TikTok* has caused political controversies, made Meta change its Instagram platform to mimic it, and caused many a moral panic. All signs of success.
TikTok’s use of machine learning to present a never-ending stream of engaging content is an example of the successful application of machine learning at a gargantuan scale.
But, as the linked WSJ article shows, TikTok’s growth is driven by massive investments in technology and advertising.
ByteDance, which owns TikTok, lost more than $7 billion from its operations in 2021 on $61.4b in revenues
The company spent $27.4b on user acquisition and $14.6b on R&D
I believe that the value of applied machine learning technologies will accrue to those companies that can deploy vast resources to acquire data (in TikTok’s case – users who generate the data) and build massive data and ML infrastructure. I am sure we will see similar revenue and spending trends if we analyze Meta and Google’s results.
While Data Science and Machine Learning careers grab the limelight, making ML platforms more efficient and processing data much cheaper will be more lucrative in the long term.
If a company spends significant cash on ML and data infrastructure, it will always look for people to make things more efficient. Possible careers for the future:
Natural Language Processing or NLP is a catch-all term for making sense of unstructured text-like data. Google search recommendations, chatbots, and grammar checkers are all forms of NLP. This is a field with many years of research. But, for the last 5-7 years, machine learning has reigned supreme.
Five years ago, machine learning approaches to NLP were labor intensive. Success meant having access to large amounts of clean and labeled training data that would train ML models. A text summarization model would be pretty different from one that did sentiment analysis.
The development of large language models or LLMs has revolutionized this field. Models like GPT-3 are a general-purpose tools that can be used to do several different tasks with very little training.
To show GPT-3 in action, I built a tiny slack bot that asks some questions and uses GPT-3 to generate actions. The video below is a demo of the bot and also an explanation of how to prompt GPT-3 to do NLP tasks.
The morning after a big software release can be both terrifying and exhilarating.
Kudos to the Ethereum team for pulling off a massively complex transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. This reduces the energy consumption of the Ethereum blockchain by 99.95% (and global energy consumption by 0.2%).
I am still not convinced by the utility of the crypto ecosystem, and I am sure there will be bumps along the way. The transition to Proof of Stake will further entrench the power of those holding significant capital. Proof of Work meant influence aggregated to those who could deploy significant computing power by spending vast amounts of money on GPU hardware. The switch to Proof of Stake will remove the hardware intermediation layer. The massive savings in energy and speedups in transaction processing make it a worthwhile change.
Philosophical arguments aside, as a software engineer, I can appreciate a job well done 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾.
I have played video games for thirty years. With two kids and a busy job, I don’t get as much time to play as I would like, but I pick up my Xbox controller whenever I get a chance. Over the last few months, this has meant playing Elden Ring, a role-playing game where you explore and adventure in a fantastical realm called the Lands Between.
Elden Ring – Bandai Namco
I am terrible at Elden Ring, yet I have spent hours playing it over the last six months. I am in awe of the game’s scale, beauty, and challenge.
When not playing video games, I support software development teams. Over the last ten years, I have worked as an Engineering Manager and, more recently, as a CTO at early-stage startups.
Managing and supporting teams is hard. You have to balance competing priorities and make decisions under conditions of ambiguity. Periods of stability can be interrupted by crises. It’s not that different from playing a game like Elden Ring!
As I reflected on why I enjoyed playing some video games more than others, I realized there are parallels between excellent video game design and supporting high-performance teams.
In this post, I explore what makes a video game great and what lessons we can apply from video game design to become better managers.
What Makes a Good Video Game?
Video game design is a vast and evolving topic. However, there are three critical elements to a good video game.
Good vs. Bad Video Design
The Story: What is this video game about, and why should I bother playing it?
A good video game story makes players want to invest their time in learning more about the world and the story. Games like Elden Ring, Horizon Zero Dawn, and God of War have stories that push players to do all sorts of side quests and missions. Exploring the world helps fill out the story, and each task moves the character and the story forward.
Hades – Supergiant Games
The Setting: Where am I going to be spending my time?
Seasoned gamers are familiar with the “one more turn” phenomenon. You want to keep playing because the game world is so darn fun. Dungeons filled with loot (and traps), exciting side missions, and beautiful scenery make the game’s exploration and progression fun. Games like the Mass Effect series make you care not just about the characters but also the broader game world and lore.
