🔗 WWW
There are a lot of links out to different parts of the web on this site. I try to mark them all so they get listed here.
🔗 Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees at Activision Blizzard and Xbox this week. While Microsoft is primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted by the cuts.
Sometimes you forget how sprawling companies like Microsoft are. With 1900 gone - there are still over 20,000 left.
And that’s just the ‘gaming’ bit.
🔗 ProPublica Hires First Senior Director for Technology
Awesome. So many congratulations @werd
🎈025/366 | 🐫 Do Not Put ‘Product’ In Charge
Don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of time and respect for 🖇️ Dana Blankenhorn - as you can see … so this one caught my attention
There’s a single rule I’ve learned studying technology this last half century. Product must be in charge.
.. and 🔗then he goes on
I totally disagree, so had to comment and did. Reproduced here for posterity
I don’t disagree on taking the finance wonks out .. but not sure I agree on putting product in … I know lots of companies that lead with product .. and it doesn’t work unless there is wider purview which is often missing in product thinking. Our friends in Cupertino don’t lead with product .. though many pundits think they do .. they lead with vision, experience and story that the product delivers against.
The ‘top’ needs to be market, future market, visionary oriented. Disciplines that used to fall under marketing … though sadly not anymore .. as they are all chasing data and models and RoI .. but those people exist. In all of those disciplines. The dude at the top can still be a focussed finance wonk … their ancillary skill (beyond those three core requirements) is to listen to everyone, take advice and pay attention.
Again .. the man at the top of Cupertino is ‘operations and supply chain’ ( by history ) but to the casual observer, that isn’t so obvious. Meanwhile, the man before him was vision and experience and story .. sure he definitely had a say in product … but from an holistic viewpoint -
Just one slice of the holisticism (is that even a word)… how many ‘product’ people get what good design can do.
If they do .. I mean REALLY do .. why are there so many badly designed, poorly performing products out there?
What Do You Think?
Postscript - sometimes the Leonardo images take a few tweaks to get even close to my underlying message - but in this case - third go - and was only generating 1 image at a time. Sometimes I run out of the 150 free credits that I get every day - and have to choose from a bad lot.
This image just spoke volumes to me as ‘the house that ‘product’ built.
Funnily enough - today’s emoji was also absolutely clear.
🔗 Donald Trump wins Republican primary in New Hampshire
He is representing the American people. He is not out for himself. He’s not out for political gain. He’s not out for financial reasons. He doesn’t need money, he doesn’t need fame and fortune. He already has all of that.
💬 Tina Lorenzo, 63, a Trump supporter since 2016
No comment … you know 🖇️ my position
🎈023/366 | 9️⃣ Highlights From Yesterday
A different theme for today’s 366 … nine links to yesterday’s news - complete with pithy comment - courtesy of this author
1️⃣ 🖇️ Remember my post from a couple of weeks ago?
Well, it turns out that though he might have been expecting .. hoping for that … it might not be a slam dunk.
🔗 Tories hire coordinator to get expat supporters to vote in general election.
Who knew?
2️⃣ 🔗 Trump Says He ‘Aced’ Cognitive Test, Mind Is ‘Stronger’ Than 25 Years Ago
.. not exactly a high bar.
3️⃣ 🔗 Flanders government looks to force TikTok and YouTube to share revenue | Belgium.
Some lessons here. Most Governments pay (they don’t use that word … but that is what they are doing) to attract film production.
I think this is the right way round.
4️⃣ 🔗 Rise in measles cases prompts vaccination campaign in England.
Oh .. so it’s ok to get vaccinated now?
5️⃣ 🔗 The Musical Instruments Market Size Is Expected To Reach $14 Billion By 2027.
Wonder what constitutes a ‘musical instrument ‘ these days?
6️⃣ 🔗 January 21, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
I wonder if Dobbs, with its announcement that when Republicans are given power over our legal system they do not consider themselves obligated to recognize an established constitutional right, will turn out to be today’s version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
No Comment. Yet.
7️⃣ 🔗 Thousands of Māori gather to tell New Zealand’s government: you cannot marginalise us.
Got to say .. ‘Cristopher (sic) and crew’ were warned.
8️⃣ 🔗 DeSantis Might Be the Worst Presidential Candidate in Recent Memory
Say what now?
Isn’t The Orange Clown a Presidential candidate? Problem nailed .. ‘they’ve forgotten already .. and he is in the fucking race!
9️⃣ 🔗 It seems that ‘God sent a quitter’
If his campaign is remembered at all, it will be for setting fire to a pile of money big enough to be seen from space in order to win a grand total of nine Iowa delegates.
ROTFFLOL
🔗 LIfe Imitating Art? … that is if 🎬 Love Actually counts as ‘art’?
Thought I’d try out 🔗 paid tinylytics for a while.
Some odd stats there - so now I need to check out what is being checked out!
📺 Ted Lasso
Just marvelous. No point in saying more, since I can’t add to all the other plaudits.
Ted Lasso on 🔗 Reelgood
Steve Winwood and Carlos - and no - I do not know how I missed this 2 to 3 years ago - but missed it I did.
Well worth recording. Well worth a listen.
