aresant

I don't have inside knowledge but have followed Bioware (given how many of their games live rent free in my head)

1 - 2017 they cut from 500 -> ~350

2 - 2023 went from 350 -> 200 that included a bunch of very senior people including the OG writer of Baldur's gate Lukas Kristjanson

3 - Early '24 cut down to 100 skeleton crew as the writing on the wall for DA Veilguard sales materialized (sold about 1.5m vs 3m projected)

BioWare shutting down is sad, but it’s really a classic ship of theseus situation.

There are a handful of notables still there but the majority of the teams that made the classic Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect disappeared a long time ago through natural turnover and a couple of brutal rounds of layoffs.

The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.

This was 100% precursor to the absorption of Tesla into SpaceX and I’m here for it

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-spac...

I had a financial advisor tell me once that he loves Vanguard because once he sends people there to buy index funds the web interface is so utterly TERRIBLE that people can't ever figure out how to sell :)

Curious if this kimi moment is net growth (jervons paradox - abundance = more consumption) or just people shifting to cheaper model

Is there a good source for total token consumption between the various labs / openrouter / etc?

This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI

Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...

(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.

(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.

(5) Meanwhile Sam and others are reframing including launching a new foundation to "increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world" and pivoting messaging to AI "accelerating everyone in achieving their goals" https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431 & https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888

Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?

That is an absolutely beautiful infographic and should become the standard for time series change!

The context this comment misses is Gamestop's secret weapon is their CEO Ryan Cohen who has been sitting around the hoop trying to figure out how to leverage Gamestop's fundraising capabilities to do something big

Couple of highlights on Ryan

- Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time - Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on - Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming largest personal shareholder - Took over as CEO after being a proactive board member, works for no salary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Cohen

This is too perfect - >

Regarding their new systems that track every employee key stroke and task on their computer to train AI a Meta rep says “There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,”

LOL?!

Meanwhile the rank and file are somehow astounded that the great white shark they aligned themselves with has turned on them as new morsels of food.

Like you knew exactly who you were in bed with what did you think was going to happen?

The AI data center narrative is the perfect storm:

First most of the data center build out is happening in areas that have had little other opportunity so local resistance is muted. Abilene, Texas is referenced and is the kind of place my grandfather would lovingly say is where you go to learn to be a “dirt farmer”

Second, every environmentalist in the US is fighting 100 different battles with the most anti-regulation, pro-energy administration in decades (ever?) and has limited bandwidth.

And third, the AI narrative around national security, longevity, and super intelligence enabled abundance provides massive national coverage - the implications being that AI will solve any environmental and or human economic disasters that they enable.

If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/

On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.

That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.

The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.

Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!

Clicked this and was hopeful it was a TSA-line-tracker

Anybody have a good solution that's utilizing actual traveler data vs the (non existent atm) TSA data?

Fascinating first principle to thinking about Kalshi 90% of it is sports betting - I assume a lot of their revenue is gambling law regulatory arbitrage atm

https://closingline.substack.com/p/the-takeaway-kalshi-non-s...

It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!

PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating

PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE

Really good comment and fair point

But mortality credits (pooling) don't solve the math of the discount rate - they add 100 - 150 basis points of reduction so retarget to 5.5% vs 4% if generous

So they are still structurally designed where they HAVE to allocate towards risk to meet their targets which is at core of issue

From first principles public pension funds are broken.

The "Safe Withdrawal Rate" assumed by many private individuals planning for their own retirement assumes a withdrawal rate in the 3 - 4% range based on the "trinity study" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study

Meanwhile, American public pensions are structurally engineered around a 7%+ SWR - this was recently confirmed again by the median goal by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.

The perpetual "under funded" nature, and all the return hunting etc in pension fund management can be explained by that disconnect.

But this then belies a very uncomfortable acknowledgement which is that we cannot afford the government workforce currently in place requiring us to either:

(a) Raise taxes to increase contributions.

Or

(b) Somehow make due with less government :)

Top comment of one of the standout Bitcoin-culture memes ->

"The best technical analysis anyone has done on bitcoin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

Great find and also worth a watch is the Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout video from Fallout creator Tim Cain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OxO-4YLRk

"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."

This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.

These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.

"When I was a kid, science fiction was off in the future somewhere. . . now it’s kind of science fact. . . AI and social media and all these influences are driving progress so quickly, at a pace that I think many of us, as human beings, are having a hard time keeping up with."

This is a quote from Alex Proyas (director of Dark City, irobot, the crow etc), he has long observed that humans are biologically under-adapted for a modernity of silicon-fueld complexity

https://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/alex-proyas-dark-...

The real "genie is not going back in the bottle" moment is that both sides have decided that power - at any cost - is a valid strategy.

And that's very apparent even in this article which leads with the logical fallacy of moral equivalence

". . . and America’s preeminent real estate fraudster who bankrupted six rigged businesses is all of a sudden concerned with supposed mortgage fraud"

BOTH are guilty, BOTH are crooked!

This directly leads to a lot of "the whole system is broken, may as well get mine"

Feels like a mixed bag vs regression?

eg - GPT-5 beats GPT-4 on factual recall + reasoning (HeadQA, Medbullets, MedCalc).

But then slips on structured queries (EHRSQL), fairness (RaceBias), evidence QA (PubMedQA).

Hallucination resistance better but only modestly.

Latency seems uneven (maybe more testing?) faster on long tasks, slower on short ones.

It's a great / memorable / and tongue-in-cheek name that anybody seriously in the space will instantly get and appreciate.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

UX 101 taught by George Carlin

Can’t believe this doesn’t include our friend Pinot who is still churning out unreal MacPaint pixel art

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/pinot-w-ichwandardi-flatiron-...