Tag: Commentary

Great Customer Service Smoothes Out Bad Self-Service

Posted on by Scott

Success at switching to a truly bundled Disney+ and Hulu experience (both with no ads) from the janky status quo where both services were billed separately and Hulu had ads but Disney+ didn’t required the great customer service experience I had earlier today. In prior months, I’d made the mistake of following the instructions provided as the self-service approach to accomplishing this, and failed miserably. I switched from annual billing to monthly on Disney+ and tried to switch to the Premium Duo multiple times over multiple months, only to be redirected to Hulu and be blocked from signing up for what I wanted.

Today I tried the chat option (with a live human being) and finally got the bundle I wanted–and a refund for the price differential between the new bundle and what I’d been paying. It ultimately took being manually unsubscribed from both Disney+ and Hulu, which the customer service rep accomplished by reaching out to whatever department and systems she needed to, in the span of about 20 minutes. Definitely a 5-star customer service experience–unfortunately made necessary by terrible self-service options.

Plenty of companies almost certainly believe that they will be able to use ChatGPT (or something like it) to replace the people that do this work. But at least initially (and probably for quite awhile after that) the fully-automated customer service experience is likely to be worse (if not much worse) than the experience of customer service from people. I’m very skeptical of the idea that an AI chatbot would have driven the same outcome from a customer service interaction as a person did in this case. And this is in a low-stakes situation like streaming services (some number of which will very likely end up on my budget chopping block in 2024). High-stakes customer service situations will not have the same tolerance for mistakes, as shown in the FTC’s 5-year ban on Rite-Aid using facial recognition for surveillance. These are the sorts of mistakes warned about in the documentary Coded Bias years ago, but I have no doubt that other companies will make the same mistakes Rite-Aid did.

In an episode of Hanselminutes I listened to recently, the host (Scott Hanselman) used a comparison of how AI could be used between the Iron Man suit and Ultron. I hope using AI to augment human capabilities (like the Iron Man suit) is the destination we get back to, after the current pursuit of replacing humans entirely (like Ultron) fails. Customer service experiences that led by people but augmented by technology will be better for people on both sides of the customer service equation and better for brands.

Flipboard Renewing Its Relevance With the Fediverse

Posted on by Scott

Flipboard is jumping into the fediverse with both feet, according to a piece from The Verge. While the fediverse isn’t where I saw the piece first (that would be on Threads), when Flipboard first announced it was experimenting with Mastodon some months back, it was the first time I’d thought about Flipboard in years (much less used it). Since The Verge piece first ran December 18th, it’s been updated with links to both their Flipboard account, and their Mastodon account.

If you’re not familiar with Flipboard, their key organizing principle is the magazine. Articles you read from any number of sources can be “flipped” into a magazine you create, along with any commentary you may want to provide. As in other social media networks, you can follow other members and be followed by them. You can comment on shared articles and other Flipboard members can respond. Another interesting feature (which I never took advantage of myself) is Invite contributors. I presume this feature allows multiple Flipboard members to contribute articles to the same magazine. This might be how The Verge handles its own presence on Flipboard.

Unrelated to the whole fediverse pivot, reviewing the features of Flipboard makes me wonder if they ever actively pursued the sorts of people who write newsletters. From what I’ve seen of Substack, I haven’t seen anything it does as a service that Flipboard doesn’t do as well or better–and they probably have a much larger number of monthly active users.

The key difference I’ve found so far between the mobile app experience and the web experience of Flipboard is that you can only flip articles into Mastodon via the mobile app.

Another thing Flipboard has changed since I last looked at what they were doing with Mastodon is allow you to add any Mastodon profile URL to your Flipboard profile and display a verified link on your profile page. I’ve already set that up and now my profile looks like this:

This is the sort of attention and interest that Tumblr could have generated had they moved more aggressively in exploring integration with the fediverse via ActivityPub. Tumblr is a first-class citizen on IFTTT, an awesome site for creating workflows and automations between a whole host of different services. I have a number of automations (IFTTT calls them applets) that use Tumblr as a destination and a “fedified” Tumblr would have let me automate a lot of posting without having to change a thing. Flipboard simply isn’t set up for that–not without workarounds or hacks (though IFTTT appears to have one that uses Pocket as an intermediary that I plan to try).

