Incredible story, just pure resourcefulness and grit in following this through. I know it sucks to have this disease, but kudos for how you approached this.
I'm not sure how you drew the conclusion they don't think it will be profitable soon or an AI ceiling.
The only thing we can realistically glean from IPO is the need for more funds which are not able to be provided by private markets on the terms a private lender/investor may want.
Insiders will profit from this liquidity event, but I suspect the earliest investors will stay put only liquidating enough to make their funds look great while still keeping an eye on the future growth.
Uber WAS a pump and dump. Insiders used the public for exit liquidity and any public shareholders got stuck with a pretty crap stock. Uber went up 100% from IPO to mid 2025, Google went up 400% in that time period (and I picked 2025 to avoid the huge AI runup we have seen).
It was hemorrhaging in many cities using extremely profitable cities like London and NYC to keep their global competitiveness.
Uber was able to pivot and become financially sound with two moves:
- Uber Eats becoming first party delivery to restaurants (it started as a limited selection of items from some restaurants and quickly evolved into a Doordash-esque competitor)
- Uber launching a 1B+ RR Ads business - margins on this are obviously incredible
Both of those combined with discipline in their ridesharing business (exiting the China market with a sale + stake, dumping their self-driving business when it became a money sink) have led to a recovery in their stock price, but it is FAR from the crazy expectations set up for VCs. I expect those in the last round didn't get a great return, but obviously folk like Benchmark exited like kings.
The biggest regulation of building in space is... where do the debris go. You are tightly monitored for how much trash reenters into the atmosphere, so there is still SOME level of regulation.
As others have echoed, I think a subscription model is FINE for a game IF you are upfront about that being the cost. I suspect many customers are frustrated when they purchase something and then it is simply not able to be used when the developer feels like it.
The last 5 years of Game of The Year (Astro Bot (2024), Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), Elden Ring (2022), It Takes Two (2021), and The Last of Us Part II (2020)) are all nearly 45 GB+. All of them are incredible games spanning a vast series of game style (coop puzzle, solo platformer, stealth, ARPG, RPG) and animation.
Stardew Valley, universally acclaimed and not graphically intensive at all, still takes up nearly 2 GB of space.
Your view on games is not grounded in the reality of modern gaming.
Waymo does slow down as it approaches stop signs (usually where crosswalks are) and it will slow down if there is a pedestrian entering the roadway (crosswalk or not) since it doesn't want to crash into them.
The explicit signal of a driver noticing you (eye contact) is replaced by the signal above the vehicle. Are you not equally concerned that pedestrians have to get an explicit signal from drivers who are legally required to yield or stop??
Not too much to specifically take away yet, but appears that the degradation detection system did not function well. That is pretty egregious for FSD given a human won't be able to tell if FSD is confident or needs the human to intervene. I'd expect this to be a VERY important test case with high reliability of passing, but who knows.
The current fruit is automating away a ton of human labor with no foreseeable way to continue to engage that labor. It is poison for the majority of humanity which will bear fruit for the limited few who can use it / own it.
The models are better, the integrations are now in your email, search, youtube, docs, spreadsheets, slides, Gemini is now higher than ChatGPT in the App Stores
I think you are right with the timeline being Google was infinitely ahead in the beginning, did nothing, then fell behind, but right now, they feel ahead -- established even, and distributing AI into all their products
Your efficiency is having the $$ spent on goods worth the $$ given. However, the goal of food banks is to spend money on FOOD and make sure the FOOD is given out to those in need (with little wasteage). Efficiency is being measured completely differently than what you are hoping it is measured as.
This does not happen, if you forgo one month of rent you have to have kept prices up significantly to make up for the loss. The only reason this could happen is if your loan terms are pegged to rent roll (usually only on commercial properties).
an example: $5000/mo apartment generates $60,000 a year; forgoing one month of rent means you have to now generate $60,000 of revenue in 11 months, which in a bad market will likely not rent for $5450 if it didn't rent for $5000. Your mortgage still continues to pile up along with insurance and taxes, so you can't escape the hole.
Is there any link directly to the report? I am unable to find any in this article or a number of others which seem to just copy the same information here.
I think beyond the number of crazy assumptions (no Google taking market share in the consumer market?? only 2% of digital advertising expected to be captured by OpenAI?) it is hard to nail down which levers could move which might make this funding hole disappear.
Because the internet is far more optimized at capturing your attention and encouraging terrible behavior (purchases, viruses, scams, etc.)
When you were younger the scariest thing was joining an AOL chat room on a 56k modem. Now you can mind rot yourself on YouTube shorts with the next video loading in milliseconds while being fed content full of sports gambling ads.
To act like the internet doesn’t have significantly sharper edges and dangerous loops which affect children is ignoring the reality around you. The downvotes are not because in principle folks disagree, it’s that the situation is different.
Using invasive surveillance tech to govern is not needed then. If you can't handle the full service (on both ends) of the technology, then you can't deploy it and have to use regular old police work or legacy techniques to enforce it.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.