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No comments onA highly-upvoted Hacker News comment linked to a post I wrote twelve years ago on The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a book from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age … that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read,…
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Ninja’s Fortnite tournament, a fascinating mix of streaming, participation, $75 paid entry, and prizes ($2500 if you kill him, $2500 if you win a game), reminds me of what broadcasters like the BBC were trying to do in the 2000s. Back then, the tech and logistics for ‘massive’ games was too expensive, but it’s finally…
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Google Maps emailed me today saying my photos had reached 500,000 views. This one from Red n Hot Szechuan restaurant has 180,000 views, mostly because it’s shown when you pan around King’s Cross.
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A GDPR omen in the Guardian today. While this is technically opt-in because users must affirmatively click “Continue” to receive emails, the strong resemblance to EU Cookie notices where everyone hammers “Continue” is surely deliberate.
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Brutal: CCP pulled out of VR game development because the reception was “even below our lowest expectations.” I’m still long-term bullish on VR, but it seems like there are several big problems to solve, one of them being the friction of just starting a game, something echoed in the interview: “The ceremony of putting on a…
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A Quiet Place, 2018 – ★★★
As entertaining and dumb as a bag of puppies in a sound-proofed box. It’s a cool premise, I’ll grant, but try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking of bombs on windchimes. Vía Letterboxd – Adrian Hon
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China, a Land of Contrasts
Extended excerpts from four recent pieces on China. It’s impossible to generalise about a country of 1.4 billion people, but there are plenty of interesting nuggets here. The quiet revolution: China’s millennial backlash (Financial Times, semi-paywalled) by Yuan Yang: Faye Lu, a Beijing-based businesswoman, chose the Chinese new year after her 30th birthday to come…
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My Problem With Reddit
I keep most of my savings in index funds, as recommended by Warren Buffet and pretty much every financial advisor in the world. Given that interest rates on savings accounts have been practically zero for the past few years, this has worked out quite well for me, and I expect that to continue. And yet…
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Skip the part about the update to Doctor Who Legacy, a match-3 smartphone game, and read the discussion about why it’s so difficult to make a good Doctor Who game.
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The Cultures Ep 244: Thai Restaurant Diplomacy, How We Make The Podcast
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Listen to episode 244 of my weekly podcast with Andrea Phillips and Naomi Alderman: Followup from developer ethics on ep 241 Thai restaurant diplomacy How we make this podcast (Auphonic, Libsyn, Audio Hijack, Blue Yeti microphone) Note: No Naomi this episode