Friday, October 2nd, 2026, 5:59 am
No Badges, Thanks
Filed under: Trying “addiction”
he other night the company behind MATLAB E-mailed me to say I got a “badge” 20+ years after I, a postdoc student, had uploaded code that people apparently still download (after 2+ decades) in meaningful numbers.
I was at one point (in 2005, if I remember correctly) ranked #1 in the world for downloads there. They called it “MATLAB Central” (maybe they still do).
Badges are nonsense. They don’t offer any financial compensation, this is just gamification. This is “addiction”.
Over a decade ago, without my explicit consent, they also decided to change the licence of my code.
There are many lessons here.
