Ben Dean

Product at @Corbo_ai, Technologist, Musician. Husband, Father, and Cubs Fan.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

Remember when people thought facing the A's, Giants, and Rockies was going to let us turn things around?

It turned things - into a disaster.

#Cubs

[Ben Dean @bendean]

How is Dustin Kelly still hitting coach? 4 straight years of extended team-wide slumps. And the league figured out the #Cubs can't hit curve balls.

"It's not on him, it's on the players" means no coach or manager would get fired, ever.

They do. It's time for a new approach.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

@TheWrigleyWire Poor results, but the Titanic recorded its four fastest speeds all voyage in the final hours:

22.5 knots
22.75 knots
22.9 knots
23.0 knots (iceberg avoidance assisted)

Glad to see her finally hitting top speed.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

If I told you after last night's incredible comeback walk-off that today's score was 16-1 you would assume the Cubs carried that momentum forward for 14 hours.

In fact, the #Cubs are losing 16-1.

[Scott Hatch @scotthatch22]

This is embarrassing. You scored 4 in the 9th to win last night and you come back and give up 5 HRs to a Giants team who is 13 games under .500. Meanwhile your own offense puts up 2 hits???? Cut people. Fire people. IDC. This is unacceptable!! #Cubs

[Ben Dean @bendean]

@RapSheet Fun fact - Bears in Hammond would be the 4th furthest from "city center" in the league.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

It’s time

#sCrUBS

[Ben Dean @bendean]

@WatchMarquee Guess we're all going to 'sit' more and wait for things to somehow turn around. That's a #sTragedy - with a capital "T". #Cubs

https://t.co/h5dX1Zq04p

[Marquee Sports Network @WatchMarquee]

Craig Counsell on the Cubs' stretch: "We're not winning a lot of baseball games right now ... and we're not playing well enough to win a lot of baseball games. You have to earn it and we're not earning it."

[Ben Dean @bendean]

#Cubs fans. I'm starting to think this might not be our year.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

Unfortunately accurate.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

For the #Cubs starting the 10th with a runner in scoring position is actually a massive disadvantage.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

For the #Cubs starting the 10th with a runner in scoring position is actually a massive disadvantage.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

MLB umpires when a team has no ABS challenges left.

Check out pitch 2.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

So PCA hits a bomb into some shirtless idiots who were chanting "overrated" - then one of them tries to throw the ball back onto the field and - fails.

Pete embarrassed them. Then they piled on themselves.

#Cubs

[Ben Dean @bendean]

The Cubs are unwatchable.

Incredible to imagine after 2 10 game winning streaks this year.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

Ian Happ is killing this team. And don’t think other players aren’t affected by Counsell’s refusal to sit him or move him down in the order. They see a manager who refuses to give them the best chance to win.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

I wouldn't have thought a team with two 10 game winning streaks already this year could suddenly, and completely suck.

The Cubs have changed my mind.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

Thing of beauty

🔊 Wait for it.

[Billy @CubsBilly]

#Cubthumping 🎵

Castoff to walk-off. Comeback song, comeback player, comeback win.

First walkoff HR of Conforto's 12-year career — full count, two outs, opposite field.

6 in a row. 12 straight at Wrigley.

#Cubs

[Ben Dean @bendean]

@Brett_A_Taylor It's not the .392 that scares people. It's that he's 12-for-20 over the last 14 days. He's getting better inside an already elite month. At 22. Now he walks into Dodger Stadium against a 5.85 ERA. Good luck.

#Cubs

[Raiza Martin @raizamrtn]

I really believe that the next turn of AI is personalization and proactivity, with one massive caveat:

These two things are only powerful if they are "subtractive."

Let me explain.

Most “personalized” products today add more: more recommendations, more alerts, more surface area. True personalization should do the opposite. It should quietly take things away.

The same goes for proactivity. A proactive system shouldn’t interrupt you, it should preempt friction. It should remove steps, not insert itself.

Since we launched Huxe a month ago, I've been talking daily to our users. Unanimously, each person describes the best quality of the app as being subtractive: it takes away something as its core value.

"I listen to it first thing in the morning instead of opening my mail app"
"Instead of opening a bunch of tabs, I just listen to the news"
"I always look up this niche topic to keep track of it, but now I just created a station about it"

In these quotes I'm hearing what I've always believed about good products, too: there’s a real usefulness in things that unburden us, especially from tasks we’ve always believed we had to do, but never actually liked doing.

So as we build the app more, we're really embracing the art of subtraction.

People want less:
fewer tabs,
fewer decisions,
less friction.

Not just an app that does everything for you, rather an app that removes everything that gets in your way.

[Luke Wroblewski @LukeW]

Some UX issues have been with us so long that we stopped thinking we could do better. Need to collect data from people? Web forms. People don't understand how your app works? Onboarding. But new technologies (in this use AI) create new opportunities including ways to tackle long-standing UX challenges.

[Ben Dean @bendean]

No way in hell Shota should have pitched to Machado there.

This is the kind of poor management we saw from Craig all year and hoped it wouldn't carry over to the post season.

It did.

#Cubs