity issues. We waited a good five minutes before he finally found it, and we moved on to the next level.

I didn't think much of that day. We finished the game, we had fun, it was great. He waited until our next one-on-one to explain what had actually happened. He panicked, and he was embarrassed. It turned out he was colorblind. We were yelling random color names at him, and he couldn't, for the life of him, see any of them.

As far as I can tell, I'm not colorblind, and it never would have occurred to me that this was something to account for. Just last week, I learned about Vehicle Motion Cues on the iPhone, a feature that helps reduce motion sickness. I don't think I've ever experienced motion sickness myself, or at least never in a car.

Watching a blind person navigate a website was eye-opening for me. I realized that many of my past design choices would have worked against their experience without my ever knowing it. The same goes for someone navigating a computer entirely by voice. I recently rediscovered Windows Speech Recognition, which I found pretty annoying for my own needs. But for someone who relies on it for all of their computer use, it's an essential tool.

A coworker once mentioned, almost in passing, that she struggles to read certain fonts because of dyslexia. Tight letter spacing and low-contrast text make some of our internal tools nearly unreadable to her. I had picked those fonts because they looked good on a demo slide. It had never crossed my mind that a font choice could be the difference between someone reading a document easily and someone giving up on it entirely.

In some of our zoom calls, a teammate would often ask if he could do audio only before the call. While it didn't bother me at all, the managers kept insisting on everyone turning on their cameras. But after he used the camera for a few minutes, his connection would start dropping. I just assumed he had slow Internet. But the reality was he was located in a rural area and he relied entirely on his phone's hotspot to connect to the internet. The zoom call was using up all his data in minutes.

None of these problems were problems for me. That's exactly what made them invisible. Unless you are experiencing these issues, there's little reason to ever notice them. We tend to design our tools, our meetings, and our expectations around our own experience of the world, and then mistake that experience for the default. It takes a colorblind teammate freezing on a call, or a friend who can't ride in the passenger seat without getting sick, to remind us that "normal" was only ever normal for us.

You can never anticipate every invisible problem in advance, that's impossible. But at the very least, we should remember that our own experience is rarely the default. We should be a bit more curious on how others experience the tools we build.

But for some reason, it's different with AI. If nobody's using it, the assumption is that employees aren't being productive enough. So we got signed up for mandatory training. There was limited space, but I moved fast and got a spot. I'd been using ChatGPT since it came out, so I was hoping the training would turn me from a casual user into a pro.

Instead, we were shown how to copy and paste data from Excel and other sources into the chat interface. We worked with sample data, and there was always someone in class who'd say "mine didn't work." The developers in the room asked about Codex. The OpenAI-certified instructor replied that she wasn't a developer. There was an awkward moment when someone asked if we could just use Copilot, since it's already integrated into Excel.

I got my certificate. But I don't think I learned anything I couldn't have picked up with a free account on my own time.

What comes with a certificate, though, is the obligation to use the tool. I had a hammer, and everything looked like a nail. Whenever I ran into dense information, I'd copy, paste, extract insight. The great thing is that the result always looks neatly presented. I didn't have time to read the dense information in the first place, so of course I wasn't going to verify whether it was accurately referencing the source material. Besides, everyone was doing the same thing. I hate it when people use AI to write a Slack message, but at this point it's inevitable.

One time, after a meeting, I pulled the transcript and asked ChatGPT to organize it into action items and generate a Q&A based on the content. It gave me something very elaborate. Or at least it looked elaborate. I skimmed it and passed it along to the next person, who actually had to use it to research a project. What I failed to notice was that a large part of the document was hallucinated.

Some of the action items sounded technical enough to fool me. But to someone who actually had to work on them, they made no sense at all. I'm guilty of this, and it's become the norm. The same way we use large language models to write code as software engineers, the planning and architecting behind that code is increasingly written by LLMs too.

In my household, AI slop videos are strictly banned, to the point that my kids police their friends who watch that stuff. So when my son saw ChatGPT open on my computer, he asked if I was making BI Slop.

"BI Slop? What's that?"

"It's Business Intelligence Slop!"

I was so proud of him for recognizing exactly what I was doing. And I was so disappointed in myself, because that's exactly what I was doing. The same way we scrutinize code and refuse to merge PRs that are entirely AI-generated, we need to pay attention to the other ways we use these tools. Business decisions and plans produced by LLMs need to pass the smell test before they're accepted.

The issue is the same one. We merge large PRs because we don't have time to read them, then suffer the consequences later in unexpected ways. With business intelligence, we don't read the output because of its sheer volume, and we approve it because it looks good on the surface. Then, again, we suffer the consequences later in unexpected ways.

