ageitgey

I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).

The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.

Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.

You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.

The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".

I think it means literally nothing for start-ups. It's just a slightly better than expected economic result for one quarter.

As a founder, my experience is that the US is a much easier place to raise capital than the UK or Europe. But your experience is going to vary based on the kind of business you are in and where your customers are located.

While this is a nice bit of news that is "technically correct," the headline makes it sound like a much bigger deal than it is. One quarter doesn't mean the UK is suddenly taking over the G7.

In Q1, the UK grew at 0.7%, which is slightly more than the expected 0.6% growth and more than the US's 0.3% growth in the same period. But it's also less than Q1 a year ago, which saw 0.9% growth in the UK. And it's nothing compared to the 5.4% growth that China claims in Q1.

These numbers are also pre-US tariffs, which hit some segments of the UK. So growth is expected to be worse in Q2.

I don't think that open-world design is that big of a factor anymore in the direction of modern games. It feels like that trend peaked 5-10 years ago with Ubisoft. It's been replaced by much more insidious trends.

As an old person, my take is that the business reality is what is ruining modern AAA games. To justify investing hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people's time into producing a game, the game needs to be a global smash hit with a long tail. That means the game has to be a new lifestyle that a large group of consumers adopt, not just a game that they play once.

It's so rare to find a AAA game today that is a standalone game that you can just quickly play and enjoy. Sports games have become gambling casinos where playing the sport is secondary. Open-world exploration games have been replaced with "RPG mechanics" where you have to do the same things hundreds of times to level up, like feeding bad guns to other bad guns to make very slightly better guns, infinitely. Shooters have become online lifestyles centered around skin collection and gambling. The main exceptions to this trend for AAA games are 'system sellers' bankrolled by Nintendo and Sony who make money based on system install base.

It's hard out there for AAA publishers. There are scary stats like only 15% of Steam game playtime in 2024 was for games published in 2024. The most popular games by playtime are things like GTA V, Minecraft, Warframe, Counterstrike, DOTA, etc, many of which were published a decade ago or more. The market for a new game-as-a-lifestyle is saturated, and there are few new winners.

I think indie games are doing a great job of filling a lot of the gaps left by modern AAA games. But I also mourn the death of the "B game." Puyo Puyo Tetris I/II is a great example - it's not an indie game, but it's not an expensive game to release. It's a mid-tier release for a niche audience. This is the kind of product you don't see much of anymore, and what I miss the most.

The opposite - Zuck begged Xi to name Zuck's child as a form of flattery.

As a co-founder at a company, I get more outbound sales spam than you can imagine. I just checked my spam folder and I get at least 30-50 "personal" sales outreaches a day.

So many of them are obvious AI to anyone who has used LLMs. The emails are always like "Hi, I really like how <general fact about company mission> and how you used to <old job on LinkedIn>. We can 10x your business..."

Another fun one is they say they care so much about our business that they recorded a personalized video of them exploring our website. But the video is a person gesturing at their computer screen that only shows a Cloudflare bot blocking page because their AI video generator got blocked by our site as a bot.

It's so lame. It feels incredibly off-putting and dishonest that I am having my time wasted by a machine pretending to be a real person spending their time on me.

The problem is that this automation leads to the death of the entire sales channel. If 99% of "personal" emails I get are computer generated and the volume of emails keeps increasing because it's now so easy to send them, I'm going to stop reading any emails. I feel burned.

This is the problem with AI sales. It can automate the current average sales process. This in turn makes the average sales process really easy, so it gets saturated by everyone and then it no longer works for anyone.

If anything, you should do the opposite of whatever the AI sales people are currently doing. That's the way to make a mark.

Over the past 5 years, there have been many startups that are variations of "AI can now automate interacting with companies that don't want to interact with you." This is common in healthcare, FinTech, consumer shopping, etc.

There are so many examples:

- We're going to automate provider availability, scheduling and booking hair/doctor/spa/whatever appointments for your users with AI phone calls

- We're going to sell a consumer device you talk to that will automate all your app interactions using "large action models"

- We're going to automate all of your hospital's health insurance company billing interactions with AI screen scrapers

- We're going to record your employees performing an action once in any business software tool and then automate it forever with AI to tie all your vendor systems together without custom programming.

- We're going to be able to buy anything for you from any website, automatically, no matter what fraud checks exist, because AI

Most of these start-ups are not "fraudulent"—they start with the best intentions (qualified tech founders, real target market, customers willing to pay if it works), but they eventually fail, pivot completely, or have to resort to fraud in a misguided attempt to stay alive.

