The cost of lies: A Mineserver story
jeremyreimer.com
jeremyreimer.com
That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.
There's also this. Well, RIP.
He may be resting in peace, but I don't really know
If you sell something at 3× the bill of materials (BOM) cost, that just means you will break even on that bill when you have sold a third of the product. And that does not include wages and other fixed costs like e.g. running your website, customer service, rent, cleaning, RND budget for future products, ...
Meaning that very often if you know everything that is involved, you realize that the product is not actually expensive, it is just as expensive as it needs to be to operate at that scale. If it is a small company selling to a small market that scale will of course be different.
E.g. if we talk audio equipment, you totally will not be able to build yourself a cheaper mixer than Behringer (assuming the same features and specs) — even if we assume you work for free — just for the simple reason that Behringer builds audio equipment at such a scale, they get the parts for a fraction of the price you would have to pay.
On the other hand if you want to build that boutique fuzz pedal sold by one guy in his shed in Minnesota, you can easily go cheaper than him simply for the reason that he has to pay the bills and you don't (and because the electronic parts of the pedal amount to pocket change in a fuzz pedal). His market aren't people who are being economical about fuzz pedals. His market are guitar afficionados with deep pockets that love to have something a bit more special and less off the shelve.
So I am always a bit careful when I see people with the knee jerk reaction of "I could do that cheaper". Yeah sure, but you can also jump of a bridge like a cliff jumper, the tricky part is not the jumping, the tricky part is to walk away unharmed every time. Similarly the tricky part when running a business like that is not to be cheaper than the competition, the tricky part is to be cheaper and be able to grow the business in a sustainable way.
I think the other mistake they made was offering a WiFi option rather than just making it ethernet only for the initial launch. It seems like they had a lot of trouble getting the WiFi working and ended up having to switch WiFi cards. I don't know how they would have made WiFi network authentication work reliably on a headless device, and it seems like a ton of complicated work vs. just having the customer plug the box into their router. Again, it's a "nice to have" that could have waited until after the initial shipment.
Gonna have to disagree on this one. A handful of clothes can be held in your hands. A bunch of electronics can't. That's for insurance to sort out at that point.
His gears start slipping halfway through the article and it ends with a weird parasocial vibe.
I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.
There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.
They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.
I feel like I've heard this one before. Its the story of the Intellivision Amico & Tommy Tallarico.
Weird how similar the two stories are. I wonder if there's a 3rd and a 4th computer-personality-from-the-90s-who-fails-to-build-a-crowdfunded-hardware-thing-and-lies-rediculously-about-it that I don't know about?
Most startups have a 1:22 chance of making it past 3 years, but if it is a hardware related item that drops to about 1:132 success rate.
Most modern startups just re-sell pad-printed/branded gadgets out of China, or partner with China factories to meet volume demands needed to reach a profit mode.
With the tariff situation, only a sucker would take that bet these days. =3
For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.
Once you have the Raspberry Pis, pre-installing an operating system to run the standard Minecraft server should be the easy part.
Unless, of course, it really was a case of "reverse engineer and reimplement Minecraft to make my own server." Not strictly impossible, but a completely unreasonable goal.
Hasn't that already been done several times? There's feather-rs (fairly mature but reduced set of features) and Pumpkin and FerrumC. And, for that matter, Paper - that one is Java and I haven't checked to what degree it's just borrowing from the original implementation, but I do know that Paper is actually used for real servers.
It's a shame, I love detailed simulator type games, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Very nice orbital simulator, tho lacks maneuvering computer, hence it's hard if you haven't played KSP (have to wing it to make RV with stations and such).
Demo version and a gamepad are enough to do the most fun thing in the game. Atmospheric re-entry at orbital speed and disintegrating at 30-40km.
Game's called Flight of Nova and it's super chill. Executing the burn correctly and then coasting for 12min to get to a station, watching the views.
Narrator's voice: They will do it again.
I guess I got fooled by Cringely back in the old days. His journalistic work with Triumph of the Nerds was great, but only because of the subject matter and the people being interviewed. Whenever the topic veered to Cringely himself (which happened more than it should have) the work suffered.
I don't claim to be a paragon of honesty or virtue, but through my experiences I've generally understood that lack of virtue can and does trap one in cycles of misery, anxiety & suffering.
But there seem to be a bunch of people with sociopath tendencies, mostly in finance, tech & politics, which don't seem to be affected at all by this.
There's a reason people joke about schizophrenics innately recognizing psychopaths.
"What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"
People get lost in conditional existence, advancing their own agenda, morals changing by degrees, until they end up in very difficult positions.
Today I'm thinking of the recently deceased convicted perjurer and world's most successful prison author, Lord Jeffrey Archer.