If this post has piqued your curiosity about Flipboard’s foray into the fediverse, I encourage you to check out Flipboard for yourself. Follow me there, comment on pieces I’ve flipped, create your own magazine(s), get the Flipboard mobile app and flip good pieces into Mastodon.

(Tech) Education Should Be Free (and Rigorous)

Posted on by Scott

Free tech education is the reality being created by Quincy Larson, the founder of FreeCodeCamp. I’ve been seeing their posts on Twitter for years, but didn’t dive deeper until I heard Larson interviewed recently on Hanselminutes. The 30-minute interview was enough to convince me to add Larson’s organization to the short list of non-profits I support on a monthly basis. One of the distinctions I appreciated most in the interview was the one made between gate-keeping and rigor. Especially in the context of certifications (in an industry with an ever-growing number of them), making certifications valuable is a challenge that FreeCodeCamp solves by making them challenging to get. Having pursued a number of certifications over the course of my tech career (earning a Certified Scrum Master cert a couple of times, the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate, and an internal certification at work for secure coding), I’ve seen some differences in how the organizations behind each certification attempt to strike that balance.

  • Certified Scrum Master. Relative to cloud certifications for AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, CSM certification is much easier. Two days in an instructor-led training course, followed by a certification exam and you have a certification that’s good for 2 years. I don’t recall what my employers paid for the courses to get me certified each time, but these days you can spend anywhere from $500-$1100 per person for the 2-3 day class and exam. I think the minimum score to pass is 80%, and one of my classmates the last time I certified got 100% (I missed out on that by a single question). In short, less rigorous (and far less gate-keeping).
  • Certified AWS Solution Architect Associate. I spent months preparing for to take this certification exam. Just the associate-level exam itself costs $150. The self-study course and practice exams I took (both from Udemy) normally cost $210 combined, though there are plenty of other options both online and instructor-led (I expect the latter would cost significantly more per student than instructor-led training for other certifications. Achieving the minimum score to pass (usually around 70%) is far from certain, given the sheer amount of material to retain and the high level of rigor of the questions. I ended up scoring around 80% but I really had to sweat for it. Much more rigorous, but rather low on gate-keeping as well because of the relatively low cost of self-study and practice exams (and the ability to do hands-on practice with the AWS Free Tier with a personal AWS account).

The key value of rigor is that the process of preparing to take a certification exam should meaningfully apply to actually doing the work the certification is intended to represent. My experience of pursuing AWS certification is that the learning did (and does) apply to design discussions. It’s given me valuable depth of understanding necessary to push my teams to fully explore different services for building features. One of my direct reports used the knowledge gained from certification to build equivalent functionality out of AWS services approved for use inside our organization to approximate the functionality of an AWS service currently not approved for use (in order to integrate with a third-party vendor we were working with).

When I talk to people in different fields where certifications are available, I get the distinct sense that there are varying degrees of gate-keeping involved (a practice that tech companies are certainly no strangers to). My wife has said this often regarding HR certifications offered by SHRM. She’s been an HR director for over 20 years (without that certification) but hasn’t been able to pass the certification exam (despite having a master’s degree in HR management).

When considering whether or not to pursue a certification, it’s definitely a good idea to look at them from the additional perspective of whether they are gate-keeping–or providing rigor–not just if they will help you advance your career. If you can, find out from people who’ve actually earned the certification whether they feel like it helped make them better at their job. Some certifications are must-haves regardless of their rigor or utility, either because your employer requires them or because eligibility to pursue certain contracts requires them (particularly in the federal contracting space).

Duke University Libraries Drop Basecamp

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I was glad to see Duke University Libraries in-depth explanation of why they’re dropping Basecamp for managing projects. It reminded me of previous blog posts of my own from 2017 regarding the ideology and worldview that seemed prevalent at that time in tech, and a post from last year that drew a line from James Damore, through Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, to Elon Musk.

The Libraries took the time to revisit their discussion of 2021 to continue using Basecamp and updated themselves regarding the posts and rhetoric of Hansson regarding DEI, and his public glee in the mass layoffs of tech workers last year (which have by no means abated in 2023). They also did not shy away from talking about their own shortcomings as an organization when it comes their own workplace:

We also know the harms that our own workplace practices and culture have caused over the years. We know about it because we listen to each other, both informally and formally, via climate surveys, workshops, and other practices: 

The point is not that we’re perfect, or a model to emulate. The point is that we are not naive. We have seen (and done) some stuff.