This is a problem created only because we were handed a mandatory solution: use AI to justify the line item in the spreadsheet. It only saves you time in the sense that you skip reading the output, and you do that because it looks good on the surface.

When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of that amount. So I wondered, why did they inflate the amount in the first place? It looked like a PR stunt.

This past couple weeks, I worked on a video to explain what really happened and how we should take this news.

Enjoy

Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time.

When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply because they are discovering the insight at the same time you are.

They were busy, they didn't have time to write. As a consequence, they only dedicated enough time to skim the result before publishing. They don't know what's in it. You can't ask them what they were thinking when they came up with the insight because, well, they didn't think.

The great article sucks because there is nobody behind it.

A poor man buys a cheap pair of boots for a few dollars. They fall apart within a year, so he buys another pair. And another. Over five years, he spends far more than the man who bought one expensive, well-made pair up front. A pair that's still going strong to this day.

And the lesson was simple: buying cheap is expensive. Buy quality, and you save money in the long run.

Now swap the boots for a jacket, a phone, a kitchen knife, whatever you like. In my experience, that used to be true. I have old clothing still hanging in my closet, and they still hold together. Price and quality were correlated. If a company was going to charge you more, it needed to justify that premium with better materials, better construction, better everything. The market punished brands that didn't.

But something changed along the way. This is just my own personal observation, but I'm sure you can relate: I pay too much for things that don't last.

When I was growing up, we separated the real from the knockoff with a simple test. You flipped the product over and checked the tag. If it said "Made in China," you knew it was a cheap knockoff.

Then, somewhat suddenly, that stopped working. Walk into almost any flagship store for almost any prestige brand today, and check the label. Chances are it says the same thing as the bargain version sitting in a discount bin three blocks away. They all come from the same factories, the same supply chains, and in some cases, the very same production line. It's not the quality of the product that determines the price. What determines whether a good sells for $30 or $300 depends entirely on the brand.

Right above the "Made in China," you'll now find another line: "Designed in [prestigious country here]."

The materials didn't necessarily get worse. But the price no longer tells you what it used to.

When you pay that premium now, the price covers the ad campaigns, the celebrity endorsements, the logo, the history, the feeling of exclusivity, and the envy from your friends.

Today, price is not a proxy for quality. Businesses are simply capitalizing on brand power, that's all. When you buy something expensive, you have no guarantee that it will last. Everything should be judged on a case-by-case basis. In fact, if you're looking for goods that last, one approach is to search for "cheap alternatives" online.

The story we were always told was really about information. The poor man didn't have the money to buy quality, so he used price as a signal to gauge quality, and maybe saved up to invest in a better product. That rule has changed. Price is now just a signal of a brand's power, nothing else. To find the better product, you'll have to rely on others who've tested it and can tell you how it holds up to time.

That's 2 GB for Windows 95, Office 95 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Encarta 95, all my father's work documents, and the million games I had installed.

I borrowed a disc from a friend that had a few dozen games on it. I installed them all. Before I knew it, I ran out of space. The computer became extremely slow, and I couldn't install any more games. I figured I needed to delete some games, but I was ten years old. I was not going to delete my games. I couldn't delete my father's stuff either, so I decided to explore the hard drive.

I noticed that in the Program Files folders, every application came with a bunch of text files. Some of them were large, and they didn't look that important to me, especially the ones ending in .ini.

So I went from one folder to the next, deleting those .ini files. There's satisfaction in gathering all those files in the recycle bin, emptying it, then watching your storage space increase. I deleted so many files that I was able to install an additional game on the computer.

It was one of my most satisfying accomplishments. I had a problem, I explored the computer, and I found a solution. I played the new game until I got tired of it. In the 90s, when you were done using the computer, you clicked Start → Shut Down → Confirm Shutdown. The computer would think for about two minutes, then display in big orange letters:

And I shut it down. You can imagine what happened next. The computer wouldn't boot again.

Those .ini files seemed unimportant to a child, but they are configuration files used by several applications, including the operating system. While the Windows Registry did exist in Windows 95, .ini files were still commonly used. When I deleted them, any application or process that relied on them failed to load and simply crashed.

Anyone who had anything of importance on that computer lost it. Everyone except my father, who carefully kept copies of his documents on floppy disks. He knew I was up to no good.

Throughout my career, I've seen many people make this same mistake. When something doesn't look important to them, they delete it. Whether it's a programmer deleting a function that "looks stupid," or a DBA dropping a table or a single field they assume no one will miss. It's all the result of the same mindset: "I don't think this is important."

