Monetization ruined X.

'almost' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

I've been on the peripheries of a few campaigns like this. Usually it works roughly like the following: 1. The government puts pressure on firms to try and achieve something - eg, trying to get the industry to push UK investments more, or to encourage people to put more in UK investmentw. 2. The firms don't want to do that, or they're already doing what they can, but want to retain good links with the government, so they come up with the idea of a joint marketing campaign to promote UK investment. 3. Most of the firms realise it will achieve very little, but will keep the govt on-side. 20 firms each agree to put up £800k for an initial year, with the possibility of continuing for another 2 years. A small cost individually for big financial firms. 4. There's then a process to appoint media and creative agencies to come up with a concept, and get paid a few hundred thousand pounds. 5. There is collective realisation there is nowhere to actually point people who see the ads: they can't go to an individual website to open an investment account, as there are 20 firms involved. And if they send them to a central place, there is little they can put there, other than info on how investing works. 6. They also have the problem of getting 20 firms to agree the creative approach. 7. So then it all ends up a bit 'lowest common denominator' - they come up with a bland cartoon mascot, and infantilise the audience as there's always worry that people won't 'get it', and the only reference points for campaigns like this are other bland mascots. 8. There's then a big launch, with the headline number of 'up to'£50m to get press coverage, though usually that assumes it will run for several years and none of the firms will back out. 9. The campaign launch, and criticism of the launch, generally gets more coverage than the campaign itself. The £50m sounds good to the press, as it is big enough to sound impactful, but sounds wasteful to others. 10. At the end they're not sure how to measure its effect, so all of the firms involved are asked to supply numbers on how well the campaign has affected them - they all scrap around to find the most positive numbers they can, as they don't want to look bad, and then centrally they add that to a 'brand recall' campaign which asks if people have heard of 'Savvy Squirrel', and if they've thought about investing more in the last 6 months. Ie: nothing which really indicates that the campaign has helped people to invest more, bit things that will sound broadly positive. 11. Everyone in the industry pretends it's gone well, as they want to appear successful to each other, snd want to keep the govt on-side. The media agencies pretend it's gone well, as if it continues they get paid for another year. But nobody's fully sure if it made a positive difference, or no difference, or if - counterintuitively- it was worse than doing nothing, as it took up time and money that could have been used more wisely. And then it continues till it fizzles out, or the next government is in place. Not saying it is the case here, but having seen a few of these I have suspicions!

We're all Derek.

Strictly speaking his customers would have made this return, as it was their money.

Typical expand too quickly, manage a business on spreadsheets scenario. FM has been poor for years...and of course they're shutting the original site.

Oh you get your news from the mainstream media? I get mine from a a16z funded livestream of an Australian guy scrolling Twitter to read OSINT accounts aggregating the New York Times

Louder for those at the back.

Nah. You've messed up too many times now for multiple seasons.

Remember when fintech marketing was good? This screams AI generated idea. Tries to be clever, fails.

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

I can answer this - of course they're not vetting candidates and I don't think they care, either.

I’ve never seen anything more accurate

Nope.

.@vonderleyen "The European #AgeVerification app is technically ready. It respects the highest privacy standards in the world. It's open-source, so anyone can check the code..." I did. It didn't take long to find what looks like a serious #privacy issue. The app goes to great lengths to protect the AV data AFTER collection (is_over_18: true is AES-GCM'd); it does so pretty well. But, the source image used to collect that data is written to disk without encryption and not deleted correctly. For NFC biometric data: It pulls DG2 and writes a lossless PNG to the filesystem. It's only deleted on success. If it fails for any reason (user clicks back, scan fails & retries, app crashes etc), the full biometric image remains on the device in cache. This is protected with CE keys at the Android level, but the app makes no attempt to encrypt/protect them. For selfie pictures: Different scenario. These images are written to external storage in lossless PNG format, but they're never deleted. Not a cache... long-term storage. These are protected with DE keys at the Android level, but again, the app makes no attempt to encrypt/protect them. This is akin to taking a picture of your passport/government ID using the camera app and keeping it just in case. You can encrypt data taken from it until you're blue in the face... leaving the original image on disk is crazy & unnecessary. From a #GDPR standpoint: Biometric data collected is special category data. If there's no lawful basis to retain it after processing, that's potentially a material breach. youtube.com/watch?v=4VRRriyD…

X just announced is launching a new “Cashtags feature.” $TSLA. $BTC. $ETH. The $ convention that the entire financial internet runs on wasn’t built by X. It was built by @Stocktwits in 2008/2009. Howard Lindzon, Soren Mcbeth, Phil Pearlman and a small team. Twitter copied it in 2012 and had the nerve to be the ones to name it “cashtag.” Lindzon’s response at the time: “you can hijack a plane but it does not mean you know how to fly it.” Now in 2026, X is “launching cashtags”, a 17-year-old idea. @howardlindzon & the @Stocktwits crew built it before anyone cared. give credit where it’s due. 🫡

It fascinates me that anyone could look at this conflict and not admire Ukraine. They look at these two leaders, one who is innovating and fighting for his people...and one who is sitting in the Kremlin...and think "oh yes I admire the guy in the Kremlin relying on mercenaries hired from abroad....not the guy who innovates and resisted invasion." But then again...it's the same types apparently who looked at young and strong and inspiring Peter Magyar and thought "oh, yes superannuated Orban is better"....so it must just be a glitch....because no reasonable person would ever draw those conclusions.

That team 🥰

Several folks in my mentions said they quit watching the new Count of Monte Cristo because it features black actors. My friend, you are going to be shocked when you learn the ethnicity of Alexander Dumas.

Kyoto Aquarium is a must see. It's hard to describe just how immense its main tank is.