Thanks to crowdfunding, there are deluxe editions of games all the time being announced for $400–500.

Games ship with "6 expansions in box" which sounds great and like a ton of replayable content, until you realize that they're poorly playtested, lack balance, and add a confounding (and sometimes contradictory) number of rules.

As you noted, games come with a ridiculous number of minis and trinkets and baubles that drive the price of new games well past $100 in many cases.

As the industry has gotten larger, many publishers are turning more toward bankable IP as opposed to innovative concepts. Or, they're releasing a bajillion reskins of the same game (looking at you, TtR, Azul, Pandemic, 7 Wonders, etc..) This is not unique to board games by any stretch. But it's a sign of an inflection point.

I'm not saying there aren't good games being released. I'm saying they're harder to find and getting drowned out by the shameless cash grabs and lazy IP-based games.

Go find some of the classics by Rosenberg, Knizia, Feld, Luciani, and others. You'll get a lot more bang for your buck.

What about Gemma and Llama and gpt-oss, not to mention lots of smaller/specialized models from Nvidia and others?

I would never argue that China isn't ahead in the open weights game, of course, but it's not like it's "all" American models by any stretch.

This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.

If I can get the performance I'm seeing out of free models on a 6-year-old Macbook Pro M1, it's a sign of things to come.

Frontier models will have their place for 1) extensive integrations and tooling and 2) massive context windows. But I could see a very real local-first near future where a good portion of compute and inference is run locally and only goes to a frontier model as needed.

The Gemini app is kind of terrible (apart from the models) but Gemma 4 runs great locally already.

The readme is one sentence long. The website doesn't really have any additional info. The link to the App Store seems to be a for a "Tech Jobs in EU" app from the same developer. Supposedly, it's more private, lower latency, lower cost, and works offline... but how?

The pulse dashboard seems to imply that there are nodes around the world... is this some distributed inference engine that lives on Apple silicon?

I'm not saying it wasn't wasted spend, but velocity of money is a thing and maybe it's better off in the hands of the people who it was spent on instead of sitting in Zuck's war chest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

My kids and I use our two headsets a lot. Sure, it's not a daily driver for workflows, but the uniqueness of many of the game experiences just can't be replicated on desktops/consoles.

It's a damn shame because Facebook bought up Oculus, poured gasoline on a fire by pumping $100B dollars in and now seems set to walk away because it didn't make a $100B + 1 dollars.

In its current state, it was never going to be a replacement for PCs or phone experiences. It's just a different lane all together. But Beat Saber, or Walkabout mini golf, or the I Expect You to Die series are insanely fun and unique. I'll be sad if they fold the quest down entirely, but I hope that Valve or others take up the banner. VR doesn't have to be a $100B industry to be viable, especially in its infancy.

Meanwhile, Apple tosses a $3,500 headset onto the market and then is surprised that it's treated as a novelty. Why is it so hard for these companies to get their strategies right? Maybe it's because it's not a product suited (today, at least) for two of the largest companies on earth to focus on. These are moonshot companies who make products that half of the globe uses on a daily basis.

I just want a solid VR platform with a healthy pipeline or quirky, interesting games.

> By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. Also, Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. You can still jump into your other favorite worlds in VR until June 15, 2026, after which the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest, and Worlds will no longer be available in VR.

So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.

So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!

(Because the other side of the argument has thousands of measurable, verifiable scientific studies)

Apple does a lot of things I don't agree with in the interest of share price (like cozying up to authoritarian governments) but this seems like a reach to criticize them for a feature they have put extensive effort into, rather than applauding that they resist spying and enhance customer privacy. Sure, it's an optional feature and maybe they don't push broad acceptance of it, but it's important for those that need it.

Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term.

Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)