It's not strictly true that it didn't mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros' vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta's implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn't offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn't have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

McCarthy needed Dem votes to maintain a hold on the speakership, but the concessions he would have needed to make in order to get them would have meant making himself incredibly vulnerable to a career-ending primary challenge. The political incentives don't line up.

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot...):

• Give goods or services away for free
• Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
• ???
• Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn't even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with "Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product." High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they're all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.

I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who'd transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, "because the hours and pay are so much better." It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.

M1 gets most of its performance-per-watt efficiency by running much farther down the voltage curve than Intel or AMD usually tune their silicon for, and having a really wide core design to take advantage of the extra instruction-level parallelism that can be extracted from the ARM instruction set relative to x86. It's a great design, but the relatively minor gains from M1 to M2 suggest that there's not that much more in terms of optimization available in the architecture, and the x86 manufacturers have been able to close a big chunk of the gap in their own subsequent products by increasing their own IPC with things like extra cache and better branch prediction, while also ramping down power targets to put their competing thin-and-light laptop parts in better parts of the power curve, where they're not hitting diminishing performance returns.

The really dismal truth of the matter is that semiconductor fabrication is reaching a point of maturity in its development, and there aren't any more huge gains to be made in transistor density in silicon. ASML is pouring in Herculean effort to reduce feature sizes at a much lower rate than in years past, and each step forward increases cost and complexity by eyewatering amounts. We're reaching the physical limits of silicon now, and if there's going to be another big, sustained leap forward in performance, efficient, or density, it's probably going to have to come in the form of a new semiconductor material with more advantageous quantum behavior.

As always, the radical flank is perfectly happy to leave unimportant issues like "can we help people in small ways now even if helping them in the bigger ways we'd prefer isn't achievable within the limits of our current democratic system?" And "how do we stop the right-wing fascist takeover of the country?" by the wayside order to focus on the far more critical problem of enforcing maximal ideological purity.

In the distant future of 2030, social networking between the scattered bands of surviving humans will be facilitated by ham operators bouncing packet radio off the few remaining satellite repeaters, and importing the responses they receive into their clan's scavenged network via FidoNet.

That's fair as far as it goes, but there are analogous behaviors on the US side of things as well. This is just another instance in which the US government has gone to incredible lengths to rescue tourists who got in over their heads (Wendover Productions touched on this in recent video about the National Park System, if you're interested) at the same time that Border Patrol and local vigilantes have been recorded sabotaging water caches left as life-saving measures for migrants crossing arid parts of the southern border. That's a pretty clear indication of which sorts of lives our society thinks matter, and just as in the Mediterranean it more or less comes down to "which ones look and talk like I do?" rather than "which ones are most deserving of the limited resources available to help them?"

Laughable, maybe, but not surprising. Since the Web 2.0 boom started picking up, the game for tech startups has always been to attract users as fast as possible, profits be damned, and hope a FAANG buys you out for your userbase before your VC money runs out. Post-Great Recession, debt has been near as makes no difference free, so VCs have been willing to extend very long runways to the companies they invest in, but with interest rates going sharply up the music has stopped and it's time for companies like Reddit to show they can become profitable or else.

I got my money's worth from the original, but I have two major complaints about it that, from what I can see, the new game doesn't address:

First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows. C:S makes it incredibly hard to design a city that isn't car-centric, and gameplay in practice tends to center on optimizing car traffic at the expense of everything else a city-builder could be.

Second (and this ties into the first, to an extent) is that the game doesn't represent the passage of time, in a technological or societal sense. Real cities grow and change over decades and centuries, with decisions made in prior eras imposing informing and imposing restraints on those made after. C:S cities exist in a weird, timeless and anachronistic "now" from the start. This was something that classic SimCity games did well, at least in the context of an American boom town: as the years advance, so does the tech tree, opening up new mass transit options, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure items, and new kinds of commerce and industry.

Personally, I'd love a game in this genre that plays like SimCity but takes in the whole arc of history, say from from the Middle Ages onwards, so that players can start to appreciate how decisions they make hundreds of years prior can leave their mark on the city in the present -- for example, where a defensive wall gets placed during a medieval time of war leaves a mark of the street networks, and changes the way that that social classes distribute through the city and leads to a high-rent luxury district in a future era.

Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors' confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he's trying to sell them damaged goods.

I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of "We're very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we're all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time."

Instead it's all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they're done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.

They famously got Al Capone on tax evasion, and nobody thinks of him as "the tax cheat" first and foremost.

Besides, I suspect that this is a case where the floodgates are going to open up in terms of investigations and charges, once the first set sticks to him. There's also the NY state fraud charges already filed, and the GA state election tampering investigation that is widely expected to lead to charges.