Gameplay Loop:How do I play the game?
Elden Ring is brutally difficult, yet I keep returning to the game. The reason is that while challenging, the gameplay is fair and predictable. And I get a real sense of accomplishment after clearing a particularly tricky dungeon or boss encounter. Hades is another game that has wonderfully compelling gameplay. Great video games have a simple yet addictive core gameplay loop. These are the actions that a player is expected to perform most often to make progress in the game. These must be balanced to avoid tedium while presenting fun and challenging experience.
From Video Games to High-Performance Teams
What do video games have to teach us about supporting high-performance teams?
We will approach this by looking at the same attributes that we explored for successful video games:
Story → Vision
Setting → Workplace
Gameplay → The Day-to-Day Work
Vision: Why am I being asked to do this?
A compelling narrative is about selling a vision – what will the player gain at the end of this quest line, boss battle, or challenging project? An honest, well-articulated vision helps give direction to a team. In his viral talk, “Start with Why,” Simon Sinek talks in detail about this “inside out” approach. Having a vision contradictory or inconsistent with the day-to-day work could lead to frustration and a lack of trust. The narrative must be straightforward and backed up with action aligned with the company’s stated values.
Workplace: Where do I spend my time?
A leader must create a workplace that maximizes productivity while allowing creativity, serendipity, and exploration. This is true both for in-person and remote work. Encouraging (reasonable) risk-taking and exploration enable more engaged and motivated teams. A video game with a predictable and tired setting (post-apocalyptic zombie infestations, for example..) is boring. Similarly, an environment that is dull or unpleasant is a drag on motivation and productivity. Psychological safety is also essential. As any player of online games knows, dealing with abuse and cheating makes for a miserable experience. A workplace perceived as hostile and a leader unwilling to support and protect their team will lead to people walking out of the door.
The Day to Day: How I do my work…
A manager must focus on the “gameplay” loop for their team. What are the challenges that stop them from doing their work? For software engineering teams, this could be the ease of making changes, getting pull requests approved, and getting changes into production. I have rage-quit lots of games because “life is too short.” Online games where I keep getting taken out by snarky teenagers with fast twitch reflexes are a particular bug-bear. Elden Ring can also veer into frustrating territory until I realized I could avoid most difficult encounters until I was leveled up and ready. When supporting a team, you need to consider what can be done to remove obstacles for your team. It may mean picking the right battles and knowing when to compromise. Making the workday loop engaging for your team is a critical leadership skill.
Conclusion – Gaming and Learning
Video games are the dominant entertainment and artistic form of our time. Oscar Wilde opined, “Life Imitates Art far more often than Art Imitates Life.” I agree.
Video games have been around far longer than modern software engineering tools such as Agile, DevOps, and other current paradigms. The art of video game design has been refined through decades of experimentation and many, many failures.
Indeed, as managers, most of us will be supporting teams that grew up playing video games. As a medium, video games create interactive, compelling worlds where people enjoy spending their time.
Taking cues from how video games are designed could help us become more effective supporters and advocates for our teams.
Managing and supporting a team is a difficult job. A manager is often a coach, disciplinarian, a surrogate parent, and cheerleader – all rolled into one. I am always on the lookout for ways to be a better supporter of my teams. Over the last few days I discovered a fortunate intersection in my interests in sport and in management.
I am a fan of the Arsenal football club. Like many other Arsenal fans, I have been watching and enjoying the Amazon Prime show “All or Nothing: Arsenal,” which follows Arsenal through the 2021 – 2022 season. We get a close look at how Arsenal’s manager Mike Arteta works with his players and his management team and motivates them over a challenging 45-game season.
At 38 years old, Arteta is currently the youngest manager in the English Premier league. He has been at the helm since 2019. The Arsenal squad also has the youngest average age in the Premier League – this season, the first team averages just 25.2 years old.
Arteta’s reign has seen the club slump to 8th place in the 2019 and 2020 seasons before having a marked improvement in form to finish 5th in 2021.
