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.

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.

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.

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??

Overall, yikes.

I think that much is fairly clear from AI.

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

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.

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.

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 this tech is not mandatory to have governance.

I'm not sure why you would feel entitled to make a purchase on their site outside of their (whatever reasonable or unreasonable) rules may be.