It makes me think of DOGE, the real yet fictional Department of Government Efficiency. The team supposedly tasked with combing through government programs to find waste never looked deeper than the surface. Just like ten-year-old me, they looked at a department they didn't understand and decided it wasn't important. They uprooted how the entire country works just to save money, the same way I destroyed the family computer just to save storage space. Whether DOGE actually saved us any money is still hotly debated, especially when weighed against the pain and suffering it caused.

Anyone with half a brain could have seen their failure coming from a mile away. The same way anyone who understood how computers work could have told me those configuration files were important. At least, all we lost in our household was time and some saved games. The American people can't say the same.

There is a large class of apps that could be replaced by a simple website, especially those made for schools that only present information. The worst part is that in those apps, most of the things we take for granted on the web are blocked. You can't copy and paste, you can't open a link in a new app, and you have to update the entire app just to get new information. For someone like me, who never updates an app until it's necessary, I usually end up with broken applications.

But when I complain, I'm usually alone in those circles, because no one seems to know what a website is. The more I explain, the more I sound like a character from the 90s explaining how cool email is.

They don't know what a website is. Check their phones, they have a thousand apps.

The last time I blogged about just using websites, several people pointed out that they prefer using apps. My argument was that there is nothing the LinkedIn app does that necessitates an app. All its features are supported on the web. All but pervasive tracking. But I'm fighting a losing battle, because a large number of people have forgotten, or never knew, that LinkedIn is just a website. So is Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

They push you toward the app only so they can better harvest information from you.

So when we tell people to use the website instead of the app, they don't understand, because these services only push the app. A large number of the population has started to believe that a website is just a preview of an app, like a lightweight version.

While I'm here complaining about a single app displaying an unexpected notification, people in my circle have a thousand unread notifications. It's a surprise that they somehow respond to my messages in the midst of all those alerts. I've met people who have an app for every single restaurant they go to. While I'm reading the privacy policy of a single app, trying to determine if it's worth downloading to benefit from a 20% discount, my friends are already in the loyalty program of the juice bar that opened down the street less than a day ago.

People download apps, and they don't understand websites. They have a thousand apps on their screen and would rather swipe through it to find the one app they need for a single purpose.

When I read Dan Q's post a few days ago, I was relieved for a second, just to know that I'm not alone. We prefer using websites, and we know most apps are oversized wrappers around a website. But I have to remember that the people with a thousand apps are not the minority. We are. We are the few who would rather use a progressive web app than download a 300 MB wrapper.

I'm not prescribing a solution here, just want to remind the web community that outside of our circles, people happily download a 300 MB app that displays information already available on the web.

I'm not one to tell you that billionaires shouldn't exist, or what is or isn't fair in a system I don't control. But one thing I've come to see over the years is that public good deeds are rarely what they seem. Whether it's a feel-good story on the news, a TV show pimping your car, or another turning your house into a mansion, there's an underlying truth that often gets obscured by the appearance of a good deed.

Bill Gates, who was once the richest man in the world, pledged to leave almost all his money to charity. Over the years this story has been repeated, and I'm the last person to tell you how to feel about it. For me, it's a good thing to help a charitable organization that's trying to help others. Last year, Bill Gates renewed this pledge, stating that he would give away around $200 billion and keep less than 1% for himself. I mean, $200 billion? That's crazy. Any charitable organization receiving even a fraction of that money will be able to do a lot of good with it, especially when Elon Musk said he could end world hunger with just $6.6 billion.

But that's only part of his statement. He isn't leaving his money to any random organization that needs it. He's leaving it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That's a different thing. Not a bad thing, but it changes the statement from "I'm donating my money to charity" to "I'm going to use my money to do charity." The money moves from one pocket to another.

The point I'm trying to make is that good stories often come with a few asterisks. When I read the Evan Spiegel story, I was intrigued because, well, I'm Californian. I've been here for over 20 years, my kids were born and raised here, and so far I have no intention of going anywhere else. Oh, and I've had one of those surprising medical bills that nearly made me faint. (A story for another day)

Reading a story where a billionaire pays off people's medical debt makes you feel good. It made me feel good. But when I looked at the details, things didn't add up.

The language of billionaire philanthropy.

First of all, the title of the LA Times article said: "Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr help erase $550 million in medical debt for Californians". Note that it says "help erase." The charitable interpretation is that they paid $550 million of our debts. But that's not what it says, it says "help erase."

Further into the article, it states:

The couple made a multimillion-dollar donation to Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit that provides debt relief to people in financial need. The organization acquires medical debt in bulk from hospitals, physician groups, collection agencies and other groups for a fraction of the cost.

So rather than pay the debt directly, they made a donation to Undue Medical Debt, which had already acquired the debts. And the most interesting part of all this is that Undue Medical Debt acquires debts for "a fraction of the cost."