Arteta comes across as an intense, detail-oriented and hands-on manager. I realized that Arteta’s approach to management was something I had come across before. It is strikingly similar to that described in Radical Candor by Kim Scott – one of my favorite books on building high-performance teams.
In this post, I will summarize the Radical Candor approach through the lens of Arteta’s unique take on people management.
What is Radical Candor?
Radical Candor is a book by Kim Scott published in 2017. It focuses on creating a culture of guidance, building an effective and cohesive team, and driving results collaboratively.
The book’s central thesis is that effective leadership requires direct, clear, truthful, and kind feedback, even when difficult. Scott believes getting to know each person in your team personally is essential to understanding their desires and motivations.
The book offers tactical and strategic advice to leaders on building high-performing teams in an open, healthy, and productive environment. I strongly recommend Radical Candor for those looking for an authentic and modern approach to people management.
We see Arteta speaking candidly and passionately with his players throughout the season. He is generous in his feedback when things go well. When things go poorly, Arteta is direct, passionate, and emotional. While he doesn’t mince words, he doesn’t humiliate his players in the dressing room or in front of the media.
Caring Personally while Challenging Directly
The 2X2 below shows “Radical Candor” as giving feedback by caring personally while challenging directly. It also covers some dysfunctional ways of giving feedback – obnoxious aggression, ruinous empathy, and manipulative insincerity.
From Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Ted Lasso aside, football managers are not known for their empathy. Indeed, the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson are revered for their ability to drive performance through aggression and intimidation. Ferguson’s proverbial “hairdryer treatment” would probably end up in the “Obnoxious Aggression” quadrant above.
While he is partial to the odd F-bomb, Arteta’s open displays of emotion and vulnerability inspire his players, as seen in this clip. At the end of a run of poor results in April at Crystal Palace and Brighton, we see a manager who cares about the results and is passionate about wanting to make things better. He calls out a lack of intensity from his players and gives specific feedback on the training pitch and in the dressing room.
This combination of caring personally and directly challenging poor performance is right out of the Radical Candor playbook.
Building Resilience Through Trust
The Radical Candor approach is built on a foundation of trust. Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose. The key to building trust is to be transparent and authentic, clear and concise in communication, and consistent in your actions.
Arteta calls out his “non-negotiables” in explaining his management philosophy: respect, commitment, and passion. Throughout the show, we see Arteta embodying these values.
This results in significant friction with his star player Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang who does not meet Arteta’s high expectations around discipline and accountability. Aubameyang is the club captain and is a popular member of the squad.
Arteta ends up stripping Aubameyang from the captaincy of the team. This could have destabilized the team, but it seems to have the opposite effect. Arteta does not criticize Aubameyang, and his team is made aware of how important trust and accountability are to their manager. By showing consistency in his actions and clarity in his communication, Arteta builds trust and resilience, resulting in outstanding results on the pitch in the second half of the season.
Managing Rockstars and Superstars
In Radical Candor, Scott describes Rockstars as stable employees who are happy and effective in their roles. These are folks who are aware of their talents and limitations and can consistently perform at a high level. On the other hand, Superstars are on a steep career trajectory and can be change agents. They are ambitious and want new opportunities. A high-performing team usually has both rockstars and superstars.
Given his young team, Arteta works with plenty of players on steep growth trajectories. Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe, and Eddie Nketiah are all young and eager to learn and perform at the highest level. However, he also has players like Rob Holding and Mohammad Elneny. While experienced pros, they have specific roles and are not guaranteed a place in the starting lineup. Holding and Elneny are the rocks (and Rockstars) that provide a stabilizing influence in the dressing room and on the pitch while laying a foundation for the more flamboyant players up front.
As a manager, Arteta has to ensure that the players like Holding and Elneny feel valued and are ready to perform when called upon while the ambition and talents of the young Gooners are nurtured. You can see this come together towards the end of the season. Holding and Elneny perform well after being called into the starting eleven after injuries. He also gives the ambitious Nketiah an extended run. He repays his faith by scoring five goals in the last seven games. Arteta and his team need to understand each player’s mentality and ensure they feel motivated to perform when needed.
Conclusion
All or Nothing is entertainment and has been edited to push a narrative and maximize engagement. Mikel Arteta has come under intense criticism for being uncompromising and stubborn at times – especially with how he has managed high-profile players like Aubameyang and Mesut Ozil. But, the little glimpse we get in the documentary shows a young manager trying to build a successful team.
