I have no doubt that someday in the future these world models will revolutionize gaming. However, they are clearly very far off from that point in capability, not to mention the cost. And a lot of these articles I'm seeing are confidently stating very incorrect facts like "this new model will completely change the workflow of game developers and accelerate game development." No it won't.
I don't trade individual stocks but it does seem like an easy case of "buy the dip" here.
The intersection of investors who understand what it takes to build a game engine and also the capabilities and plausible future capabilities of Google’s model is practically zero.
I don't really get this take... not when Tesla is by a wide mile the world's most valuable automaker. How does Tesla ending production of the S and X equate to the old auto establishment "stomping over them"?
Worth related statistics doesn't mean anything in the realm of hard engineering. I completely look from the point of "what the companies are doing tech-wise".
When Tesla came about, they were distinctively different. A different chassis, a different weight distribution, completely different dynamics. Since they started with a blank slate, their cars were greenfield projects, and they correctly took note of the pitfalls, and avoided them.
On the other hand, avoiding past pitfalls or remedying them doesn't make you immune from the future ones, and doesn't mean the other companies can't learn, too. This is where they made the mistake.
They overpromised (esp. with the Autopilot thingy) and underdelivered massively on that front, and while they "made" the software-defined-vehicle, they underestimated the problems and behaved like the problems they face are as simple as configuring a web service right. This is what slowly broke them. They also underestimated hardware problems of the car (like using consumer grade parts in the critical parts of the hardware. Remember wearing down flash chips and bricking cars?)
Because while car is software defined now, it's also an "industrial system". It has to be robust. It has to be reliable, idiot-proof even. Playing fast and loose with these things allowed automakers to catch them, maybe slowly but surely.
Because, "the old automakers" has gone through a lot of blood, sweat and tears (both figuratively and literally), and know what to do and what not to do. They can anticipate pitfalls better then a "newbie" carmaker. They shuddered, sputtered, hesitated, but they are in the move now. They will evolve this more slowly, but in a more reliable and safer way. They won't play that fast, but the products will be more refined. They won't skimp on radars because someone doesn't believe in them, for example.
Not everything is numbers, valuations and great expansions which look good on quarterlies, news, politics, and populists. Sometimes the slow and steads wins, and it goes for longer.
Physics and engineering doesn't care for valuations. They only care about natural laws.
Thank you for the explanation. I guess the thing I don't understand is what exactly the problems are that you are seeing. We've all heard the stories of wooden parts in initial production runs of Tesla models, sure. But it does seem like they iron out these kinks over time. Maybe I'm biased because I'm in the bay area, but it seems like every 3rd car you see on the highway is a Tesla, and lots of my coworkers speak very highly of theirs that they own. It just doesn't seem to me like there is actually a quality issue here?
If anything, ending production of SX and giving more focus to 3Y would probably increase the quality of those models, I'd imagine.
If you're pointing to Autopilot / camera-only as the main transgression here, yeah I'll agree that they have definitely overpromised, but it doesn't really seem to me like the lack of a L5 system is actually a deal-breaker for anyone, because from what I hear they are just damn good cars anyway.
Honestly, how long do you guys think we have left as SWEs with high pay? Like the SWE job will still exist, but with a much lower technical barrier of entry, it strikes me that the pay is going to decrease a lot. Obviously BigCo codebases are extremely complex, more than Claude Code can handle right now, but I'd say there's definitely a timer running here. The big question for my life personally is whether I can reach certain financial milestones before my earnings potential permanently decreases.
It's counterintuitive but something becoming easier doesn't necessarily mean it becomes cheap. Programming has arguably been the easiest engineering discipline to break into by sheer force of will for the past 20+ years, and the pay scales you see are adapted to that reality already.
Empowering people to do 10 times as much as they could before means they hit 100 times the roadblocks. Again, in a lot of ways we've already lived in that reality for the past many years. On a task-by-task basis programming today is already a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, and we just grew our desires and the amount of controls and process we apply. Problems arise faster than solutions. Growing our velocity means we're going to hit a lot more problems.
I'm not saying you're wrong, so much as saying, it's not the whole story and the only possibility. A lot of people today are kept out of programming just because they don't want to do that much on a computer all day, for instance. That isn't going to change. There's still going to be skills involved in being better than other people at getting the computers to do what you want.
Also on a long term basis we may find that while we can produce entry-level coders that are basically just proxies to the AI by the bucketful that it may become very difficult to advance in skills beyond that, and those who are already over the hurdle of having been forced to learn the hard way may end up with a very difficult to overcome moat around their skills, especially if the AIs plateau for any period of time. I am concerned that we are pulling up the ladder in a way the ladder has never been pulled up before.
Supply and demand. There will continue to be a need for engineers to manage these systems and get them to do the thing you actually want, to understand implications of design tradeoffs and help stakeholders weigh the pros and cons. Some people will be better at it than others. Companies will continue to pay high premiums for such people if their business depends on quality software.
I think to give yourself more context you should ask about the patterns that led to SWEs having such high pay in the last 10-15 years and why it is you expected it to stay that way.
I personally think the barrier is going to get higher, not lower. And we will be back expected to do more.
I think the pay is going to skyrocket for senior devs within a few years, as training juniors that can graduate past pure LLM usage becomes more and more difficult.
