"Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it."

This is laughably untrue.

But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:

- Fortnite

- Apex Legends

- Valorant

- Overwatch

- COD

- League

- Dota 2

- Roblox

Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.

Very few of those games you've listed are new games.

Newer than cs 1.6, sure, but very few of them are under 5 years old.

    Fortnite: 2017
    Apex legends: 2019
    Valorant: 2020
    Overwatch 2016 
    COD: Not sure which version you're talking about.
    League: 2009
    Dota 2: 2013
    Roblox: 2006

So from your list, only COD is under 5 years old, and even that might not be depending which version you're talking about!

Several of the games in your list are well over a decade old. How old is too old to be "new"?

"New" means you're dependent on an official server.

I don't think any of those have private servers that you can run and host games in. They're all far too dependent on microtransactions and in-game-purchased items to implement that kind of robust and long lasting system. They will die because of this as soon as they are not profitable.

Oh, and Overwatch is dead and unplayable. Blizzard unilaterally killed it despite people wanting to keep playing. There is overwatch 2 but that is not the same game.

At first I did a double take because I thought you said there are still people playing Phantasmagoria.

Well 1 person just now running the game. And 3 simultaneously today... Does 3 count as people? Steam's statistics are kinda wild at times.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context:

Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)

Apex Legends: February 4, 2019

Valorant: June 2, 2020

Overwatch: May 24, 2016

Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release

League of Legends: October 27, 2009

Dota 2: July 9, 2013

Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)

Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...

I will not blame an LLM, I will blame your laziness for repeating a message you didn't verify.

I know, right?! People misuse a valuable tool and blame the tool for it.

Impossible to decouple the quality (or not) of his writing from the fact that he had already sold Viaweb to Yahoo at that point. Surely that drew early founders to YC as well.

more info here

https://www.motortrend.com/news/2027-slate-truck-electric-fi...

I kind of love how barebones it is.

Consumers have no agency in relation to General Dynamics or SpaceX.

I wouldn't argue with that, but I would say this is a subset of "consumers have no agency in relation to neither US federal politics nor the behavior of the oligarchy".

This is a great answer.

But I'm curious what the answer would look like if every strata in it was not "things you can buy" but "things you can do with the money" ... if the "IMPACT" section was delineated at each level.

One of the things I envy the most about my rich friends is their capacity to be generous. They can materialize their compassion on a regular basis without having to balance their budget.

I'd like to see what that looks like at each of these wealth levels.

(One funny thing I noticed is that I have multiple friends with virtual personal assistants now, at middle class levels of weath/entrepreneurship... definitely not a rich man's thing anymore.)

Automation is for less wealthy rich people - so the company can serve more users.

When you are rich, you get a real person who speaks your language well and has the authority/power to get things done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual

Even wealthy in the US tend to have much less servants than they would have in the past. Labor is too expensive, and the large middle class has made automation just as good and sometimes better. Sure I could hire someone to turn on my lights - but the switch on the wall works well and isn't much effort (compare to the lamp lighter of the past which did work that would be annoying).

Note, I and, I assume, the parent commenter weren't talking about home automation.

"Virtual personal assistant" to me meant a computer program that could understand speech and carry out a limited set of actions based on that speech - the computer equivalent of a human personal assistant/secretary.

That has been getting much less common. My dad used to have "his secretary" do tasks like schedule is meetings and book travel - the secretary was a department secretary for a couple dozen engineers and was kept busy just serving those needs. Today I don't have a secretary for several hundred engineers. My computer is better at scheduling meetings than the secretary ever was. Go back 100 years and the rich would have hard far more servants than they would today because various levels of automation have replaced many jobs.

The right still have servants of various types of course. Right now "Virtual personal assistant" are too limited to replace humans. Since I cannot afford a human servant I'm hoping that changes. Time will tell.

I would love a virtual assistant that could handle the tasks a human personal assistant does. VA would be available 24x7, would perform consistently regardless of time of day/how long they've been running/awake, would know/ understand my particular habits/preferences.

Maybe there's some bespoke software firm that does provide such a service for rich-enough people. Of course it'd have to run mostly locally/on-premises - none of this cloud stuff/monetizing my behaviours to bump their revenues.

The rich can afford humans to do this job. While a lot of the jobs the assistant does would be easy to automate, the hard part is from the vague description of what they want to getting something acceptable. If I ask for "famous singer" do I need that singer, a cover band, or any band in that style, any live music, or a good DJ - depending on the situation any might be acceptable (and sometimes several of the above are not available at any price). Scheduling just the famous singer is easy - just send a calendar request and see if they accept (it is more complex than that, and odds are the singer isn't signed up for this service, but that is all details), but trying to figure out which substitute is available and acceptable is hard.

to clarify I meant a personal assistant that is an actual human but accessible via email/text, not someone that is actually with you physically

People tend to stick together. Once you know one odds become higher that you get introduced to a few more. Billionaires like parties as much as anyone else, so if you are not an insane stalker and get to know one well they will invite you to parties just to have a group of friends and now you are vetted so the others will not stay away as much. Different people have different sizes of friend circles so breaking in is hard.

There are fewer than 200,000 Americans, rich or poor, who are chummy with billionaires, but many millions of Americans who are liars.

The post's author is a random person on social media...

making claims an attention-seeker would make...

for an audience that wants to believe them.

The sensible position, without corroborating evidence, is that the author is a liar.

Odds are he is lieing. However on the off chance ne is not he lihely knows several

Genuine question: why do I care if birth rates are falling? There are plenty of people.

There are many problems that come with a population decline, two of the major are:

- Our economy (read: investment) is based on a constant growth, which is a function consumers

- the elderly have to be taken care of … this is us one day

It's because the personality attached to the guy on the right is no doubt way more into how he looks, and how impressed he wants people to be by how he looks.

It also means that dating him will include leaving chunks of every day for him to workout, and counting macronutrients at every meal.

The guy on the right looks like a self-involved boring person to hang out with. Well fit for sure! But what are you going to talk about beyond the benefits of creatine and whether or not you should get protein from whey?

wow, you're very impressive

say you didn't read the article without saying you didn't read the article

i didn't read the article

I comment on HN.

I think the idea is that they are some of the ones that know where all the procedures (and skeletons) are buried, so the DOGEkids will be slowed down because they'll be trying to examine and audit systems they don't understand.

I agree that's probably the rationale, I am just afraid the Dogekids won't let a lack of understanding slow them down.