I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.

I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.

Check out Matt Levine commentary, which goes into more detail (SpaceX Indexing) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are...

“As written, this looks closer to sophisticated curve-fitting (numerology with constraints) than a legitimate geometric unification, mainly because the claimed “ppm agreement” is often not assessed against experimental uncertainties and because several integer/constant choices function like hidden degrees of freedom.”

Thank you for sharing and happy holidays!

I take a slightly more narrow definition of “thoughts” that may be more akin to “expressions” - ideas that can be communicated, so excluding non-linguistic mental processes. I think that may be where we disconnect. A lot of my idea about thoughts comes from the Borges story, Funes the memorius (short story about a dude who could not forget - interesting read and really clarifies my feelings on my definition of “all possible thought”). In the story he talks about tree leaves, but instead imagine needing a unique linguistic scheme for every single unique snowflake you ever see. It would be a linguistic nightmare! Therefore language must generalize otherwise it becomes noncommunicable and that generalization to me induces the “lossy approximation” I attribute to language in my prior comment.

So, in my head Funes’s mind represent the abstract space of all possible thoughts. When we use language, we are stacking words/sentences/paragraphs/etc together almost like vector addition trying to reach a particular point in the thought vector space. Some languages have really clean ways of getting to certain thoughts while others take a mouthful and still don’t get you exactly there (物の哀れ example from link).

I agree with your statement on new languages being different thinking. As you follow that vector addition process to get to the “thought,” different languages will take you on different paths to get to your destination thought because languages encode those vectors differently, even if the destination thought is the same. In my mental model, the act of thinking is putting those language vectors together and tracing their path to get to your thought.

And if my comment still makes no sense - I might have to incubate this thought a bit more :) but I do recommend the story- it’s a quick, thought provoking read.

I tried to find the really interesting article about language and color that describes how some cultures use different naming schemes for colors but couldn’t find it. It talked about how back in the day we don’t know orange as a color, we just thought it was red-yellow and only after the fruit was distributed did the word for the color catch on. Here’s the best article I can find that talks about this phenomena https://burnaway.org/magazine/blue-language-visual-perceptio...

So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they represent “meta skills” that we want kids to develop when they are most apt to learn.

Ultimately, I think it’s a big TBD - a child’s mind innately wants to learn, it’s just unclear what kids are learning when exposed to so much tech early on and that’s what has teachers worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society won’t really know until the kids are old enough to tell us firsthand.

To specifically answer the optimal quantity question, the above answer implies that you would keep bringing rocks home until the cost to bring them back is higher than the price you set. To be clear, you could still go out and get more rocks and sell them for less and still make a profit, but you wouldn’t maximize your profit with that strategy. Competitive markets nudge behavior towards providing more product for less profit/cost which is why we love competition.

[0] Planet money did a great podcast on how to actually do this. Here’s a link to a transcript (though listening is probably best): https://podscripts.co/podcasts/planet-money/how-much-for-tha...