📼 .. and then a little older. … GROOVIN!
📼 🔗 Ferret - Apple’s new multi modal AI
I found this rather interesting, of course when you think about it - their camera work and car dev will absolutely have given them an edge on understanding images … makes total sense.
Then I read…
Apple stopped using and supporting NVidia products in 2016, its Ferret model was developed using NVidia’s highly efficient A100 graphics cards. Therefore, the source code available on GitHub does not work on Apple’s products.
🤦🏽
It’s an Instagram account. Clever ideas brought to life …
I am not a paid subscriber ..so don’t know how this ends, but this is one of the best pre paywall cliff hangers I have ever read ….
🔗 Postcard from Sundance… Starting with H'wood Agents at Burbank Airport
Maybe The Media Is Biased?
The comforting conceit that Donald Trump is an unpleasant yet passing American aberration, often heard during his 2017-21 presidency, is harder to believe than ever after his Iowa caucus landslide victory last week.
Simon .. it wasn’t a landslide. Even the article you linked to doesn’t say ‘landslide’. You of all people should know this .. maybe you should read your own newspaper more …
🔗 Iowa caucuses 2024: Republican results in full | US elections 2024 | The Guardian
He won 20 delegates .. and 3 more after the idiot Ramaswamy dropped out. 17 more won by ‘others’.
Call that a landslide? Ronald Reagan winning 49 of the 50 states .. THAT’S a landslide. (Tip o’ the hat to Crocodile Dundee.)
🔗 Here’s what Iowa’s own newspaper wrote.
TL;DR 15% of registered republicans actually voted. Around 110 thousand out of 3.2 million people.
It really does seem that we have a biased media .. but not like the Rethuglicans think.
🎈021/366 👮🏼♂️ The Seven Laws of Identity
I was listening to 🎙️this podcast and of course duly reminded of Kim Cameron’s 7 Laws of Identity, so replaying here for posterity. You can 🔗 read a quick summary here.
Law 1: User control and consent
Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent
Law 2: Minimum disclosure for a constrained use
The solution which discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long-term solution
Law 3: Justifiable Parties
Digital identity systems must be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship
Law 4: Directed Identity
A universal identity system must support both “omni-directional” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles
Law 5: Pluralism of Operators and Technologies
A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-working of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers
Law 6: Human Integration
The universal identity metasystem must define the human user to be a component of the distributed system integrated through unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks
Law 7: Consistent Experience Across Contexts
The unifying identity metasystem must guarantee its users a simple, consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies
Down here in sunny New Zealand, I have been helping a local man with his identity solution. More on that in due course - because - guess what - its pretty much ‘tops’ .. and expression I learned last night which is the antonym of ‘pants’ … but I digress.
It turns out his system hits all seven laws - and that’s just how it worked out, to because he designed to them. This gives me even more confidence that we are on to something. It would be kinda like building a robot and then realizing it is ‘Asimov compliant’.
Last week, Thomas-Smith and his male cofounders abandoned their original concept of “the Tinder of subletting” to launch a “girls only club” called Girls Who NYC in New York.
🎈020/366 | 🔮 Future Vision
Over the holidays, down in Wellington, I somehow constantly found myself in conversations about ‘local politics’ … council, city, region … and dare I even say national? (On a global scale ’national thinking’ for a small country like New Zealand is still ‘local’.) No need to talk about the topics discussed - the usual, but my recurring observation that was never rejected is that long term planning anywhere for housing, climate change, infrastructure, EV cars, bike lanes … you name it .. is never that long term because the elected officials - even if they had the vision .. and often they don’t’ (but that is a different story) - don’t think beyond their election cycle.
As a result it is a brave group of politicians that put in place 25 to 30 year plans for anything … much less real long term!
Enter 🔗 The Ministry for the Future - New Ideas From Ancient Wisdom. - with my highlights and annotations on Readwise. It’s not quite the same idea and far more ‘financially technical’ than I might ever hope to completely understand - much less explain - but it is all connected and makes for a fascinating - if technical - read.
Unless you’re a policy wonk or a certain kind of federal contractor, you can be forgiven for not knowing what the discount rate is.
BUT - so you know …
Seperately …
📼 A Long Now talk from Kim Stanley Robinson : Climate Futures: Beyond 02022 (referenced in the article, not yet watched - but is now in my queue). Also, that 02022 is not a typo - it’s a ‘Long Now’ year. I like them just from that simple switch in thinking. It positions us in time very differently to 2022. (Not sure if it is also unseen inspiration behind the numbering system of my series for 2024.)
‘nuff said for now. Suffice to say, I am going to do some further exploring around the ‘social discount rate’. This bear hadn’t stumbled across it previously - but it seems to be an excellent way of thinking about a reason why ‘our’ policies are so broken.
Can’t recall if I have shared the 🔗 Gurwinder Principles before, so belt and braces - using my annotated / high-lit Readwise link.
🔗 Well now - maybe I am reading in the wrong places - but surprised I am not seeing more about this … annotated Readwise link.
TL;DR - Apple has changed how podcast downloads are being measured and that means a lot of some of the bigger numbers out there are no longer that big.