The problem is that they are all using technology to try to solve a human problem. The current state of the world exists because the service provider on the other side of the equation doesn't want to be disintermediated or commoditized. They aren't going to sit there and be automated into compliance. If you perfect a way to call them with robots, they will stop answering the phone. If you perfect a way to automate their iPhone app on behalf of a user, they will block your IP address range and throw up increasingly arcane captchas. If you automate their login flows, they will switch to a different login flow or block customers they think are using automation. Your customer's experience is inconsistent at best, and you can never get rid of the humans in the loop. It leads to death by a thousand paper cuts until you bleed to death - despite customers still begging to pay for your service.

Nah, it has nothing like the influence it had 10-15 years ago (at least in my opinion as a start-up founder and old guy).

VCs still seem to track CrunchBase, but that is a separate company.

I got lots of substack spam, but I assume it is the individual substack authors signing me up manually from a list. But something in substack's design definitely doesn't seem to prevent or discourage this too much, so I'm not giving them a total pass.

Who's going to be the hero that builds a modern update of C&C Generals/Zero Hour with 4k rendering, raytracing, etc?

For designing new models to 3D print, you have several open-source options. But all of them come with pretty big caveats:

- FreeCAD: The closest to a real OSS parametric CAD package for making functional parts. But it is a very frustrating tool to use compared to, say, the free-to-use personal version of Autodesk Fusion.

- Blender: Great for making artistic designs to print, but not really suitable for CAD work. There is a "CAD Sketcher" add-on that sort of provides that if you already know Blender, but again, it's pretty goofy to use compared to, say, Autodesk Fusion.

- OpenSCAD: This one is pretty cool. It's a programming language where the code generates 3D parts. While the feature set is kind of limited and awkward, it is really neat when you get something modeled because users can feed in values for the variables and customize the object easily. Some 3D object marketplaces even offer web GUIs for OpenSCAD scripts, like Makerworld. But it's not really a replacement for a CAD package — it's more like an alternative way of making re-usable designs with more effort.

Part of the reason that the Open Source options aren't better is that the popular commercial options maintain market share with "free-to-use" versions that suck away users:

- Autodesk Fusion (F/K/A Fusion 360): A very popular, relatively easy-to-learn parametric CAD package. Pretty ideal for most functional 3D print creation work. Very weak at artistic work (where Blender would make more sense). Has a free-to-use option and then increasively punative commercial options. About as non-OSS as you can get and Autodesk will continually worsen the free version. But if you can live with that, it's a very efficient tool.

- OnShape: Another very popular parametric CAD package, but this one is browser-based. Offers a free version with the limitation that all the files you save have to be public. Also very non-OSS.

The next tier up from there would be fully-professional solid modeling packages like SoldWorks that cost many thousands per year (unless you are a student) and offer no free license.

Most people with 3D printers who are making parts (as opposed to artwork) just use Fusion or OnShape. You can make pretty much anything quickly with 10,000% less frustration than using FreeCAD. But you do you.

This is a very instructive story of how much the media landscape has fundamentally changed in the past 15 years due to the explosion in content, the lower costs of production, and the change in audience tastes.

It used to be that people made homemade videos with the hope of graduating to 'Real' TV'—think Andy Samberg & friends getting picked up by SNL or the guys from Big Brother magazine filming themselves on VHS and getting picked up as Jackass after a bidding war.

15 years later, and now Real TV is a hollow shell. The viewership and ad money evaporated. Outside of sports and news, cable TV is fully dead, showing Pawn Stars on a 24/7 loop. Live news has never had lower production values with the guests Zooming in from their spare rooms and the hosts just showing screenshots of tweets as news.

Check the viewership on your favorite cable TV channel. The numbers are comically low and far below even niche YouTubers: https://ustvdb.com/networks/

TV (and before it, music) used to be INCREDIBLY lucrative. TV shows used to get 10s of millions of viewers on a weekly basis. The ad money was incredible. Everyone had mansions and vacation mansions. Except for sports and news, that is all gone now.

This creator is coming from Bon Appetite and going solo. A monthly budget of $14k to produce 4 cooking shows IS comically low compared to the old BA world. That's $3500 to produce, film, edit, and post a full 30min+ Food Network-style cooking show. $3500 is a shoestring budget for any kind of professional production. It's pocket money.

The response here is that "my favorite youtuber straps a GoPro to their head or films with their iPhone - why should anyone spend more than that?". That take is economically correct. The absolute flood of content is making it unsustainable to produce anything more expensive than that unless you can appeal to a Mr. Beast-sized audience. But that goes for YouTube AND TV.

In the old days, everyone who wanted cooking content would watch Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay. But now there are hundreds of people around the world making cooking content in all shapes and sizes and genres, but the total audience is still roughly the same size. The pie is getting sliced smaller and smaller and the type of content that people want has evolved.

