Tim Harford
speaker
411 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026
podcast
Wait a second.
Second more.
There we are.
Tails.
Wasn't that fun?
Wasn't that whimsical?
The coin flip, by the way, was programmed by General Magic's co-founder Andy Hertzfeld, one of the greatest software engineers ever born, and a man who at that moment clearly felt that he had all the time in the world.
Speaking of all the time in the world, the calendar function is a story in itself.
It originally ran from 1904 to 2096.
It was just a few lines of code.
But what if someone writes a historical app that needs to go further back in time?
So the calendar was reprogrammed to go all the way back to year one, and much further forward too.
Then it was realised that human history is longer than that.
The calendar was reprogrammed again to go back to the beginning of astronomical time.
That sort of time-wasting, gold-plated feature creep is how to make a product that's late and expensive and somehow, despite being full of delightful little Easter eggs, doesn't really deliver on the basic promise of being useful.
General Magic.
One part vague, one part impossible.
In hindsight, it was the perfect name.
David Epstein argues that General Magic's ultimate problem was that they had too much freedom.
It's so much harder to create something good, argues Epstein, if you have no constraints at all.
Showing 321–340 of 411 · page 17 of 21
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