gilbetron

I found this response to that essay even better: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

11.3 Force Majeure. Except for payment obligations, neither party nor any of their affiliates will be liable for any delay or failure to perform any obligation under this Agreement where the delay or failure results from any cause beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, labor disputes or other industrial disturbances, electrical or power outages, utilities or other telecommunications failures, earthquake, storms or other elements of nature, blockages, embargoes, riots, acts or orders of government, acts of terrorism, or war.

I think your maybe counting just physical sales? 15 years ago was the start of the shift to digital sales, which have greatly grown. Just steam (which is the bulk of digital PC sales):

Steam units sold: 402M (2019) → 704M (2024), up 21% in 2024 alone.

Steam peak concurrent users: 3.52M in January 2011 → 42,042,778 on January 11, 2026. Roughly twelvefold, directly measured from Valve's API.

Valve's own disclosed number, which isn't an estimate by anyone: between August 2024 and August 2025, Steam averaged 109,000 people making their first ever purchase every day. That's about 40 million brand-new paying customers in one year.

Games released on Steam: ~8,100 in 2019 → 20,282 in 2025.

Steam gross revenue: $4.5B (2019) → roughly $16.9B (2025).

Some of the best selling games did come out roughly 15 years ago, but that's because they've been selling consistently ever since. Like Minecraft, the Witcher, etc.

PC game revenue hasn't been declining:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...

I enjoy that guy, but I've found he is wrong about what he talks about in several situations. This is probably one of them, but we'll see once the EREVs are tested. His argument here is basically, "The Volt wasn't fuel efficient so EREVs can't be". Ignoring all the has been learned about EVs since then. Plus he ignores that PHEVs and Hybrids are more complex than an EREV because they need complex transmissions and other subsystems because they need to be both an EV and an ICE vehicle.

I have an EV and a hybrid, and the EV is so much better than the hybrid - I will happily swap the hybrid for an EREV when the time comes.

When taken together, that is ASI.

AI lets people cosplay as whatever field they are interested in. You can feel like a game developer, or doctor, or writer, or artist, and it's fun!

In my experience (35+ years), it is the opposite now. It used to be massively top down, and now it is more and more bottom up, at least with the companies I have experience with.

It is "pretty dumb" to hate on people who recognize they potential world ending technology they are working on but still do it anyway with no controls?

The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?

Hong Kong is around 5x the density of Dallas.

There's already been responses to this argument by Dunning: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dunning-kruger-effect-an...

That data is published quite often, no conspiracy here.

The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.

Interesting read from Google on AI (Gemini) usage. In particular, I found the usage in the "hands on" aspects - mechanics using AI to help diagnose problems, for instance.

Wolfstreet summary of it: https://wolfstreet.com/2026/07/23/ai-may-not-cause-total-job...

This makes me think: what are the odds weights from Frontier Models have already been stolen? Something like Mythos without "guardrails" seems like a hell of a glittering gem for many nefarious actors.

The first reason formal verification has never taken off is that it's difficult. The second reason, that most people don't get to because of the first reason, is that formal verification is really brittle. It is only verified under the very specific setup of the problem. Close doesn't count in math.

The first reason prevents humans from engaging with them, the second reason is what will make it difficult even for LLMs. I mean, I'm glad we are trying, but I'm dubious they will be the panacea some people proclaim.

At least for where I grew up, you seem to have history backwards. 40-50 years ago fireworks were largely outlawed - the best I could play with as a kid were smokebombs, snaps, sparklers, and small fountains. Now fireworks are pretty much completely legal, even municipal grade cannons. This is why they are going off all over the place on July 4th.

1. Test scores have increased 2. Simpson's Paradox - we are educating a far great % of young people then we used to be, so we're pulling in disadvantaged kids that would've been left out of the education system, or simply left out of testing. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-average-isnt-good-en...

A parallel is when I looked into home births versus hospital births when my wife was pregnant. The statistics of home births crushes hospital births in terms of outcomes. But that's because only healthy women who don't have complications are in the home birth category. Hospitals must admit anyone that shows up in labor, and must handle any negative situations.

Schools now handle so many more kids than they used to, and try to meet the challenge. They are failing because the challenge is too great given the funding, not to mention the corruption of the bureaucracy that inflates administrations.

Very late to the discussion, but many people see the price of the Steam Machine and balk at the high cost, even if they understand the reasoning. However, this isn't about the Steam Machine. Computing has just gotten more expensive. This is the new reality going forward, Steam Machine is just on the front edge of the wave. (Until, and if, RAM manufacturers catch up).

Ah yes, so we should have corporations controlling it? Because they can't be corrupt or evil?

The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?

I don't care much about Siri, and not a lot about Apple (other than as an investment), but Apple is generally really good about putting out polished tech, and so I'm curious if Siri AI will be up to their usual standards, because if so, it represents a significant usage of AI that has solved hallucination issues.

But that's a big If!

> So, judge the book by it's cover?

It is literally judging the book by it's author, which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.

Having lived through all of that as a professional dev, AI is completely different. There was no career anxiety of any significance for OOP or Code Gen (certainly no code gen) or TDD or Agile - there was annoyance at it by some, sure, but not the existential angst the industry is currently experiencing.

Many people's understanding of "Google's hiring processes" is from a few articles over a decade ago. They had done numerous studies, switched things up, and now have a pretty solid approach to interviewing. This is one of the articles that was going around back then, and most of the conclusions are how Google still interviews: https://www.workforce.com/news/laszlo-bock-just-google-him

I work with many ex-Googlers that did a lot of interviewing and they process has been pretty consistent for many years now, and seen largely successful.

Choice and competition greatly alleviate that in other markets. With the medical system in the US, you often don't have much of a choice as switching doctors can be tough, and even if you can find one accepting patients, they are all controlled by the same administration and effectively collude to maximize their profits.

Charging it is an interesting choice:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13-ZdXDJTIfhe1vkAuzssvRx9bOQ...

I live in the midwest and there never has been a time where any lawn I owned, nor was owned by anyone that I know, needed mowing 3x a week. You might like to do it to keep a perfectly manicured lawn, but it definitely isn't needed.

Hmmm - I think the scalper just adds the escrow amount on to the cost as the purchaser will get it back at the end.

Ok, random scalper prevention scheme:

What's the difference between someone that wants to transfer their tickets from someone the know versus a scalper? Trust.

So when you buy a ticket you put, say, $1000, in escrow. The tickets have your name and ID on them. You can transfer the ticket to someone else. However, after the concert, the $1000 gets returned to the final person named on the ticket.

If the transfer is between trustworthy people, then the final ticket holder will give the money back to the original person.

There is no incentive to transfer money to the scalper, however. (Especially if scalping is illegal).

This doesn't eliminate scalping, but it significantly reduces it.

Critique?

Terrible math is terrible.

Better napkin math that is still being unrealistic compared to the true costs of space-based datacenters: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1quvbi4/sel...

Just contemplate what the radiator array and solar array needed a 1GW datacenter and all the cooling equipment and coolant, and imagine the harsh environment in space degrading it constantly.

The only point of the space-based datacenter idea is to pump the Spacex IPO