Unless you look at the numbers, it's hard to comprehend how much the media landscape has shifted in the past 15 years. All the subconscience assumptions people still hold are wrong. By viewership, Fox News is just a moderately large Youtube channel that happens to reach a demographic that actually votes and buys products from ads. Many, many Youtubers and podcasts reach a lot more people. Broadcast and cable TV still account for ~45% of total TV viewership, but the vast majority of people under the age of 35 now NEVER watch traditional TV and only use streaming services or social media. The audience for traditional TV is almost entirely 40+, and the entire business is obviously on borrowed time.

The author of this post got out there and tried something to see if it would work, which is commendable. It didn't work. But the problem wasn't so much that they spent too much money to make Youtube videos. Spending $35 per episode instead of $3500 wouldn't have achieved their goals. The problem is that using a Youtube channel to "get a TV show" is chasing a goal that just doesn't exist in 2025. There is no more TV show to get. The people making Youtube videos and the people making Food Network shows are both surviving on shoestring budgets and ever-dropping income. It's just as bad over there as it is over here.

[Deleted as I missed the reference in the article]

> Holding Honey to a different standard isn't going to work for them.

I think the perceived difference is that influencer A or B got someone to click a link to a store while Honey used a browser extension to reset the affiliate attribution when the user was already at the store on the checkout page about to click to purchase. They didn't drive the user to the store. That's a big difference.

Say a US citizen buys a house in the UK and takes out a £400,000 mortgage to pay for it and at the time, £400,000=$500,000 USD.

Now 3 years later, they want to refinance the £400k mortgage they owe with a different lender but the currency exchange rates have fluctuated and now £400,000=$550,000.

In the eyes of the US, they immediately owe capital gains tax on $50,000 even though nothing happened and they didn't even move out of the house.

So yes, the US charges CGT on foreign currency and equivalents.

Eurostar is definitely a different type of service than the others, but I think we can all agree that Eurostar is still highly priced for what it provides.

Fares from London to Paris are almost always higher on Eurostar vs flying. And this is even when you compare traditional airline "Economy Plus" service with convenient flight times operating from Heathrow, not no-name budget airlines operating at far-flung budget airports with no baggage allowances.

Obviously it's working for them though because the Eurostar trains always seems packed and Eurostar posted 2B revenue this year with near 25% profit margins.

One of the reasons that Google Search is falling apart is that it is filled with this kind of stolen, AI-generated content.

This post is just a 100% stolen AI summary of a popular YouTuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSGVk2KVokQ

It's funny now divisive Lang Lang is with classical people. The Reddit classical threads are full of people outraged that they had him play this and declare him the worst possible person in the world to debut a Chopin piece.

Not disagreeing with you that many heavy PS5 games rely on dynamic resolution to hit a good frame rate. And for some people, that's enough reason to upgrade. They want they best available no matter what.

But my point is that a holding a solid 4k vs dropping down from 4k to 2k upscaled when the action ramps up is barely visible to most people sitting 6 feet from a TV. It's diminishing returns. And what does 8k bring if you don't have a 200in tv? Can you even see the difference?

Digital cameras went through a similar cycle. Since about 2008, high-end digital cameras have been good enough that the pictures from them still look great when produced by a good photographer. There has been a lot of sensor improvement since then around dynamic range, etc, but it is not super obvious in a sales demo. Digital camera sales have totally fallen off a cliff and now what sells now is software improvements on cell phones that make it easier to take good pictures with no thought, not drastic hardware improvements.

I think that consoles are starting to hit a point where they are powerful enough for the kinds of games that we currently have the resources to build. Making the graphics even "better" requires an enormous development investment that only pays off for the few most popular blockbuster games. It's hard for a console maker to find compelling demonstrations of why they need more power right now.

Like with cameras, miniaturization and new form factors is really interesting. Nintendo is killing it with the Switch despite the dinosaur hardware. It's a lot easier for them to demo improvements for a Switch 2 because the Switch isn't at the point of "good enough" yet for many types of games.

Of course computers will get more powerful and console development isn't done forever or anything like that. But it feels like the hardware is currently a bit ahead of the software maybe for the first time in history which makes the value of a upgrade tenuous for many consumers.

I'm sure this will sell just fine, but in the history of consoles there has never been less incentive to upgrade. It just doesn't feel like the upgrade delivers anything tangible for the average person.

Many games I want to play these days barely take full advantage of the base PS5, let alone needing more hardware. A lot of cheaper titles aren't even bothering to take advantage of the PS5 over the PS4. There are some really stand-out PS5 titles like Ratchet and Clank that look amazing, but they are relatively few and far between and they don't really leave you wishing for "more power".

Sure, this will let you play some games at 8k instead of 4k. Or this will let you get more FPS in 4k. If that is enough to upgrade, great. But I bet 99% of people wouldn't even be able to tell the difference in most real world situations unless they were staring at the two systems side by side with magnifying glasses. There's just no big obvious difference in most games.