In the article, they admit that the actual amount the couple donated was not disclosed; however, they do explain how much the organization pays to acquire debt:

Every $10 donated to Undue Medical Debt relieves an average of $1,000 in medical debt.

In other words, they acquire debt for a hundredth of its original value, a penny on the dollar (1/100).

10 years ago, to the date, John Oliver aired an episode of his show where he bought $15 million of medical debt “from Texas at a cost of less than half a cent on the dollar, which is less than 60 grand”. He then paid it off, relieving 9,000 people of their medical debt. It’s a ripe business for anyone looking for a quick PR win.

Again, I'm not complaining about this, I'm just doing the math. It's a good thing that they're taking on people's debt and finding rich people to pay for it. That's a good thing for the person receiving the relief.

"No one should go bankrupt because of a cancer diagnosis and no family should have to choose between insulin and groceries."

It's a good thing:

San Diego County residents benefited the most from the donation, with total medical debt relief through the couple's gift totaling roughly $99 million and affecting 40,369 people. In Los Angeles County, the gift provided $26.7 million in medical debt relief to 17,466 people, according to the nonprofit.

That's close to 60,000 people benefiting from this relief. But the language keeps circling the drain instead of just telling us what they actually gave. It says "the donation with total medical debt relief through the couple's gift totaling roughly..." They never tell us how much they gave, just how much the medical debt is "roughly" worth.

But we can do the math. Undue Medical Debt purchases debt for a penny on the dollar. Evan and Miranda paid off $550 million in debt. At a penny on the dollar, or 1/100, that puts the purchase price at roughly $5.5 million. That's a huge difference in value. Evan and Miranda donated $5.5 million to Undue Medical Debt, "roughly". Why was that so hard to say? Is the value too low? Not good enough? I'd argue it's still very generous. But it doesn't generate the same amount of PR, does it?

It's one thing to say you've donated a quarter of your wealth, but a whole other thing to say you've donated 0.27% of your money.

I'm not trying to shame them really, I think they should just be honest. Either donate silently, or tell the truth. Why inflate it? It also tells us something about how inflated medical bills really are. If the debt only costs a hundredth of its face value, then patients should be able to pay it off themselves. When my children were in the NICU, we were charged "roughly" $20,000 a night for our two-month stay in the hospital, per child. I'll spare you the math for now. (Again that's a story for another day)

Here is how the Math makes this whole story completely ridiculous. With the original debt of $550 million for 60 thousand people, it comes down to $9,167 (550,000,000 / 60,000) per person. That's a steep price for anyone to pay. But for the price that Evan and his wife paid it's $5.5 million for 60 thousand people. We are down to just $91 per person. If that was your medical bill, there wouldn't be a need for an organization to offer any help.

There's always an angle to these charitable stories. We celebrated Bill Gates' pledges without questioning that he was funding his own foundation, and that it did more than just charitable work (like oil, fast food, or pharma). We celebrated Warren Buffett's pledges, while he quietly changed his tune in his last annual letter. Evan and Miranda boasted $550 million, while they actually donated only a hundredth of that amount.

I'm not saying the money they donated or actions these people took aren't commendable, it's just that it would have been better if they had been honest about it from the beginning. When the rich donate money or make a show of it, there is always more to the story.

Resources:

• NPR
• LA Times
• Yahoo

Update:

The LA Times only mentioned ~60,000 people in two Californian cities. However, on Undue medical website, the reported number is 260,000. If we update the math to 5.5M / 260k it comes back to $21 in average medical bill per person. I'm pretty sure the majority of people would be able to afford that without assistances.

A merchant, or anyone really, can create a product (or source it from China), then resell it on amazon. Amazon is the service provider, and hosts all the metrics concerning the products. If Amazon themselves were in the business of creating and selling products, then that creates a potential of conflict of interest. Because they have the data of all products that sell and sell well. They could replicate that success without doing any further research since the merchant has already confirmed the existence of demand.

It's not surprising that Amazon Basics quickly became the best selling "private-label brand" on Amazon. They already know what sells because they have access to the data. Yet they continued to deny it, and state that they only ever use publicly available data from sellers.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company believes the allegations are "factually incorrect and unsubstantiated," adding that Amazon strictly prohibits the "use or sharing of non-public, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands."

Yet the results are right there for all to see.

If you sell any product through Amazon, you are exposing your company's operations to them. If you want to keep that information to yourself, then you don't get to reach your customers, which in reality are Amazon's customers.

