• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 6 days ago
cake
Cake day: August 6th, 2026

help-circle

  • Startups are real companies. They are not the comfortable lazy jobs you would have on a big tech company campus or even a post-IPO tech company. They are still trying to “change the world” or else they figured out it’s not going to work. The founders typically leave within 5 years of starting them, either because they succeed and get bought out or because the investors stopped financing their continued existence for a particular reason. Maybe the idea was great at the time but the market changed. Maybe they were wrong about the idea from day 1. They are often 1 mediocre executive decision from going out of business.

    Big companies are full of people who aspire only for a comfortable existence in a relatively easy job offering a career path or a lucrative compensation package that will get them the nice 2 story home in the suburbs and pay for the kids private school this year. They work a standard 40-50 hours per week unless they’re on the management track and then they may leave the baby at home with the nanny until they make Vice President of something very ordinary and mediocre.

    In a startup, depending on what it is, you could be working for or alongside the next Steve Jobs and not know it yet. You could also be working for and alongside total bozos. Figuring that out is key to knowing whether its worth your time. Steve was kind of an a-hole according to some, so it might not be apparent until you talk about serious things having to do with the vision for the future. You will probably have 5 to 10 jobs that change frequently and will work way more than a standard workweek.

    It’s like saying “I’m going to join the military and can either become a supply clerk or join an elite unit whose name is not publicly acknowledged”. Most people should probably stick to supply but the others will never be fulfilled there.


  • The headline seems a little misleading about the real point of the article where it explains the best way to avoid having to pay anyone like Github in the future is using a p2p equivalent. I agree that having a backup somewhere else is the key to avoiding all kinds of problems when companies decide to raise prices, enshittify, or otherwise ruin the service. Companies have been driven to bankruptcy by cloud services becoming unavailable and they had no backup.

    Whether it’s development, using AI, office suites, file storage or anything else, you should always have a backup and not rely on another company to continue working or existing as a company. The same social media moderation hall monitor karens who make your article or video critical of commercial cloud AI executives disappear go to all the same conferences as the ones employed at cloud services companies. Most of these people live within 50 miles of each other and are in the same San Francisco Bay Area social circles.





  • The free to play listen to player feedback and incorporate related design or development features in a timely manner. If there’s a bug they fix it. If they want a new feature, they strongly consider it. The AAA gaming industry has been inwardly focused for about 10 years now. Watch The Game Awards and you see its just like the Oscars. Awards going to a lot of very obscure titles for checking some box on the social justice agendas. Some games like CS2 stay at the top by simply not making major changes for the worse when they already have a winning formula for their market that nobody wants to see changes.

    Aside from the California-western europe developer culture, I think a lot of it has to do with the people above AAA gaming who make the major decisions are not themselves in the industry but in enterprise services or the business community. Microsoft top people may know how to squeeze profits out of enterprise customers but they’ve been clueless on gaming.


  • The Xbox is a dead platform and PS is right behind it. Look at active player counts for the info on who matters. It’s not Microsoft, EA or the others. It’s indie studios and free to play studios on the PC and Steam. Until those guys decide they need to comply, none of these laws are going to matter. Any country telling some indie dev somewhere else that they need to set up software to verify ID cards is going to be ignored. Then, the people who want to play those games are going to ignore them too. If you walk around in any major city in Australia today, you see people ignore the law routinely. This is just one more law they will ignore.


  • It’s a simple supply-demand issue that took 30 years to arrive and will take at least 5 years to solve unless the AI bubble pops a lot sooner to stop the hoarding by big tech cloud companies, Chinese state-backed investment and others who are betting it all on black like a has-been Hollywood actor at a Caesars roulette table on a Saturday night. The US never penalized US tech companies for shuttering the dozen memory plants since the 1990s so they just relied on the Koreans and a few others. Now Korea can’t keep up and the US tech companies have been caught with their pants down. While these kinds of people are very bright within their areas of expertise, leading to huge earnings, they’re not bright on most business topics and eventually the market shifts and they’re struggling.

    This is where the tech companies founded in the 1970s-2000s are right now. Their original ideas are long in the tooth at best and about to be disrupted, if not already disrupted. The cash cows are looking a little fatigued. They’re looking for a lifeboat to keep the good times going, thinking its AI, just now realizing their industry screwed itself with all of the offshoring but its too late now. They have to once again “fake it until they make it”.

    They just hope the people providing the capital don’t start asking about when the market will accept the higher price points so they can break even. That’s a question nobody acknowledges today when it’s asked because they know it could sink the boat if it becomes a hot topic of the month on CNBC and Bloomberg.


