I've seen people compare the situation we are in now with AI to early days of Uber. Basically "You're excitement is artificially inflated by the fact that a VC just paid half your bill."
That definitely happened with Uber, but I would argue that one key difference between the Uber situation and the AI situation is COST. How much can COGs be reduced via optimization and technology.
In Uber scenario, the cost is labor, there's a hard lower limit where people will find something else to do for work.
In AI scenario, we've already seen the labs make major reductions in cost-per-token. I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say they have more possible cost reduction levers than Uber.
So I don't agree that at some point VC money will run dry and the unit economics for tokens will dramatically change.
The part where this will be fun is where the VCs lobby the US government, via peace board donation or golden iphones, to ban Chinese Open Source AI because otherwise they won't ever make their money back.
I'd think so. Stored procedures let you do multi-statement sequences in fewer round trips. In 2026 larger systems are as likely as ever to run PostgreSQL on a different machine (or machines) than the application server. While latency between the two generally goes down over time, it's still not nothing. You may care about the latency of individual operations or the throughput impact of latency while holding a lock (see Amdahl's law).
Of course, the reasons not to use stored procedures still apply. They're logic, but they're versioned with the database schema, not with your application, which can be a pain.
* Good database drivers will let you pipeline multiple queries concurrently (esp. in languages with async support), effectively eliminating the _N_x roundtrip cost (you can even execute them in parallel if you use multiple connections, not that I recommend doing that). But obviously this is only doable where the queries are independent of one another; I use this mainly to perform query splitting efficiently if the join key is already known.
* These days databases are often effectively versioned alongside the code anyway, at least for either smaller projects that "own" the database, eliminating the biggest issue with stored procedures.
Brings back amazing memories from when I was in high school. A friend invited me to come to the museum for some drawing thing, turned out I got to participate in making a Sol Lewitt drawing. Had no idea who he was at the time but it was such a unique experience.
We were in an empty gallery room with a (I believe) BLACK painted wall with a faint grid on it and we were given an old hat with a bunch of cards in it. There were 4 or 5 highschool kids and we each took turns drawing a card out of the hat and drawing the shape from the card on consecutive grid squares on the wall. The shapes were basic lines and semi-circles. It was lots of fun and the end effect was a very beautiful line drawing mural.
This got me thinking: Rewind 25 years, I can easily imagine 15 year-old me sinking DOZENS of hours into playing this "game". I remember I put much more time than that into a free game that came in a box of cereal[0].
Today, I loaded the site up and spend about 30 seconds on it before deciding "this is cool!" and moving on, probably never to return.
What changed? I guess it's a mix of: (A) How I value my time. (B) The bar for "what pulls me in" in terms of gaming. (C) Some other factor around me just having already burned enough hours on games.
I'm not really sure how much each factor contributes.
Opportunity cost and perspective. We've probably played enough games to know how the cycle goes; there's a little voice in our heads now telling us that it's all just a big pixel hunt and the next few hours will be more of the same (my interest in a game fades once I learn the meta). And then there's so many games these days... so the other question is why not play something more interesting or exciting?
I think that's it, when it's new you explore, but when you know what to expect or seen it before, exploration is no longer interesting.
That said, there's some games out there today that draw me in just as much as others did 25 years ago; I've spent hundreds of hours in Factorio, I can't imagine how much I'd be into it 25 years ago (...assuming I would have understood it back then). Likewise, I'm sure I'd be a lot more into Minecraft if I was 25 years younger.
I used to believe this about myself as well, but later realized it was a rationalization. The reality is it's because leaving hacker news for extended periods (more than a minute or two) results in dopamine withdrawal. I feel a powerful urge to return to browsing links and my brain makes up a reason along the lines of "you're wasting time by staying on this site instead of going back to hacker news." It's a similar thing that drives me to "skip ahead to the good part" in youtube videos rather than watching the whole thing, evidenced by my doing it even on videos that are very short.
Weirdly, playing games is typically something I the feel least guilty doing, precisely because it's a distraction from the other stuff I'd otherwise not be doing. There's just a lot of stuff I want to do, that I struggle to do, and so I feel guilty about not making progress on that stuff. Then, whenever I try to do something else, I feel too guilty to do that something else.
It's a real self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. I agree that it's not healthy. It's just hard to break out of.
I deal with the exact same mental model. I think for me, while actively gaming I do have fun. It’s only after the fact I look back on the time wasted gaming and think “wow, I really should have worked on that project I want to build instead of playing a game”. It’s also hard to rationalize time spent gaming when you have nothing to show for it afterwards.
If you ever figure out the solution to this negative thought-loop, let me know please!
I dunno. I see many “grown ups” replacing video game time with just more time scrolling on their phones, or maybe on the TV watching YouTube or some streaming service.
I think playing (some) video games can be a bit better for your brain vs. the above alternatives. At least many of them require thought and/or coordination.
Again, there are exceptions, where they’re not much better than doom scrolling. But it’s not hard to find some that require some effort and thought.
Same but with 1 kid and different websites (including HN, which is equally bad!). Actively fighting it though. Slowly removing all social media accounts, now just need to figure out how to block stuff permanently on my phone.
On a desktop I did it with changing my hosts file to point everything to 127.0.0.1. Need to figure out how to do this also on mobile without an additional network device that would disrupt things for my wife.
I think it's in large part just having to do with us developing our frontal cortex and like impulse control. I would have probably gotten dopamine addicted to it 15 years ago, as well as wouldn't have some nagging back-of-mind thoughts about having to use my time to be converted into money to survive at that age.
I miss the days when I'd click every link and follow every rabbit hole. 100% completionism of collection games. It's shaped how my life has turned out, for better and worse.
FT uses "underwater" because the deal was $300 Billion and the stock has lost $315 Billion in market cap since the deal. That's a bit of a stretch, but the rest of the article is very good.
And as it won't be obvious to everyone here: Alphaville is one of the few free parts of FT online. You need to create an account to access it, but don't need a paid subscription.
Yea these market cap discussions are always a bit meaningless actually, stocks can be volatile for many reasons… its not like they actually lost the delta
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
as much as I question why someone would trust a free "forever" offer, I have a lot more questions about a company that is denying what's in the public record.
To be fair the CEO is quite comfortable using the word 'forever'. It was used as the title of the announcement to withdraw the Hobby tier and also specifically used to justify it:
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
This is the bloody pricing page. If I as the CEO of a SaaS startup don't even know what our pricing page says I should step down. That's our offer, that's the most important page we have. Come on now. Writing "free forever" isn't something some rogue marketing intern does, this is a core positioning decision and something you'd absolutely be part of, if not leading, as the founder.
What are you arguing about? People send you web archive links and you're still stubborn enough to say that it wasn't the case. Shame to even see you here, just shows what kind of company you are from the inside.
