brendan halpin

Last week, Alpha School had an informational meeting for prospective parents in Boston. If you don’t feel like clicking, Alpha School is “reinventing education’ with the help of AI, something something disruption, something something personalizaton, “crushing” academics, etc.

Now, Alpha School is a private school charging between 40k and 70k a year, so at least they’re not trying to tap into public money. Yet. More on this later.

But there are a number of HUGE red flags about this place that folks should know about. I mean, apart from the whole “The magic of AI will transform school” nonsense, which would be a red flag for many people. If you want to read what this looks like in practice, here’s a Wired article from last year. It’s kinda harrowing stuff. (And here’s an article about the article, expanding on some extremely problematic stuff that’s only mentioned in passing in the Wired article).

But even if that doesn’t convince you that Alpha School is a bad idea, dig this:

Years ago I snarked at Michelle Wu on Twitter—she said something about supporting public education, and I asked her why she then kept voting for budgets that harmed it.

Her response was to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to get some folks together who knew about school budgets so she could listen to us and learn. Some time later, I got people who knew a LOT about school budgeting (I was in touch with such people then because Twitter facilitated building communities of like-minded local folks to get stuff done, which is probably another reason Musk wanted to kill it) together and we met with then-councilor Wu in the meeting room at the JP Library. She took the T from City Hall and walked 15 minutes from Green Street to the library. And she really listened. And took notes.

There’s quite the scandal in Boston education circles, as the CEO of The Croft School, which has 2 locations in Boston and one in Providence, was revealed to be keeping two sets of books and also gave his landlord a forged letter of credit. The school is millions of dollars in debt that nobody else knew about and may not have enough money to finish the school year. Oops!

Went to see the Baz Luhrman-directed Elvis doc last night. It starts with a recap of Elvis’ career up to that point, notably omitting the ‘68 Comeback Special, presumably because that’s better than any of the Vegas footage that follows. Then we see some rehearsals, and then we get to the live shows.

Cory Doctorow recently caused a stir on the nerdy corners of the internet where I hang out by writing an essay saying he uses AI to proofread his blog and, what’s more, you are a chump if you decide not to buy literally anything. I mean, that’s my interpretation, but he gives multiple examples of how every form of tech is tainted by its association with someone horrible, and his conclusion seems to be that one therefore should be indiscriminate in what one uses and purchases.

I’ve been playing Marvel SNAP for close to three years. If you’re not familiar, Marvel SNAP is a card battling video game where you play cards with Marvel superheroes and villains, each of which has a point value and most of which have abilities that affect the game.

Games usually take about five minutes, so it’s a really good casual game to play on your phone. You can win without spending a ton of money, and the developers seem to really put a lot of effort into keeping the game competitive.

….and, I think it’s going to die.

Part one is here. Part two is here.

At this point, I suppose it’s worth asking why I continue to write about this. I should start by saying that I really had no resentment of Danny Hillis from my time as his employee. One of the things his company did that probably led to their downfall was to hire overqualified people for low-level jobs. Which was how I found employment during the Bush The Elder recession. I rarely interacted with Hillis—he played the part of the absent-minded professor who didn’t own any professional clothing and would slouch around the joint in old t-shirts. Even then I recognized this as a flex— “I’m so important I don’t have to dress as nicely as the people who answer my phone”—but while there were some horrible people at Thinking Machines, I never thought of Hillis as one of them.

A while back, the marketing people were talking about “friction” a lot. I can’t remember if this was before or after they were talking about “pain points.” Either way, friction in this context means things that slow you down, that make it hard for you to get stuff done. (I believe online shopping was the prime example here—like every click that stands between you and the “complete purchase” button is friction.)

More Epstein emails have dropped, and after seeing my former boss, Danny Hillis, in one of the recent photo dumps, I went a-searchin’ for Danny’s name in the emails.