I do love this about #Singapore:

“In 2015, the then Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who has a first-class degree in mathematics and a diploma in computer science from Cambridge, shared a Sudoku solver on Facebook which he had programmed himself in C, which racked up 36,000 likes and 12,000 shares within a day. One of his ministers, Vivian Balakrishnan, promptly translated the program to JavaScript and posted his own version online. That sort of alacrity for technology in the upper echelons of government is still rare in much of the rest of the world and Singapore has that to its advantage. “

https://restofworld.org/2025/mehran-gul-new-geography-of-innovation/

“But the way I think about it is, let’s say you were amazingly successful, let’s say you somehow managed to double web traffic and double their ad revenue, you would be some kind of messiah in the Valley, but if you made a national announcement about that, that people are searching Google twice as much, clicking on ads more, people will be like, who the hell cares? I think that put it in context for me, which is that even this absurd success that you could have of getting people to search the web twice as much and click on twice as many ads would just be nothing in the context of actual society despite the money it makes.’”