Plenty of books like Radical Candor have come out of Silicon Valley, and the content often reflects the author’s experience working in technology companies. The strength of a book, especially in the crowded management genre, is how applicable the message is across different domains.
Managing Arsenal presents quite different challenges from managing a software engineering team. However, I hope the lessons of Radical Candor and All or Nothing are valuable to managers looking to build and support a high-performance team.
Machine Learning has brought huge benefits in many domains and generated hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. However, the second-order consequences of machine learning-based approaches can lead to potentially devastating outcomes.
This article by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times is exceptional reporting on a very sensitive topic – the identification of abusive material or CSAM.
As the parent of two young children in the COVID age, I rely on telehealth services and friends who are medical professionals to help with anxiety-provoking (yet often trivial) medical situations. I often send photos of weird rashes or bug bites to determine if it is something to worry about.
In the article, a parent took a photo of their child to send to a medical professional. This photo was uploaded to Google Photos, where it was flagged as being potentially abusive material by a machine learning algorithm.
Google ended up suspending and permanently deleting his Gmail account and his Google Fi phone and flagging his account to law enforcement.
Just imagine how you might deal with losing both your primary email account, your phone number, and your authenticator app.
Finding and reporting abuse is critical. But, as the article illustrates, ML-based approaches often lack context. A photo shared with a medical professional may share similar features to those showing abuse.
Before we start devolving more and more of our day-to-day lives and decisions to machine learning-based algorithms, we may want to consider the consequences of removing humans from the loop.
Stuart Kirk, former journalist for the FT and now former banker at HSBC got into trouble last week for suggesting that climate change risks are overblown.
Before his suspension, he was the head of Responsible Investing for HSBC asset management.
The “markets”, in all probability, already priced in climate change risks
Climate change adaptation is more pragmatic and likely cheaper than mitigation
By the time climate change hits, we will all be dead anyway. So why bother?
I found the presentation interesting and a little horrifying – in the drunk uncle holding forth – sense. He makes some good points – about the short term nature of markets and investing, about the necessity of climate change mitigation, for example. But the general attitude can be summarised as 🥱🤷♂️.
I am still surprised that after 2008, after COVID, Ukraine and all the other shocks, people like Mr Kirk still think in terms of normal distributions. I.e. the probability of events can be modelled as a bell curve – with very bad or very good events having low probabilities, and predictable “average” events being the most common.
Or to channel mathematician, philosopher and truculent Twitter warrior N. Taleb, the likes of Mr Kirk believe that the impact of climate change to be an ergodic process while it is most definitely not.
Doing a Google search for “Ergodicity” will lead you to baffling mathematical and statistical explanations. But it is, at its core, an intuitive concept. In a non-ergodic system, things that are true for the aggregate may not be true for the individual.
In Mr Kirk’s presentation he plots economic growth from the 1930s to the present day and states, pretty much, that the “line goes up” despite world wars, economic upheaval, recessions etc. He uses this trend to assert that we will be fine despite the risks of climate change. The benefits of a growing economy will overcome the downsides of climate change.
However, the story of aggregate growth over the last 100 years hides tales of individual ruin.
For example, someone who invested all their savings in tech stocks in 2002 probably didn’t have anything left to make money when the market finally moved up. For those unlucky investors, it was game over. Therefore, we are modelling a process that is non-ergodic (individual outcomes can be radically different than aggregate outcomes) as an ergodic process.
So, what does this have to do with climate change?
I believe that the effects of climate change make our economic system even more non-ergodic. It makes it much more likely to have extreme events – heat waves, wild fires, hurricanes, droughts, etc. This makes modelling based on aggregate probabilities a little suspect. Sure, you could increase insurance premiums for coastal communities to account for higher flooding risk. This is what Mr Kirk means by the risk being “priced in”. But what happens when entire communities are wiped out due to an unprecedented storm surge, or heat wave, or forest fire?
Climate change adds more chaos to a complex system. It heightens the likelihood of extreme events that have catastrophic outcomes. Adaptation measures are necessary but they will do little to mitigate the impact of “black swan” events. So it doesn’t matter how complex your modelling is, and how sophisticated your investment strategy is. If you die due to a freak hurricane, you are done.