  • AAA gaming is full of execs who have not grasped how their industry has already begun imploding. The survivors in the all digital potato PC world will be the indie devs and Steam since Steam sells their games. The indie game devs write their games to run on anything. The other survivor will be the free to play studios who have already won every market they’ve entered. If they don’t own a gaming market yet its because they haven’t bothered winning it. Look at active player counts. Franchises like Battlefield and Call of Duty are way down the charts from the free to play shooter games.






  • X loses money so no margins there. Twitter has never made a profit in its history that I’ve ever heard of. Facebook’s on the way out. 20 years ago it was college age users. 10 years ago it was people over 50. Now it’s a lot of commercial accounts posting as they do on other basically dying or dead platforms. The only sign of life is streaming video and chats related to streaming video. YouTube has been losing users and content creators to both Rumble and Twitch. The right 1/3 of America is on Rumble while Twitch took the gamers. Youtube still has business but they basically gave away enough business to make those 2 relevant.

    Alphabet’s dependent on Youtube, cloud services, web search, and related ads to pay for the unprofitable parts of the business, which appears to be where the bulk of their employees work, rather than at the earnings-generators. If they screw up youtube, then they will have to lay a lot of the people in the fun and interesting jobs off, along with the many layers of bureaucracy and non-coders working in jobs that nobody’s quite sure what they do there. They can’t really afford to screw up youtube any more than they have. It can’t merely do well. It has to do great to pay all of their bills. Very similar to the action-hero movies at the movie studio paying for all the unprofitable ones that most people work on



  • Anyone familiar with cops in europe knows experiences vary widely. British police have gone on a campaign to arrest people for preaching on sidewalks. German and other european police physically beat people with clubs without much provocation. They were arresting people for talking walks by themselves in the woods in 2020-2022. In Switzerland, they use water cannons to spray protesters when it’s below freezing. Small towns in America are pretty laid back for the most part, because there’s not much happening to begin with. All of the murder is in the larger cities or a few regions where they have a history of high crime like northern alaska and native american reservations and the areas marijuana is farmed illegally by organized criminals. These are easily avoided.



  • Seems the same pattern at X, probably because they hired in an ex-YouTuber at the top. Moderation algorithms are universally very poorly written and don’t appear to have gotten better in the last 6-8 years when they began using them to replace human moderators. On X they seem to have a timer for new accounts that puts a fake label on accounts as if they’re spamming or a bot, when it’s just a real user with opinions the algorithm is trained to dislike. Same exact crap the old Twitter did. They put the source code on the web and it showed how if you posted or replied on any of a broad range of topics, your account was scored lower until you were deemed low quality and made invisible. It’s like they just wanted cat memes and recipes from elderly women, but not many of them on Twitter or X. Probably because they hired in people from companies where non-controversial topics were a much larger share of what was discussed there. 1 trick ponies who weren’t suitable for doing the same job at X.

    There’s no way to boost ad views or MAU with that approach. I believe X will never be profitable due to those people running the show and Musk not ever hiring anyone a lot better to run X. Musk had a similarly bad experience with Solar city. Another company he didn’t know enough about to manage himself and the people he hired to do it weren’t good enough either.


  • Based on my usage of Linux, Windows 10 and Windows 11, I have no doubt that Windows 11 uses at least 1-2gb more of ram. It runs like crap on older PCs while Windows 10 runs okay. That’s the true test.

    I’ve dealt with AI and know the history with hallucinations. Today Hallucinations are more of an issue when it’s a controversial topic (politics, religion, or issues the political influencers have taken control of in the media).

    They’re fed training data pushing a narrative preferred by the AI developers, who leave out the contradictory info. It’s a lot like social media moderation. Ultimately, there’s a group of individuals at the company who think a certain way and think the rest of the world should think like them too. It’s more of an issue after the R&D model has been turned into a commercial variant at the company by the engineers there and it’s out of the hands of the Ph.Ds who originally made it.

    As soon as you prompt a basically decent AI to not rely on a training data or a superficial web scrape, and it goes looking for contradictory info, then it re-thinks what it told you. This is more of an issue with the commercial corporate subscription AIs and the older small LLMs from years ago that didn’t have web scraping capability. Things have definitely changed in the last year or two where the dense models with web scraping capability are concerned. At least, if you go with the uncensored or ablitterated “Thinking” versions of them available on the Huggingface site, or you use a third party service to access a large open weights model that’s been made uncensored by whoever maintains it.