On the Nature of Daylight

I wore my Criterion t-shirt to the gym today.

The last video uploaded to Criterion’s YouTube channel is its Closet Picks series with director Denis Villeneuve.

Villeneuve is most famous for directing the two modern “Dune” movies, but he concluded his chat by naming a film I happened to mention on my Friday post:

… by far, one of my favorite movies of all time: “Seven Samurai” by Akira Kurosawa.

…

(in French) If you can only watch one Criterion film, watch “Seven Samurai.”

If I had to mention one of my favorite films of this century, it would be a Denis Villeneuve picture, but one most of you have not seen. At least, probably not more than once. “Arrival” (2016). A masterpiece.

What a score! Listen.

I re-watched it after New Year’s (not only to cry during the last five minutes [spoiler!] of its run time) because part of the plot reminded me of the podcast I binged during my trip to New Orleans on New Year’s Eve: “The Telepathy Tapes.”

From Jesse Michels:

The Telepathy Tapes covers non-verbal children across the country showing remarkable rates of “mind reading” in controlled settings. This is not intellectual entertainment. It is a paradigm shift.

From Packy McCormick:

By December 2nd, about halfway through Episode 9, I believed in God.

That is a weird thing to write. When I say “believed in God,” I don’t mean that I’ve joined a Church. I’m not trying to convert you. I went out drinking with my friends this weekend and I said “fuck” like a minute ago. I grew up Catholic and this is a very different experience.

I just kind of know that there’s a Universal Consciousness, that we’re all a part of it, and that the world is more magical than we’ve been led to believe.

This is not my own idea. It’s not even a new idea. It’s a very old one. This is what Jesus was saying, and the Buddha, and Rumi. It is the Perennial Philosophy: all major religious and spiritual traditions ultimately point to the same universal truth or reality. I didn’t grok that at all until two weeks ago.

In 1945, Aldous Huxley (the Aldous Huxley), penned a book by that name, The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West, writing:

“The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts which we have to accept, whether we like them or not.”

Maybe the lines from the “Arrival” screenplay that most easily sum up the story:

Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.

I tried to learn French before attending last Summer’s Paris Olympics.

Of course, I used Duolingo ($DUOL). I joined the app in October 2012. It helped me learn Italian this past decade beyond what two semesters of college taught — and at a much cheaper price.

My current Duolingo streak is 2,205 consecutive days, but it should be longer because I lost my first streak in the Fall of 2018 during a trip to Hong Kong. Time zones!

From The Motley Fool’s take on Duolingo from last week:

In the third quarter of 2024, Duolingo generated $193 million in revenue, $140 million in gross profit, and $56 million in operating cash flow. Of this revenue, 82% was from paid subscriptions, and the rest was from non-subscription revenue, such as advertising.

Besides being profitable, Duolingo is also growing rapidly, with revenue increasing by 40% in the latest quarter due to a 45% jump in subscription bookings. In short, the tech company is a rare example of a high-growth company that’s also enormously profitable.

…

… Duolingo has plenty of opportunities to grow its user base of 113 million, especially considering that the company’s app is available almost anywhere globally. With the potential to reach billions of users, Duolingo’s existing user base is just a drop in the ocean.

Secondly, only 8.6 million of the 113 million users are paid subscribers. Even if Duolingo increases its paid user base by 10 times its current size, it will still have unconverted users. To this end, the tech company’s ongoing product enhancement — adding new subjects and features and improving engagement and learning outcomes — will motivate users to pay for premium services.

For instance, the company introduced the Video Call feature for its Duolingo Max, which allows users to practice conversation skills with Lily, an AI agent who remembers past interactions. This feature will help learners practice their conversational skills, which will likely improve the learning outcome.

To put the opportunity into numbers, Duolingo estimated that the digital learning industry will hit $1 trillion in 2026, of which the online language industry could reach $47 billion by 2025. In short, there’s a sea of opportunity ahead!

Again, from “Arrival”:

Ian Donnelly: If you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.

Louise Banks: Yeah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s the theory that the language you speak determines how you think and…

Ian Donnelly: Yeah, it affects how you see everything.

From Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn’s conversation with The Verge last October:

I do think that large language models are going to be very positive for Duolingo — they already are, and I think they’re going to continue being very positive. What is not true is that large language models solve all our problems. One of the biggest issues that people aren’t talking about, particularly with education, is that large language models are good at teaching you stuff. They’re not good at engagement. And that’s the hardest thing with education.

The hardest thing about me trying to teach you something is just keeping you engaged. Somehow, people forget. I see some people saying, “You can learn quantum physics with ChatGPT.” And yeah, sure, but that’s just not that impressive. You can learn quantum physics with a book. The technology to learn that has been around for a long time. It’s called a book and it works. It’s just that people don’t really want to read a quantum physics book. And similarly, most people probably don’t want to go to ChatGPT and start asking questions about quantum physics. It’s the same thing for language learning. Large language models are very good at getting you to practice, but keeping you engaged is pretty hard.

Speaking of LLMs, I won’t discuss DeepSeek today because you can find many other sources on what it is and isn’t.

I’ll try not to open my brokerage accounts until the weekend.

Watch: “Arrival” (2016):

Colonel Weber: Everything you do in there, I have to explain to a room full of men whose first and last question is, “How can this be used against us?” So you’re gonna have to give me more than that.

Louise Banks: Kangaroo.

Colonel Weber: What is that?

Louise Banks: In 1770, Captain James Cook’s ship ran aground off the coast of Australia, and he led a party into the country, and they met the Aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed at the animals that hop around and put their babies in their pouch, and he asked what they were, and the Aborigine said, “Kangaroo.”

Colonel Weber: And the point is?

Louise Banks: It wasn’t till later that they learned that “kangaroo” means “I don’t understand.” So, I need this so that we don’t misinterpret things in there. Otherwise, this is gonna take 10 times as long.

Colonel Weber: I can sell that for now. But I need you to submit your vocabulary words before the next session.

Louise Banks: Fair.

Colonel Weber: And remember what happened to the Aborigines. A more advanced race nearly wiped them out.

(SIGHING)

Ian Donnelly: It’s a good story.

Louise Banks: Thanks. It’s not true. But it proves my point.