The likes of Mr Kirk are making a category error. The only way to “win” in an non-ergodic system is to survive. We should be thinking of what can be done to ensure that we don’t face catastrophic loss, so that we can continue to reap the benefits of growth in the future.
You live in the up-and-coming suburb of Cryptoville and you want to buy a house. It costs $1m.
There might be some transaction fees involved, but you won’t actually know how much the fees will be until you complete the transaction. Oh, you are not competing with anyone to buy the house, it’s just a transaction fee. Can’t be too bad right?
On the day of closing, the transaction goes through. The transaction fees are $250,000! And there was no way to tell until you tried to buy the house. It’s just the way things work in Cryptoville..
This is pretty much what happened on Saturday when Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, held a much anticipated virtual land / NFT sale on the Ethereum network. Gas fees (i.e. transaction fees on Ethereum) spiked as the network coped with thousands of ApeCoin holders looking to buy some virtual land for their virtual Apes.
The shocking thing was that it caused the entire Ethereum network to clog up – raising transaction costs for everyone – not just those looking to buy virtual land. Folks looking to buy NFTs valued at under a dollar were seeing transaction fees of $3,500!
This points to a serious, and well-known, issue with throughput on Ethereum. It does not scale under load. Perhaps the long-delayed migration to Proof of Stake may change this – when it happens.
But – do you know what happened to the “high-performance” blockchain Solana on Saturday? You see where this going..
Footnote Ethereum can only process about 15 transactions per second. It is just the way it is designed. However, miners can be incentivized to process transactions by increasing gas (transaction) fees. This is what happened on Saturday – as the demand to mint NFTs skyrocketed, so did the transaction fees. Gas fees have since come down, but it shows the big issues that Ethereum continues to face as it remains the de-facto standard for blockchain development.
What to do when your decentralized, scalable, performant blockchain turns out to be not so scalable, sort-of-centralized and not so performant?
Crypto’s selling point is robustness that is built on decentralization. No single points of failures should mean no downtime right? Right?
Turns out, crypto’s weaknesses are same as those of other, more mundane technologies. Bad code, bad actors and the fact that building scalable, distributed (and decentralized) systems is hard!
Solana, a Layer 1 blockchain, suffered a long outage over the weekend. This happened when the crypto markets are melting down..
Solana is supposed to be the answer to Ethereum’s performance and scalability issues. And yet, Solana has been plagued by performance issues and outages over the last few months.
This weekend’s issue was caused by “program cache exhaustion” due to “excessive duplicate transactions”. Solana developers released an emergency patch to resolve this issue and begged every validator to upgrade.
Where there is code, there are bugs..
Welcome to the brave new world, where the problems are the same as the ones in the old world. They just cost you a lot of funny money.
The planet of Isthar, in the outer reaches of the Delta Quadrant, was a dusty, arid, and sparsely populated world. Over the millennia, the original colonists split into tightly knit tribes and spread across the deserts and rocky canyons of the planet. What technology they had brought from their homeworld was soon forgotten in the face of the ongoing struggle to live in Isthar’s hostile environment.
When Isthar’s largest moon was full, the tribes would meet at an oasis to trade. A long history of bad blood, warfare, and mistrust had meant that these were often tense occasions. A fiercely independent set of people, they had little need for a central government or any sort of written laws. Trade meant barter without contracts, banks, or currency, with plenty of misunderstandings, violence, and theft.
During one of these gatherings, out of the western desert emerged a group of monks called themselves the Order of the Great Lizard. They claimed to have a way that would allow the tribes to trade peacefully without sacrificing their independence or indeed have to trust each other.
The monks produced a tablet made of stone. They called the tablet the Ledger. They claimed the Ledger would provide a tamper-proof way of recording what was traded and by whom. This would help reduce the sort of misunderstandings that often lead to bloodshed.
The Order of the Great Lizard had placed a spell on the Ledger that gave it some unique properties.
Only a monk of their Order could write on the Ledger.
Things once written could never be erased.
While every monk could write to the Ledger, only one chosen monk could do so at a time.
