Linked List: November 22, 2023

Wednesday, 22 November 2023

The Talk Show: ‘Two-Legged Stool’ 

Special guest Gabe Rivera, founder of the indispensable news aggregator Techmeme, joins the show to talk about the state of news and social media. Thanksgiving fun for the entire family — turn the volume down on the Packers-Lions game tomorrow and listen to this instead. (Turn the volume back up, of course, for the Commanders-Cowboys game.)

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Former Designer of Google Maps on Its Updated Design 

Elizabeth Laraki, in an article-length post on Twitter/X

15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps. I still use it everyday. Last week, the team dramatically changed the map’s visual design. I don’t love it. It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale. [...]

So much stuff has accumulated on top of the map. Currently there are ~11 different elements obscuring it:

  • Search box
  • 8 pills overlayed in 4 rows
  • A peeking card for “latest in the area”
  • A bottom nav bar

This is a very long way of saying that Google Maps’s app design should be like Apple Maps. In fact, Apple Maps has fewer UI elements obtruding actual map content than she’s proposing for Google Maps.

The OpenAI Coup Saga Seemingly Ends, With Sam Altman Returning as CEO 

Nilay Patel and Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI, overcoming an attempted boardroom coup that sent the company into chaos over the past several days. Former president Greg Brockman, who quit in protest of Altman’s firing, will return as well.

The company said in a statement late Tuesday that it has an “agreement in principle” for Altman to return alongside a new board composed of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. D’Angelo is a holdover from the previous board that initially fired Altman on Friday. He remains on this new board to give the previous board some representation, we’re told.

People familiar with the negotiations say that the main job of this small initial board is to vet and appoint an expanded board of up to nine people that will reset the governance of OpenAI. Microsoft, which has committed to investing billions in the company, wants to have a seat on that expanded board, as does Altman himself.

The question I’ve focused on from the start of this soap opera is who really controls OpenAI? The board thought it was them. It wasn’t. Matt Levine had the funniest-because-it’s-true take in his Money Stuff column — I don’t want to spoil it, just go there and look at his “slightly annotated” version of OpenAI’s diagram of their corporate structure.

See also: The Wall Street Journal’s compelling story of the drama behind the scenes (News+ link).