Notices by Adrian Hon (adrianhon@mastodon.social)

China simultaneously has the most
infamous and deeply misunderstood form of gamification in its social credit scores AND the citizenry most proficient at messing with gamification https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241120-chinas-ant-forest-users-cheat-in-game-that-helps-the-climate

NYT opinion pieces on Trump sleeping during trial:

Bret Stephens: Consciousness is for the woke

Maureen Dowd: I once had a weekend where I didn't sleep

Ross Douthat: Trump sleeps for us all

Jamelle Bouie: What the constitution tells us about snoozing

David Brooks: The (fourth) wife of my dreams

OK my last thing on scams (for now):

The idea that "being smarter” can help people avoid scams is like training people to run faster to dodge traffic rather than enforcing road safety and building pedestrian crossings – it’s not that it’s worthless, but it places the burden on individual citizens rather than addressing the larger societal problem.

Today's my final day as CEO at Six to Start after almost 17 years!

Here's what the company's meant to me, all the games and apps I'm proud of, what it's like to be responsible for that long, and what I'm doing next... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/seventeen-years-six-start-adrian-hon-pasce/

Apple nerds in the US, for the love of god:

Stop bleating on about how EU regulators are terrible, they don’t know anything, won’t do anything, don’t represent what EU citizens want.

The world is not America. The EU is not America. They do not always want or value the same things. Maybe try talking to some Europeans?!

“A publisher told me that his (successful) business operated on the rule of thumb that 80% of books were not read by the purchaser - they were either gifts or found their way onto glass tables or dusty bookshelves

…That's why we like to say a record collection defines who you are, and a book collection defines who you really want to be.”

Will Page in the Winter 2023 issue of The Author

Just set up Dolby Atmos for Jusant on the Xbox and this is a real RTX ON moment

$38,000 for 100 years of website hosting and domain name registration. Hmm.

$38k today, growing at 3.5% after inflation, equals $1.25m after a century…

https://wordpress.com/100-year/

Here's the thing with Elon.

At Tesla and SpaceX, he could hire engineers so passionate about electric cars and building rockets, so frustrated by the slow pace at other organisations, they willingly worked themselves to the bone and covered up for his many shortcomings. Quite how sustainable that is, we'll see.

But there are plenty of other companies with the same mission as Twitter. And software engineers are so sought after, he can't hire the best on peanuts. It can't work.

Reddit captured a lot of new communities that in days of old would've made their own forums.

Flyertalk is unbelievably popular and they have their own forum; I browse the UK Railforums which are similar. It can be done, and it can be better than Reddit if you have a solid community with unique needs.

A couple of years ago, in the midst of COVID lockdowns, a Guardian story about a man who'd had the same supper for 10 years went viral.

The story was, if anything, more surprising than the clickbait headline. It was an account by Wilf Davies, a 72 year old farmer who’d barely left his Welsh farm’s valley, and had only ever left Wales once, to visit a farm in England.

People loved the story. I couldn't forget it – because I was so angry at the praise:

https://mssv.net/2023/01/15/a-cut-in-the-shape-of-my-heart/

Getting mighty tired of these James Daunt hagiographies.

Yes, he has good ideas, but IMO a lot of his business success at Waterstones and Barnes and Noble comes from exploiting his employee's love of books by underpaying them.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

The book industry is built on the backs of young people who've been taught that it's *important* and a vocation, and therefore are working for far less pay than they deserve. I place the blame wholly on managers and owners.