I'm in the SF bay area w/ middle school and high school age kids.
Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school.
Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities. Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of background -- were all eliminated.
I'm in Oakland with a three year old and I'm looking to either move to a better school district or pay for an expensive private school. I used to be a substitute teacher for the Oakland unified school district and I straight up refuse to send my son there. I have seen firsthand that these kids are not being taught well and the shortcomings compound year over year until you end with high school level students that are unequipped to learn at the high school level, often only barely able to read. Completely unequipped to read critically at the level needed for a proper high school education. Students get passed on to the next level no matter what, even if they lack the basic skills needed to succeed at that level.
It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.
I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain literacy programs.
Have you considered Yu Ming, the language immersion charter school? You wouldn't need to move, you wouldn't need to pay, and 88℅ of students meet or exceed state standards for math.
(There are folks working at SFUSD for whom Yu Ming was their top choice of school for their kids.)
- It can make kids "overconfident when they see material they think they already know, so they end up not engaging."
- Some programs, particularly RSM, are criticized for valuing speed over depth. Current culture for K-8 math teachers is the opposite, they value depth over speed.
Left unsaid:
- It can make the teacher's job harder when the class has a wide span of abilities.
- Current teaching culture is skeptical of accelerating and/or skipping grades in math.
Notably, we've never heard English teachers be upset about a kid reading a book outside of school that's above grade level, or using advanced vocabulary in an essay. They tend to praise it.
Got it, thanks for the response - I think my honest reaction is shocked by reading this. I was always good at math and it was such a source of pride and sense of accomplishment. In english I struggled, vowel sounds, grammar, it just didn't come naturally to me. I'm a little disheartened by this slide (for lack of a better word) of public school education, especially STEM.
Maybe part of it is that math is objective and writing is subjective? A math teacher could be called out by a 13 yo for “being wrong” but for an English teacher, what is “wrong”?
Not the OP. I assume the public school teachers don't want to answer when the student says "my Russian math teacher said to do this" instead of the common core math that is being taught.
> So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes.
Afaik China has widely carried out this same experiment to basically the same effect, across multiple disciplines. It's the push for so-called "happy education", which involves the relaxation of exam standards inside public schools, and has led to more after-school tutoring to make up the gaps, for families who can afford it. Lowering the common standards simply doesn't really work when there just aren't as many seats in universities as there are people who want to attend them.
> This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
Do you have more info on this? Where is it coming from and what does it look like?
Because this is actually crazy if true.
Like, just compare to a situation where they strongly discourage Reading outside of school.
Not to mention that math is just a basic life skill and it gets exercised just going through normal every day stuff (at least middle school level math)
That’s for future unreleased capabilities and models, not the model released today.
They did the same thing for gpt-5.1-codex-max (code name “arcticfox”), delaying its availability in the API and only allowing it to be used by monthly plan users, and as an API user I found it very annoying.
Commenters here seem to be missing the larger David vs. Goliath story...
Netflix was a silicon valley start-up with a tech founder (Reed) who teamed up with an LA movie buff (Ted). They tried to solve a problem: it was too hard to watch movies at home, and Hollywood seemed to hate new tech. The movie industry titans alternated between fighting Netflix and making deals. They fought Netflix's ability to bulk purchase and rent out DVDs. Later, they lobbed insults even while taking Netflix's money for content licensing. Here's Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, in 2010:
"It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so." [1]
Remember: this was the same movie industry that gave us the MPAA and the DMCA. They were trying to ensure the internet, and new tech in general, had zero impact on them. Streaming movies and TV probably wouldn't exist if Netflix had not forced the issue.
Netflix buying HBO is significant, but also just another chapter in this story of Netflix's internet distribution model out-competing the Hollywood incumbents. Even now in 2025, at least 12 years after it was perfectly clear that streaming direct to the consumer would be the future, the industry is still struggling to turn the corner. Instead, they're selling themselves to Netflix.
I was at Netflix 2009-2019. It was shocking how easily our little "Albanian army" overthrew the empire. Our opponents barely fought back, and when they did, they were often incompetent with tech. To me, this is a story about how competent tech carried the day.
Netflix has been rapidly buying and building studio capacity for a decade now. Adding the WB studio production capacity is a huge win for Netflix. It makes those studios more productive: each day of content production is now worth more when distributed via Netflix's global platform.
Same with WB and HBO catalog and IP: it's worth more when its available to Netflix's approx 300 million members. Netflix can make new TV and films based on that IP, and it will be worth more than if it was only on HBO's platforms.
It’s nice to see business that rewarded customers with convenience win in the end.
Well, except for Netflix refusing their catalogue to be indexed in the TV app on macOS and iOS. I won’t pay for Netflix until they drop that anti customer practice.
If you want me to buy the video content you’re selling, it better be searchable in the TV app. And if not, there should be a better reason than you want to keep people trapped in the Netflix app.
Have you considered the possibility that much like App Store rules, Apple's requirements for "catalog indexing" go far, far beyond the Netflix catalog merely showing up in TV app?
