mattcasmith

I discovered a while back that Reddit also has a hidden metric beyond karma that affect post visibility, called contributor quality score (CQS). If your CQS is too low, you're deemed a spammer and either can't post in certain subreddits or your posts are automatically hidden.

I'd never heard of this and looked up my own account's CQS. Somehow it was tagged Low.

I'd been a member for years, posted mostly comments with a couple of posts – some of which did quite well in terms of upvotes. I can only imagine that my intermittent posting or the submissions that never got any attention were to blame. Either way, I decided it wasn't worth the effort.

I’ve taken a lot of these same steps with mixed success, but nice to see somebody else’s thoughts and results.

For the iPhone users, I got similar results to Olauncher using the iOS Shortcuts app, and then linked it to the action button for easy access. I have a blog post in the works with the detail.

I agree. One of the things I love about my Kindle is that it’s a single-use device, functionally equivalent to holding a paperback in my hands. There’s nothing to distract me or tempt me away from reading. Apps would risk breaking that spell.

I'm surprised there haven't been more releases along the lines of Konami's old WE/PES units, which essentially take a console football game and drop it in an arcade cabinet.

I'm not a basketball fan, but I've had some great fun playing arcadey NBA equivalents with friends and colleagues. It's a shame there aren't similar options for football.

I’ve seen a few of these – malicious repos to clone, fake call links that prompt for “driver” downloads, and so on.

The only way around it is to be hyper-vigilant if anyone asks you to run any untrusted code on your computer.

I’ve been going all-in on regular writing this year, and have published a blog post a week since December (https://mattcasmith.net/).

My most recent piece is about the privacy-impacting plans the UK government announced this week, but my favourite recent output is an essay titled Care About What You Do, which brings together a lot of small thoughts I’ve had for years into a consistent thread.

More technically, have found some time in recent weeks to work on my site design backlog - most recently re-implementing inline newsletter signups after the email platform’s embedded widget broke.

“Sharing malicious URLs, including those that may harm another player.”

The URL was google[.]com.

I was amazed recently by how locked down the hidden PlayStation 5 browser is.

You can’t access it as an app through the dashboard, but it appears if you click a URL from a message. So people were sending themselves “google[.]com”, clicking, and enjoying web access.

But it seems Sony have even clamped down on that. I sent a message to myself recently, the link wasn’t clickable, and I got a message to say my PlayStation Network account had received a warning and could be suspended if I did it again!

Indeed. Have never used Blacksmith and maybe there’s a good reason why they do this, but it seems odd that in world where so much of the signup and onboarding process is fine tuned for optimal conversion, a business would take an approach to a free trial that risks leaving such a sour taste in a prospect’s mouth.

Have been thinking about this a lot recently. AI could be an absolute game changer for a small start-up rushing a product to market – you could quickly build an MVP that would take years and tens of hires before.

But how much ROI is there for large businesses with established products and huge development teams burning through tokens making subtle tweaks that can’t be directly tied to revenue?