Also for the price of one of these you could rent over a year of hosting on an actual server instead of an embedded device that is sharing 1 GB of RAM with the OS.
Have we? Or is that what the ever-increasingly-consolidated media companies have chosen to talk about, and -because so many of the entities that did in-depth investigative reporting have been strangled to death- there are very few entities who "buy ink by the barrel" left to provide an opposing perspective?
Now, there were negatives to the concept, and it always relied on a certain amount of public/private hypocrisy to maintain a high public image while hiding deviations from that standard, but it did mean that people who misled the public would voluntarily resign.
Shame worked. Unfortunately due to overuse, like antibiotics, the public sphere evolved shame-resistant personalities.
> The sorts of people who I would think ought to be at the forefront of any sort of positive reactionary movement seem to be bent on making sure that any sort of traditionalism is utterly and rightfully discredited
If they had anything positive to offer, they wouldn't be reactionaries.
Fake it till you make it … or you don’t.
Or all the companies that lie about the negative side effects of their products.
In general No, even the shadiest people still uphold contracts due to public reputation with customers, suppliers, and the law.
Con artists and saboteurs do scrape by ripping off the credulous (they don't plan on hanging around long term), but even they just skirt the law to avoid prison. Note, even the worst criminals have their own code about what is acceptable, and just because their trade is illegal doesn't mean they want to live in a chaotic shit-hole country. It is a a moral gray area in both eastern and western cultures, that contrasts the written laws with actual practiced laws.
Almost every successful firm delivers everything on the invoice, and often it is customers shorting payment that are a problem.
Most customers and businesses have a mutual interest in seeing each-other do well. It is not like the movies, but be careful what you sign... and clear it it with a local legal representative if you don't understand a clause. =3
> Almost every successful firm delivers everything on the invoice
Didn’t get wings from Red Bull.
There is a reason why ads try to trigger emotions instead of giving as the facts.
But it does give taurine, and for some people it is problematic.
Unsustainable corporate policy tends to afflict larger publicly traded firms, as the responsibility and personal liability is diffused. For most normal competitive brands, the firm does not survive too many scandals or boondoggle products. =3
It gets to the heart of the dichotomy between true and false where lies are just deliberate false statements.
As the author correctly pointed out, walking extensively in the path of the false comes at an inherent cost. The cost increases with each false statement.
Walking extensively in the path of the truth, where one tries to speak true statements all the time, also has inherent costs which is high upfront and gets lower as time progresses.
This upfront cost of truth involves embarrassment and usually the work itself required for having stated the truth in the first place.
This leads me to hypothesize that progressively lying again and again (accumulated false statements) will inevitably lead to a state where one increasingly loses touch with reality (gradually one at a time like evolution) where necessary life saving precautions are increasingly discarded eventually increasing the odds of premature death itself.
The hypothesis effectively explores the compounding cost that affects the liar's relationship with reality (statements that are true - in a platonic world). This hypothesis has implications that span truths, falsehoods, life and death.
What IS worth understanding is that the aftermath is the Cringely was relentlessly and endlessly hounded about this issue by people who can only be described as mentally unwell - they were so fixated, so deeply angry that this happened that they never ever left any Cringely article or post without flooding it with their deep deep anger and righteous indignation.
But "it MATTERS" all the trolls and weirdos would say as they carried their stupid grudge for decades.
And this guy here who wrote this post is just another one of those mentally unwell permanently angry people.
They're stalkers really with the level of ongoing never ending venom they had for Cringely.
I feel sorry for their ex-partners who likely also are being hounded by people never ever able to let go of their anger.
Can you imagine being so deeply enraged by the failure of a Minecraft server Kickstarter that it becomes your never ending mission to hound that person and to declare them to be the worst of the worst forever - really sad.
So if you pile on in the comments and declare Cringely to be some sort of evil person then just be aware you are being manipulated by mentally unwell trolls who want you to behave the same way they do, to amplify their decades old campaign of righteous indignation and online harassment.
https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/21/im-writing-again/
Count up the number of comments from Jeremy Reimer - the author of this HN linked article - he cares - a lot about this.
The Kickstarter was more than 10 years ago - 2015. It raised $35,452. 10 years and the trolls maintain their nuclear level outrage.
Go read the announcement post:
https://www.cringely.com/2015/09/29/the-cringely-boys-kickst...
Would I lose sleep over it? No, but if I encountered a blog post or some other public interaction with this person that has been lying and gaslighting me about a product that was allegedly done for years I don't see a problem calling them out about. That is highly antisocial behavior and should be highlighted so that other people do not fall victim to it. Not to say mistakes aren't made and people don't change... but the repeated attempts to continue gaslighting about this product would indicate that this is not a one off oopsy.