Perhaps the judgement about Netflix being anti-consumer might be hard to sustain if you could more fully inspect the details of what Apple requires.
Everyone else allows their content to be indexed, and does not pay Apple anything for it. Disney, Paramount, HBO, Peacock, they all could have refused like Netflix.
Had to read this a couple of times to try and figure out why, as of this moment, you’ve been downvoted because this seems like one of the more insightful comments on here. Maybe it’s too inside baseball about the post-deal opportunity? Anyway not supposed to talk about downvotes so…
You were there for a while. Was/is studio capacity still a constraint on production? You read so many stories about how LA studios are struggling to fill space because all of the productions have left town for tax credits elsewhere. Curious if you’re still plugged in enough and know that it’s still true about their studio space. I assumed their interest was strictly a content play and the extra studio space might actually be an anchor they were willing to drag along to get the content/IP.
Yeah, it's ok, can't win 'em all. Lots of negativity in this thread. Maybe people have a gut feeling that "Netflix buying WB" fits into the preexisting narrative about media consolidation, and they're reacting negatively to media consolidation being a problem. I think that's more of a problem in the news media than in entertainment media. In entertainment, the bigger story is the tech-centered transitions, esp. to internet distribution. I don't think the consolidation narrative is a perfect fit in this case; this is a pretty different type of consolidation than the others in recent memory.
I think this is about Netflix's model reflecting a fundamental technology shift; any company not participating fully in that shift will be operating less and less efficiently compared to those that are. Look at the inside history of HBO's attempts to build a streaming platform; in the early 2010s their leadership knew they probably should, but were their hearts in it? Did they have executives with competence in this area? No, they outsourced it and mismanaged it. Repeatedly. But like you said, my view includes being a former Netflix employee so maybe I'm biased.
I don't have current information on whether or to what degree studio production capacity is a constraint. Content spending was publicly projected to grow, so studio capacity had to grow, which is why Netflix decided to build giant new studio facilities in New Mexico and New Jersey. Those were referenced in the Q&A Netflix held Friday morning [1]. Wild guess: Netflix's own studios run at full capacity, which is why they're continuing to expand them. I'd love to know if WB studios run at capacity.
> I assumed their interest was strictly a content play and the extra studio space might actually be an anchor they were willing to drag along to get the content/IP.
Doubt it. Like I said, I'm not an insider on that question and I'm 6 years out of date. But if I had to guess, it would be that WB studio capacity will be a highly productive asset for Netflix -- most likely, it will be more valuable connected to Netflix's global distribution model that it was when operated under WB's model.
Having a bad manager in past roles can be some of the best "manager training."
If one your past managers did something recommended in this article but it caused problems, that's ok! It just means you have seen another failure mode that the author didn't experience.
I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the best managers at a former company. "Why did you originally want to be a manager?" was one of the first questions passed around the circle. The most common answer was, "I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
>"I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
That doesn't mean that those people are learning from prior bad management. That could instead mean that management tends to be people who are convinced of their own above average competence.
Did anyone ask the reports of those managers whether they were any good?
They recently resolved two bugs affecting model quality, one of which was in production Aug 5-Sep 4. They also wrote:
Importantly, we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors, and the issues mentioned above stem from unrelated bugs.
Sibling comments are claiming the opposite, attributing malice where the company itself says it was a screw up. Perhaps we should take Anthropic at its word, and also recognize that model performance will follow a probability distribution even for similar tasks, even without bugs making thing worse.
> Importantly, we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors, and the issues mentioned above stem from unrelated bugs.
Things they could do that would not technically contradict that:
- Quantize KV cache
- Data aware model quantization where their own evals will show "equivalent perf" but the overall model quality suffers.
Simple fact is that it takes longer to deploy physical compute but somehow they are able to serve more and more inference from a slowly growing pool of hardware. Something has to give...
- They're reporting that only impacted Haiku 3.5 and Sonnet 4. I used neither model during the time period I'm concerned with.
- It took them a month to publicly acknowledge that issue, so now we lack confidence there isn't another underlying issue going undetected (or undisclosed, less charitably) that affects Opus.
> We are continuing to monitor for any ongoing quality issues, including reports of degradation for Claude Opus 4.1.
I take that as acknowledgment that there might be an issue with Opus 4.1 (granted, undetected still), but not undisclosed, and they're actively looking for it? I'd not jump to "they must be hiding things" yet. They're building, deploying and scaling their service at incredible pace, they, as we all, are bound to get some things wrong.
To be clear, I'm not one of the people suggesting they're doing something nefarious. As I said elsewhere, I don't know what my expectations are of them at this point. I'd like early disclosure of known performance drops, I guess. But from a business POV, I understand why they're not going to be updating a status page to say "things are worsening but we're not exactly sure why".
I'm also a realist, though, and have built a career on building/operating large systems. There's obviously capability to dynamically shed load built into the system somewhere, there's just no other responsible way to engineer it. I'd prefer they slowed response times rather than harmed response quality, personally.
Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school.
Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities. Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of background -- were all eliminated.
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