The chosen monk must have had a unique vision of the Great Lizard in a pose that a majority of other monks agreed was magnificent and one befitting the splendor of the Great Lizard.
Once the monk wrote on the Ledger, the spell would cause a coin to appear. It was a token of benevolence from the Great Lizard, and out of respect, these were called Lizard Coins. The monk could do what they wished with their Lizard Coin.
The tribespeople were a little bemused. But the Order seemed harmless and willing to help, so they agreed to give this new way of trading a try.
The monks all sat in a large circle around the Ledger. Tribespeople would approach and shout out the trade they just had done.
“I Troopz of the tribe Gooners bartered my sand goat for a sack of salt and a bottle cap with Bubbles of the Hammers.”
Each monk would then contemplate the Great Lizard until the first one had a vision.
“I, Brother Chili, see the Great Lizard lying down with its right arm raised up.”
As long as more than half of the other monks agreed that it was indeed a splendid and unique vision, Brother Chili could record Troopz and Bubbles’ trade on the Ledger. He would then be rewarded with a Lizard Coin by the most magnificent and benevolent Great Lizard.
Once there was a record of Troopz bartering his sand goat to Bubbles on the Ledger, he would not be able to trade it to anyone else. Bubble’s ownership of the said sand goat was now backed by the Ledger.
And so, the Order of the Great Lizard made trade possible for the people of Isthar. There were some interesting consequences:
The visions could only include the Grand Lizard and nothing else. Hence it would become more challenging to develop new and unique visions as time passed. This meant the total number of Lizard Coins would also be limited.
Some folks tried bribing one or more monks to see if they could write false transactions on the Ledger, but this would not be possible without convincing a majority of the monks.
The Order of the Great Lizard was a genuinely open group. Anyone could join and become a monk provided they committed to contemplating the magnificence of the Great Lizard.
The monks used their coins to buy goods and services from the tribes. As the number of Lizard Coins increased, they became a useful and widely accepted currency on Isthar.
Very soon most transactions recorded on the ledger were transfers of Lizard Coin from one person to another.
Through their stone tablet and their magic spell, the Order of the Great Lizard had given the tribes a way to trade without having to trust each other. The Order was also open, so anyone could join provided they would spend their time and energy contemplating the magnificence of the Great Lizard.
The End.
Bitcoin Explained
Bitcoin was created to solve the problem of coordination in a trustless environment. This problem is also known as the Byzantine Generals problem.
In our story, the Order of the Great Lizard attempts to solve a similar problem for the tribes that did not have reason to trust one another.
The Ledger plays the same function as the blockchain in Bitcoin. It is an immutable (cannot be modified), append-only data structure. In a given period of time, only the first monk to come up with a unique, verified vision of the great lizard could write a new line to the ledger.
Miners play the same role in Bitcoin as the monks of the Order. The first miner to solve a complex mathematical puzzle that can be verified by a majority of other miners can write a new block to the Bitcoin chain. The monks get rewarded by a Lizard Coin and the miners get rewarded by a Bitcoin. This concept is also known as Proof of Work. The idea is to incentivize the miners to compete to solve puzzles to be able to generate and write a block to the Blockchain. The intrinsic value of Bitcoin comes from the energy expended in solving mathematical puzzles.
Transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are limited to moving a fraction of Bitcoin from one address to another. On Ishtar, the transactions could be anything but eventually become mostly moving Lizard Coin from one person to another.
The Bitcoin protocol is represented by the spell cast on the Ledger. It provides the rules for recording transactions as well as rewards for the monks (miners) who are the fastest to have a unique vision of the Great Lizard. In Bitcoin, the magic spell is written in publically available and vetted code.
Our story also doesn’t cover the important roles that cryptography plays in Bitcoin. While we watched Troopz and Bubbles exchange a goat for salt and bottle caps, participants on the Bitcoin network can only be identified by the public key corresponding to their wallets. Hence, participants are pseudonymous.
But.. why bother?
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are complex. Skeptics often call them technologies looking for problems. My attempt at using terrible science fiction to explain how Bitcoin works is an attempt to explain how the technology works at a high level to folks who are not in the crypto ecosystem 24X7. I hope you were amused and somewhat enlightened. Drop me a line if you have any comments or questions!