Duke University Libraries Blog, November 30, 2023

The Libraries set a thoughtful, public example of consciously choosing temporary inconvenience over continuing to reward the mendacity and cruelty of the leader of a third-party vendor. I salute them.

Peter Gabriel Is Why I Love Stop-Motion Animation

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Back in October, I was reminded exactly when I became a fan of stop-motion animation. A friend in one of my Slack groups shared this Jason Kottke post. The second video on the page (Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer) was my first introduction to him. The song came out in 1986, the video won 9 MTV Video Music Awards the following year. The company who did the animation for the video, Aardman Animations, would later go on to create Wallace and Gromit (an inventor and his pet dog) who’ve starred in a number of short films (The Wrong Trousers) and feature-length films (The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) that I found hilarious. Chicken Run was an Aardman co-production with Dreamworks that I also enjoyed.

While researching this post, I learned that another one of my stop-motion favorites–The Nightmare Before Christmas–actually came out the same year as The Wrong Trousers (1993). Nightmare was very much in keeping with the dark and scary sensibilities of Tim Burton (the man behind Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, among many other films), but to make it a musical as well was just hilarious and delightful. Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox are two more stop-motion animated features I’ve enjoyed. One of my guiltier pleasures when it comes to stop-motion animation was definitely Celebrity Deathmatch. Stop-motion animated wrestling matches between clay versions of celebrities was way more fun than it had any right to be.

While not actually stop-motion animation, The Lego Movie (and its sequel) succeed at hewing very closely to the same style, with the obvious exceptions of the live action scenes. While there are much older examples of stop-motion animation (the original King Kong from 1933, the character Gumby from the 1950s, and anything by Ray Harryhausen), the Sledgehammer video is where that particular fandom of mine began.

Grenada: Nobody’s Backyard

Posted on by Scott

I learned a lot from this episode of Throughline about an invasion that happened when I was just 9 years old. It provides a ton of context and backstory of what was happening on the island in the decades leading up to the invasion. What I didn’t realize until I looked it up was how close in time the invasion was to the Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut (just 2 days earlier). In the clips of Ronald Reagan speeches played during the episode, it was interesting to hear anti-communist rhetoric as the rationale for invading Grenada just a few years before the scandal we call Iran-Contra would be brought into the light.

Other Caribbean nations (Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, and Jamaica actually played a role in the invasion as well. Jamaica sent 150 troops via an Air Jamaica 727 who served in a peacekeeping role well after U.S. troops arrived. All six nations also voted against the U.N. resolution condemning the invasion. A UPI piece I found lists Barbados and Antigua as also providing soldiers for the invasion while St. Lucia, Dominica, and St. Vincent sent police officers. The same UPI piece does a good job of putting the U.S. invasion of Grenada in historical context, noting that Haiti and the Dominican Republic were invaded and occupied for multiple years on 3 separate occasions during the 20th century.

Rhymes with 9/11

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History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes

Mark Twain

I could not have anticipated that what I wrote on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks regarding how this country really treated its Muslim population (residents and citizens alike) would be relevant again so soon. I won’t claim any special insight into the Middle East, or the latest war between Hamas and Israel–but the response of the U.S. government, U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle, U.S.-based mainstream media, and everyday citizens looks more and more familiar with each passing day.

Balbir Singh Sodhi (a Sikh, not even a Muslim) was murdered 4 days after 9/11. His killer proceeded from there on a non-fatal shooting spree against a gas station clerk (a Lebanese-American) and at his former home (previously purchased by an Afghan family local to Mesa, Arizona). Little more than a week after Hamas’ attacks on Israel, a Chicago landlord stabbed two of his Muslim tenants repeatedly, killing 6-year-old Wade Al-Fayoume.