If you want to buy something online, and get it shipped as quickly as possible, then Amazon is a blessing. Most often than not, you are not buying the product directly from Amazon. An independent store or vendor with a presence on Amazon will fulfill your order. The seller only has minor identifying characteristics on the platform. On the search result page, the space designated to the seller is small and insignificant. The customer has very few reminders that products are offered by anyone but Amazon. (Although if you want to dispute a sale, you are starkly reminded that the item is from a 3rd party vendor.)

So there is no surprise when companies embrace AI internally, they are putting themselves at the risk of sharing their product with their competitors. Maybe the most obvious example is when Antropic came up with Claude Design. A tool to help users generate designs, wireframes, etc. Kinda like Figma.

That's not a problem on its own, but when Antropic's chief product officer sits on Figma's board of directors, you can't say that there isn't a conflict of interest there. In fact, the chief product officer resigned from the board merely days before Claude Design was announced. He basically extracted all value from Figma then resigned. Figma's AI features are built on top of Claude. So Anthropic literally pulled an Amazon Basic on Figma.

When companies force their own employees to use AI to do their day to day work, they are basically asking employees to upload company data to a 3rd party that may become a competitor. Sure something in the contract clause says that the AI company won't train on enterprise customer data, but nothing stops them from peaking at successful product data.

Whenever someone tells me that they used AI to build an app and boast of its values or uniqueness, I want to remind them that if you can just prompt-create a product, so can the AI provider. In fact, they might have better resources to create a competing product if it displays any sign of success (see Figma).

While it looks like plenty of people are benefitting from AI today, all this information is being shared with AI providers. We are giving them full access to our thought process. When you include them in your workflow, you are basically providing them with a step by step approach on how to do your job.

Don’t be surprised when you see a native Antropic/OpenAi project management application suite. Or a CRM, or any software that is trying to integrate with AI and may experience success.

A few years back, when I worked in Customer Service Automation, we discovered that most companies used Zendesk to manage their customer service. Since customers mainly contacted support via email, an intentional database had been built that tracked users through their shopping experience throughout the web.

While so much could be done with that data, like identifying “problematic” customers, or recommending products based on their history, we ended up finding something more helpful. We could easily detect a pattern of issues for certain shipping carriers. We could see when UPS was having delays in certain cities, or when Fedex was having technical issues when updating the last mile status. None of these things were features designed or provided by anyone. However, having access to businesses’ data gave us insight where we had none before.

That became a feature for us, only because we were not competitors to all these online retailers.

When you expose your company's internal data to a potential competitor, don’t be surprised when they build a competing business to rival you.

1. Help people find a match, and they will never come back
2. Make people pay and keep them on the platform as long as possible.

Let's pretend for a second that we actually want people to find love. Love is such a weird thing that we don't even know how to define it properly. Ask two people what it means, and you will get five plausible definitions. If you approach it programmatically, then you will likely look into some measurable metrics to match people and then hope that love emerges somehow.

In my quest to find what the ideal dating app would look like, I interviewed a couple of my friends that use those apps. I quickly gave up when I realized that I don't have a clue on how people actually use the apps. The first comment that threw me off was when my single friend told me of an app where she found some pretty good dates.

How can you find some good dates and remain single? And what made them good? The more questions I asked, the less I understood.

I guess I got lucky. I used a dating app for a brief time, and before I knew it I was married. I never got to experience "good dates". I thought when you found one, you were safe to delete the app. I never had to pay for super swipes, and other premium packages.

Anyway, I'm not trying to solve dating anymore but apparently whatever I thought I knew has once again changed. A friend described the experience in a way that I thought was profound.

In these apps:

Men are looking for a woman who doesn't exist anymore.

Women are looking for a man that never existed.

This must be peak monetization strategy. Dating apps don't create the perfect match, they pick from the same pool of people that they share with every other dating app. So to make it more appealing, you have to create the appearance of the perfect partner that may only exist in your garden.

Men are asked to look to the past, where women were like their grandmother. She was both strong and soft, in charge and submissive. A past that they never lived, but looks appealing through their minds' eyes. They were only toddlers when grandma took care of them. Who doesn't love grandma.

Women are looking for a tall rich guy who is both CEO and able to change diapers. He is at the grocery store, but he is also at the gym. He is at work, but is available at a moment's notice. At least that's how he is portrayed on social media.

The Giga family

Grandma, God rest her soul, has passed away. We don't know who she was and how she became the loving person we knew. Those rich gym CEO guys only exist on instagram. They are a convenient plot device that keeps you swiping and spending.

I don't know if there will ever be a better way to match people, but I think technology has already solved the connection problem. We can connect. But if we want to make those connections any stronger and fit into one of those loose definitions of love, then we have to put the device away and talk to one another.