Day after day the global quality of software and learning resources will degrade as LLM grey goo consumes every single nook and cranny of the Internet. We will soon see the first signs of pure cargo cult design patterns, conventions and schemes that LLMs made up and then regurgitated. Only people who learned before LLMs became popular will know that they are not to be followed.
People who aren't learning to program without LLMs today are getting left behind.
Yeah, all of this. Plus companies have avoided hiring and training juniors for 3 or 4 years now (which is more related to interest rates than AI). Plus existing seniors who deskill themselves by outsourcing their brain to AI. Seniors who know actually what they're doing are going to be in greater demand.
That is assuming that LLMs plateau in capability, if they haven't already, which I think is highly likely.
Unfortunately it seems the incentive structures are ultimately set by global competition and the security dilemma. So short of total world disarmament and UBI, fundamentally the incentive will always be to work harder than your opponent to preserve your own security.
This was my issue with platforms like Sentry. Turns out, in a decently used prod web app with a lot of dependencies, there's a lot of noise. After spending hours trying to debug some of these only to conclude that they were not debuggable, I ended up kind of letting the Sentry reports fade into the background, and eventually I turned it off entirely to reduce payload sizes.
What? It's a bribe, he gains money. He doesn't care about pissing anyone off, he's (probably) not running for reelection, he cares about money, it's really that simple.
Besides the ~$1 million a head he's openly selling[0] pardons for?
Why wouldn't he pardon a white-collar felon fraudster? This president has pardoned dozens of those[1]—frauds who had no reason at all to be deserving of clemency, other than being incredibly rich. He's pardoned fraudsters who defrauded thousands of victims[2]. He's pardoned a fraudster convicted of fraud, who committed fraud again, and he pardoned them a second time[3]. There are no limits.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-g... ("Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence / David Gentile had been found guilty for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.")
It is disappointing to me that people can look at the list of infamous people he has already pardoned, who have paid him, and then expect that he won't continue acting on trend, just because some shallow-book manipulable prediction market, which is primarily a money laundering tool for event fixers, tells us that it's "not likely".
I think that because of my own judgment, not because the market told me. Also, it seems unlikely that someone would burn money to manipulate this market as there's nothing to gain from it.
By the way, Trump literally said he won't pardon SBF[0]. It seems money is not the only factor he considers when handing out pardons.
Wha backlash? Trump pardoned a Honduran ex-president convicted of smuggling tons of drugs, right in the midst of using the military to bomb boats for unproven drug smuggling, and kidnapped Maduro presumably because of drugs too (or was it oil?). Zero repercussions except for futile anger from internet weirdos like me.
This administration seems to relish getting away with things that would destroy any other presidency.
The backlash was relatively mild because few of his supporters personally see themselves as victims of the Honduran ex-president. That's very different from SBF—almost everyone who invested in crypto at the time hates him, not to mention the actual FTX customers.
Everybody hates Trump, he's the least popular president ever.
Unless these crypto folks have massive money and are using it right now to pay Trump tk not pardon SBF, what would they do? What backlash could crypto do? It's not like he can unpardon Trump. Crypto just joins the long line of people who fell for it again and nothing happens.
What, is a Republican going to vote against Trump? Hah! Impeachment? What trouble could crypto cause for Trump? Even if they could cause trouble, Trump would just make up charges and send the DOJ after crypto.
Like most people, he probably understands the value of keeping a few friends and allies close, even if it's purely self-interest. At Trump's scale, some relationships are worth billions, so a bribe of a few million can be a poor trade-off if it risks burning a high-value relationship.
Sure some relationships might be worth it, but whose? Trump already got the votes, which is what let him avoid prosecution for insurrection, mishandling of classified documents, etc. etc.
What friend or relationship would he lose for pardoning SBF? It has to be a billionaire, because he respects billionaires, or it has to be somebody paying home more than SBF to keep SBF in jail. What billionaire would risk their relationship with Trump in order to express displeasure about pardoning SBF? Wha person would pay more than SBF to keep SBF imprisoned?
Again and again Trump burns people that supported him. There is zero loyalty, everything is purely transactional.
I'll give a concrete example. Suppose he were to pardon SBF. That would likely anger figures like CZ (Binance) and Brian Armstrong (Coinbase). In response, they could choose to delist Trump's shitcoin, which alone could wipe out hundreds of millions in market cap. Anyways, I guess we'll see who’s right in about three years.
Thanks for that concrete example! It's far more convincing. However I'm still not fully convinced, as Trump has greater leverage due to the ability to change tax and other crypto policy. He already gets what he needs by allowing bribes through Trump's coins, listing is not the primary purpose.
I appreciate you exchanging this information and your opinion.
Trump already got donor money and he's a lame duck. 'Pissing off crypto community' does not factor highly into his decision making processes. Pardoning him would probably help crypto go up.
I wonder if there would be some way to create a hyper-local MMO. Let people meet each other from the comfort of their homes and bond over the shared activity of the MMO, and make it so the people you are likely to play with are also in your general geographic region. That way, it would be an easy way to meet people, bond with them, and potentially meet up IRL to take the friendship further.
I think this would be an awesome idea but the main challenge here would be game design and implementation. You'd need a lot of capital and some big ass game studio.
I don't trade individual stocks but it does seem like an easy case of "buy the dip" here.
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