As recounted in Spencer Ackerman’s Return to Little Pakistan, Muslims in Brooklyn began receiving business cards from agents of the FBI and INS, and NYPD officers asking to be called as soon as possible to answer questions. We would later learn that the NYPD would illegal surveil Muslims both inside and outside New York City for over a decade after 9/11, not generating a single lead that exposed any terrorists or prevented any attacks in all that time. The LAPD tried and failed to follow New York’s lead in 2007. Just one day after the Biden administration announced plans for the DOJ and DHS to partner with campus police to track hate-related threats, Ackerman reports that the ADL is urging college and university administrators to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”–without providing any evidence of such support from any chapter of this organization. The same organization whose Center on Extremism claims to “strategically monitor, expose and disrupt extremist threats” removed the notorious Libs of TikTok account (and Chaya Raichik, the woman behind it) from their extremism list after she threatened a lawsuit. This isn’t even the first retreat of October 2023 for the ADL, having resumed advertising on Twitter after Elon Musk threatened to sue them for defamation the month before.

To oppose the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force that would enable military operations in no less than 22 countries (including the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and war in Iraq, and detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) was a lonely endeavor that came with death threats, insults, and hate mail. While there is almost certainly more (and growing) opposition to the IDF bombing campaign in Gaza than there was to the US invading Iraq, any sympathy at all for unarmed Palestinian civilians unaffiliated with Hamas (or any other militant group) has come with consequences like firing from jobs, revocation of job offers, threats of deportation from Donald Trump, and a Senate resolution condemning specific campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (per Ackerman’s reporting).

Our country treated the 9/11 attacks as an existential threat–a thing that could cause the U.S. to cease to exist. That mindset regarding the threat of terrorism rationalized not only the bipartisan sacrifice of civil liberties named the Patriot Act within our borders, but “a worldwide policy of detention and interrogation”, ultimately resulting in the death of innocents as explored in documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side. As of May 2023, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay still holds 30 detainees–some still await trial, some being held indefinitely facing no charges and without recommendation for release.

The threat to Jews both worldwide and within Israel itself is very real. Anti-semitism–whether here in the U.S. or abroad–is never far beneath the surface. Not much time has passed since the former president defended neo-Nazis and others protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue as “very fine people”, or since the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh killed 11 and wounded 6 worshippers–including Holocaust survivors. As with the U.S. and the countries we attacked with military force in response to 9/11 however, the difference in military power between Israel and those who threaten it is substantial. Depending on which reports you read, between 5000 and 10,000 Palestinians have died in airstrikes from Israel’s military–the vast majority of those women and children. This death toll–the vast majority of them civilians–will only grow. The civilian death toll during the so-called Global War on Terror is orders of magnitude larger. Prior to the latest attacks by Hamas, Israel was holding over 1200 people in detention (virtually all Palestinians) without charges or trial. Per AP’s reporting, Israel’s military justice system is what Palestinians are subject to, not unlike the military tribunals used at the Guantanamo Bay prison to try terrorism suspects.

Unlike the U.S. military, Israel can’t leave where it is. It can change its policies and its leaders, but not its neighbors. I have no idea what the answer is to whether or not Israel and the Palestinians will ever be able to co-exist in a status other than “cold” war or hot war. But the ways Israel’s response to October 7 rhymes with the US response to September 11 probably mean we’ll be asking that question for a long time.

What I’m Reading and Listening to About Palestine

Posted on by Scott

A friend of mine asked what I’ve been reading about the war between Israel and Gaza to help him understand what was going on. So I’m writing this post to share with him and others to provide a sense of what I’m seeing and hearing as inputs to my perspective.

I found this piece by Kali Robinson very informative: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-hamas-what-to-know-about-its-origins-leaders-and-funding. It’s well worth reading in full, because you’ll learn not just about Hamas’ origins, but about how Egypt and Turkey factor into the conflict (against and for Hamas respectively), the civil war between Hamas and Fatah militias in 2006, and how Palestinians view Hamas, among other context.

Another valuable read is the book Palestine, by Joe Sacco. It’s a non-fiction graphic novel covering the journalist’s 2 months in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from December 1991-January 1992. In it you will find a perspective and complexity too often lacking from what is typically available in journalism covering the region even 3 decades later. As an aside, I bought my copy of Palestine from Big Planet Comics a number of years ago,

Fareed Zakaria’s interview of Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is also worth watching. Barghouti is a Palestinian physician and co-founder of a group supporting non-violent resistance to Israel’s occupation (of the West Bank and Gaza). The points where the interview would have been helped by Zakaria pushing back (such as Barghouti’s assertion that Hamas would release its prisoners if Israel released Palestinian prisoners who are currently jailed) will likely be obvious to viewers.