It's a very terrible book BUT it was also super important, influential book at the time it was published. It can be both!

As a child, I read this book in a bookstore. Nothing else like this was available to me in the suburbs with parents who didn't have any business experience. The idea of doing anything other than just "getting a job" was totally foreign. The book opened my mind to the idea that you don't have to work for someone else your whole life and that you want to build appreciating assets.

Literally everything else in the book is fluff or flat out wrong. It's not a good book. But for a lot of people, it was also life changing because it broke through in a place and a time when little else was available.

In 2024, we don't need this book. There is so much content available online that is so much better. Someone would get more out of reading a random page of the bogleheads wiki than this entire book. But I wouldn't call the book a "fraud" and I wouldn't deny the amount of influence it had decades ago when it first came out.

I don't know. I didn't really have that problem very often. Most of my playlists never had any issues. Maybe it depends on the genre / record companies you most often listen to? No idea.

I had been a Spotify subscriber since near when it started. I was annoyed with every change over the years, but I had nearly a decade of playlists that I didn't want to lose. It never felt worth switching because it seemed like a huge effort.

Recently, I finally switched to Apple Music after discovering there is absolutely no way to disable video podcasts on child accounts and that because of that, Spotify search is full of TikTok compilations, Minecraft streamers, and straight up adult content that you absolutely can't disable for children. It's really terrible and unforgivable.

The good news is (1) I actually like Apple Music a lot more, even on Android and (2) switching took like 5 minutes using Soundiiz. It is a web app where you log into both services and it syncs your playlists and collections instantly. I have no connection to it and there are probably other similar services that might be just as good, but it worked really well for me and was worth the $5 or whatever I payed. I moved everyone in my family over to Apple Music and no one complained or lost any playlists.

Since being on Apple Music, it's really refreshing that they prioritize music features over dumb engagement features. They promote lossless audio and spatial audio remixes instead of trying to push paid podcasts and other junk you don't want. It also supports streaming your own local music that is not in their library. It is a really nice product.

Obviously both are giant companies who don't care about you, but Apple Music really seems like a better product to me made by people who actually listen to music.

This is the reason we cancelled Spotify and moved to Apple Music.

Not only do they have a bunch of adult content hidden in there, but they also have tons of "video podcasts" available via search that are compilations of TikTok and streamer trash (like the one you linked). So if you are trying to keep young kids away from TikTok, trash-level Minecraft streamers, etc, but assume Spotify is safe because it is just music, your kids will find it and start getting hooked on TikTok via Spotify. It's really terrible and insidious. It feels like the tech industry is conspiring to get small children hooked.

There is a thread several years old on Spotify support where people have been complaining about this and they have done nothing. They are prioritizing engagement via crappy podcasts over delivering a music product that works for a range of customers (families, etc).

BTW, Apple Music has been totally fine as a replacement. I actually like it more. And there is a web app that will move all your old playlists over in minutes, so there's very little hassle in switching.

I realize that my experience in an upscale, somewhat suburban part of west London is not representative of the UK in general. But where I live, we've definitely "passed the tipping point" of EV adoption.

There are low speed chargers available in the streetlight poles next to street parking (low cost). There are 22kw slow/medium chargers in reserved spots throughout the neighborhood (medium cost, lower to residents). There are 250kw chargers at gas stations (high cost). The local supermarket has 10+ 250kw charging spots (high cost) and at least half are always available.

It's finally hit the point where there are always multiple charging options easily available nearby and the number of EVs parked in the neighborhood is rapidly multiplying. I see more EVs on my local streets daily.

It's a different world outside of London. Less densely populated areas of the UK can still be a bit of a nightmare for charging, especially during big travel periods. Looking at you, Cornwall.

What do you mean? The UK and Germany have very similar EV adoption (~24% of car sales in 2023).

Product Hunt is like open-mic night for PMs - there's no organic audience, just other people pitching products.

If you kill on Product Hunt, all you've learned is that the kinds of people who post products on Product Hunt like your product. That's great if you are selling products specifically to people on Product Hunt, but pretty meaningless in any other scenario.

If you want to build a business NOT aimed at other PMs, get as far away from that social media product hustler scene as you can. Go talk to real buyers and users in your target industry. Pair with an expert in your target industry. Maybe get a job in your target industry and learn how it works from the inside out.

These are just London traffic cameras. There are a lot more TfL traffic cams than just those listed on this website. They're available through the (really nice) TfL API if you want to play around with them.

Here's another random website that has them all on a convenient map if you want to click around London's busiest/ugliest intersections: https://www.tfljamcams.net/

My part of London has an interesting solution to this problem - the government will install new "normal" streetlights unless the residents of the street want to pay for ornate Victorian street lights. The street can vote and pay for it however they want.

https://www.richmond.gov.uk/services/roads_and_transport/str...