0898

Answer: organise a “hide and seek” flash mob, apparently.

Back then, I remember Internic let you register a domain and you had 30 days to pay up, because people would commonly put a cheque in the post ("mail a check.")

Is this some kind of human buffer overflow?

I can relate to this. I publish a newsletter for about 2,000 UK agency owners. I have a high open rate (45%) because the emails are really stories about other agencies, rather than about myself. But it's really hard to overcome that "fear of send".

Each time I send a broadcast, I will go back 5 minutes later – see who's unsubscribed – and Google them because... I don't even know!

One thing I do now is schedule my broadcasts, instead of sending them "live". I will even schedule them to go out in 5 minutes' time – for some reason that's way easier than hitting send.

Thanks, really useful.

I've just ordered these, so I'd be interested in any opinions. (Ideally ones that validate my decision to purchase, let's be honest.)

"All Lives Matter" is Racism 1.0 thinking.

But Racism 2.0 has been pushed out and – in some ways – it's a forced upgrade.

Racism 1.0 was widely understood: racists were bad people who made monkey chants on football terraces. It was "the nice people" vs "the mean people". If we "raised awareness", maybe one day it would be "stamped out".

Racism 2.0 is more complex.

It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.

People are having to re-learn stuff they thought they already knew and not everybody is thrilled.

Worse, Racism 2.0 is closed source. The code isn't really published anywhere, at least not in simple language. You have to kind of piece it together yourself from lists of "resources" thrown together by activists, some of whom have opaque agendas.

It's not as simple as it used to be, and it's not surprising that some people are confused.

I have to disagree. I enjoyed the use of metaphor, and actually highlighted several on my Kindle.

# "Zuck had once famously derided [Twitter] as 'a clown car that drove into a gold mine'"

# "One of the Harvard mafiosi got into the habit of theatening engineers that he'd "punch them in the face" if they messed up. Quod licet Bozi, non licet bovi. Gods may do what cattle may not."

# "Eventually, Russia, India, Brazil and parts of Africa will fall into the Growth team's patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer."

The Kevin Spacey one is genuinely brilliant. They've taken it down, but older accounts like mine still have it.

I missed the day of school where we learned what a flywheel was – so these metaphors always go over my head.

I call these companies RHBs: rich, huge and boring.

Personally, I find Zoom's breakout rooms a complete game-changer when it comes to hosting online events. If you use them properly they can reduce or eliminate a lot of the energy-sapping effects of online meetings.

The copy in your post is great. I understood what you do straight away.

Could not much the same effect have been achieved by pulling on a piece of string?

He’s a really unusual blend of journalist and comic, isn’t he.

Question if anybody knows: did Concur used to be good, and then became trash after it was acquired by SAP? Or was it always clunky and hostile?

This could be an epic house of cards.

A speaker I follow made this one of his predictions for this decade [Source: https://www.perrymarshall.com/52453/10-predictions-for-2020-...]

"A charismatic college grad drenched in debt will stand up and shout: “I’m NOT paying back my student loans. You can repossess my car, evict me from my house, revoke my diploma, throw me in debtors prison… but I’m not paying. EVER. Who’s with me?”

"When the Mall in Washington DC is jammed with Millennials standing together in solidarity, the dominoes of higher education will fall."

"The art of manipulating 18 year olds into non-dischargeable loans leading to dead-end careers has driven tuition into the stratosphere."

"Schools and banks are guaranteed their dinero, even if the student never lands a job, even if the degree is in Elizabethan poetry… and not even bankruptcy gets you out of hock."

"This runaway train WILL crash. The bubble WILL pop… this decade."

Cycle though?

People still play Second Life?

What actually is inflammation?

Yes, that’s it. Good find. I’m the first to admit I was an IT dilettante, despite covering it.

I unknowingly met him once in 2002 or 2003, and I’ve just this second realised who he was.

I was visiting Microsoft Research in Cambridge writing an article for PC Format magazine, a British computer mag. They took me to see a few people to show off Microsoft Research.

There was this one guy who talked to me in his office. He got very excited about Haskell (which I didn’t know what it was) and he was also working on some Excel feature he was convinced of the brilliance of, but hasn’t persuaded the product team of.

His theory was that the only thing you know about an Excel spreadsheet is that most of your predications are wrong. My interpretation was that he was proposing a way of indicating a probabilistic range rather than a hard number.

I don’t know if this ever made it into Excel, or if indeed this was what he was talking about.

But it’s amazing to see this odd fellow I met was actually quite famous.

Let me see if I have this right: robotic process automation means automating ordinary desktop software by simulating cursor and keyboard inputs?

A 2% profit with a 5% chance of going busto doesn’t sound like a super smart trade, unless I’m missing something.

The success of Joe Rogan is fascinating and encouraging.

For a long time there was a view that attention spans were diminishing. Facebook and Tik Tok reduced content to the smallest possible dosage.

But look at this. This is one of the world's most popular podcasts and it's nearly three hours long. You see it too in TV: what is a Netflix series but a 13 hour movie?

I see a definite trend towards long form content right now, which I think is quite positive.

I run a series of events for people who run agencies. (By agency, I mean creative, marketing, or technology agencies.)

Events are a good business to get into as a solo founder. You can book a venue, and you don't have to pay until a few weeks before the event. If you haven't sold any tickets you can just cancel the venue and walk away.

I started Agency Hackers in 2017 and I'm almost ready to quit my job and focus on it full time.

It took me two years to figure out that instead of selling individual tickets to events, I should offer a "membership" option where people can subscribe and just come to every event.

Since I started offering membership last month I've signed up 30 agencies – for a MRR of £4,500. Once I hit 50 I will quit my job.

To market the events, I don't run adverts or have much of a social presence. The only way I promote the events is via cold email - and an opt-in email list to customers. The cold email platform I use (Reply.io) did a case study on me if you're curious: [https://reply.io/case-study/agency-hackers/]

For the life of me, I can't work out the axes on that graph.

I was looking through some old Amazon orders last night. A pair of MPow bluetooth headphones I bought in 2013 now appear as an MPow fitness tracker.

It seems like sellers recycle old listings to keep their reviews.

His style is unique, particularly for a mainstream title like Bloomberg. I’d love to read a dissection of it.

We often hear the theory that 419 emails are deliberately written in broken, preposterously florid prose.

("These are warning signs that helpfully remove most people who are savvy enough to escape the trap".)

I do wonder whether this is true, or if academics are over intellectualising the methods behind this scam.