This morning, I just finished listening to the latest episode of a podcast called The Bulletin. Including a podcast aimed at Christians (like myself) may seem puzzling at first. But it’s necessary because trying to understand the region includes being aware of how American Christianity’s understanding (some might more bluntly say misunderstanding) of our own faith distorts our perspectives and our policy in that region. American evangelicals have been, and continue to be huge supporters of the state of Israel. This is where one of the distortions comes in: John Hagee’s group (Christians United for Israel) lobbies senators and congressmen regarding our country’s policies toward Israel. One of the key reasons for that support is a self-interested one however–a belief that a state of Israel is necessary for the second coming of Jesus Christ and that Jews will either convert to Christianity or die. John Hagee is just one of a number of evangelical preachers that have disturbing views about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as what will happen to Jews in the future as he interprets the Bible. A paper by Thomas Ice of Liberty University goes into more specific details regarding this belief.

The Daily podcast from the New York Times is the most consistently high-quality news product the organization produces. These three episodes about Hamas’ attack and Israel’s response have been very helpful for greater understanding:

The one link from social media regarding the latest iteration of war in Palestine that I will share is from a lawyer named Sheryl Weikal on Bluesky. She is a self-described “white Ashkenazi Jew” but pulls no punches in calling her co-religionists to task for their bloodlust and desire for revenge. In addition to calling out the immorality of bloodlust, she discusses some of the non-violent resistance to occupation Palestinians have engaged in (and the response of US states to it) as well as the deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli settlers. If you aren’t already on Bluesky, it might be worth it to join if only to read this. Twitter is predictably flooded with disinformation regarding what is happening in Gaza so I don’t look there for useful context and details.

Contrary to what we are seeing and hearing in much of the media today, what is happening in Palestine will continue to defy easy explanations and narratives. I hope there will be more journalism and reporting that seeks to add light rather than heat, and believe the links I’ve shared largely succeed in that mission.

Ahsoka Fell Victim to the Marvelization of Star Wars

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via GIPHY

I hate to say this about my oldest fandom, but Ahsoka wasn’t good. I’m not here to set Dave Filoni’s entire filmography on fire. Contrary to some, I think The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels were better than the prequel movies. Ahsoka is a key character in both The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, which is why so much of the fandom (myself included) was excited to see her in live action in The Mandalorian. Grand Admiral Thrawn wasn’t just a key antagonist in the last couple of seasons of Star Wars: Rebels, he’s one of the best villains in Star Wars–and notably one who George Lucas did not create. Timothy Zahn is the author behind Thrawn (and each of the 13 novels that feature him), including a trilogy set after the events of Return of the Jedi that would have made for a much better sequel trilogy than the one which ultimately made it to theaters.

In retrospect, this interview where Dave Filoni essentially agrees with the perspective that Ahsoka could be seen as season 5 of Rebels was a warning. This confirmed that viewers would basically have had to do the homework of watching most everything with Ahsoka in it to grasp everything going on in the show. Enough time has passed since I watched Rebels in full that there were multiple points in the show where I didn’t get what was going on. And that’s before you get to the now infamous “space cartwheel”.

Ahsoka Space Fight GIFfrom Ahsoka GIFs

Even viewers who did the homework must contend with the addition of a master-padawan relationship between Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren that wasn’t in any of the shows. This was far from the only opportunity missed to use flashbacks to add missing context and flesh out characters so they actually mattered to the audience (whether they’d “done the homework” or not). I’ve said on social media that Dave Filoni did better character development with The Bad Batch than he did in Ahsoka. The same is true of Jon Favreau and The Mandalorian. With this show, Filoni leaned far too hard on “unearned, MCU-level ‘remember this?’ tropes that rely more on good memories than actual character development.”

Beyond the “homework” problem and lack of character development in the show itself, Ahsoka was stuffed with too many competing storylines to do any of them justice. For me, there wasn’t enough in the show to explain the loyalty of the Night Sisters of Dathomir to Thrawn’s cause, or Hera Syndulla’s fear of his return. As I write this, I have yet to see any confirmation of Ahsoka being renewed for another season. Assuming it doesn’t get cancelled, I’m pessimistic that a second season would improve on the shortcomings of the first.