Notes

The original copy of the Charter was posted on Jason Snell's microblog.

While not currently codified in the Charter, there is an additional rule for the Lightning Round: picks are made in rounds in draft format, so repeats are not allowed, and hosts may drop out at any time (although this is rare). In addition, the number of picks is capped at 5.

Changes to the Charter are made on the Constitutional Convention episode, which happens every year on Jason/Voorhees Day — the first Friday the 13th of the year.

Changes

• #275: After a long series of drafts with unsettlingly increasing frequency, including the "Apple Executive Draft", the "Macintosh Performa Draft", the "First Party Mouse Draft", and the "Power Cable Draft", the draft mania hits a peak with a "Connected Draft Draft" which occurs during the "PowerPC Processor Draft". A line has to be drawn, and one-off drafts are banned. To replace them, a strictly limited Apple predictions draft is started instead, for WWDC and for the full calendar year. A three point round, a two point round, and as many 1 point predictions as desired. In addition, points are doubled in the first half of the year. The previous winner gets the best drafting spot. Ties will be resolved by coin toss by Jason, who is objectively the best in the group at tossing a coin.
• #278: After a few weeks of thought, James comes up with a clever solution that he calculates will always break a tie: subtract five times the percentage incorrect from each score. Jason objects to the loss of his sweet coin flipping gig, so instead a coin flip will be used to decide who drafts first.
• #299: Upon reading the rules before the 2020 WWDC Pickies, it is discovered that the rule about the previous winner getting the best draft position was never removed after the last rule change. However, John successfully argues that there actually is no contradiction: the best draft position is actually the second one, since you get a peek at your opponent without going last. As such, the coin flip to decide who goes first is fine. The rules are clarified to reflect this impeccable logic.
• #300: After James makes 12 Lightning Round picks in one game, a cap of 5 is put on the Lightning Round to keep the episodes a reasonable length.
• #327: The full extent of what happened in 2020 may never be known publicly, but what we do know is disturbing enough as it is. Thankfully, new rules were put in place to, hopefully, prevent events like this again:
  • The prediction document is not to be altered after the show is over.
  • Hosts cannot make a pick come true by taking action or inducing others.
• #349: After a game ends with a logically indeterminate outcome, picks must be provably true or false to earn points, and must be just about Apple or the tech industry.
• #377:
  • Clarified that the wrong answer percentage deduction rule means percentage as a fraction, not as a percentage. For example, 1 out of four means deducting by (0.25) * 5, not 25 * 5.
  • Finally corrected the triple negative in the "tech industry relevance" rule.
  • James expressed some concern that the refrigerator magnets may not stick to all fridges, but Jason points out that the rule doesn't specify the method of adhesion, just the locations of the magnets.
• #397:
  • The title earned by the winner of the WWDC Pickies was changed from the San Jose Shindig King to the Cupertino Shindig King thanks to Apple's apparent change in venue for the event.
  • The specific definition of "the first half of the year" is debated for a good 10 minutes, but finally ends up on the number of seconds in the year divided by two. In a typical year this will mean within the first 15,768,000 seconds. Leap years will add 43,200 seconds to this total. Leap seconds are announced 6 months in advance which should make them possible to account for as well.
  • Sensing a lack of... intensity? Enthusiasm? The hosts can't quite find the right word. In any case, a requirement for a "quite sneaky" pick is added to the existing "not obvious" and "pretty cool" categories.
  • When the WWDC Pickies for this year result in some unusually round numbers, James wants to make it clear that we are not in the realm of pure mathematics, we are calculating in the gritty real world, where 0.1 + 0.2 doesn't equal 0.3. In other words, floating point numbers.
  • After dealing with some cases of mistaken identity on Twitter, the social media account prizes are expanded to include every social media platform for redundancy.
• #432:
  • The Cupertino Shindig King position was renamed to Apple Park Prince, after a robust debate about the relative rankings of admirals and kings.
  • As a part of the Grand Compromise of 2023, James was granted exclusive control of all die rolls in The Pickies, in exchange for closing a loophole in the rules that James tried to exploit to invalidate the entire game rather than accept a loss. (The loophole was that, by a pedantic reading of the text, points could not be awarded unless the entire prediction document consisted of true statements.)
  • The specific definition of what the first half of the year is was removed after it was discovered that the official stopwatch didn't go that high anyway.
  • As the shakeup at Twitter fades into the past, the interference rule is modified to prevent a more relevant threat: hypnotism.
  • In a fit of procrastination about building the Vision Pro version of Dice, James develops another safeguard against ties that rewards passion and precision.
  • The ultimate prize for the winner is changed from a Twitter account to not having to edit the show every week, just post it in the Relay CMS.
• #533: In response to listener feedback that the rules were too convoluted, the old rules were completely revamped into The Pickies Charter Ultra, which can be very briefly summarized as "everyone makes 5 picks and we don't worry about ties at all."