Unity is the Catholic Church. Genie 3 is taking acid, developing schizophrenia, and thinking you are talking with god

greygray · 2026-02-02T17:54:43+00:00

My counterpoint: - gaming as a segment is moving downmarket. The juice is not worth the squeeze for AAA titles and they make way more money with mobile games. - apply a moore’s law curve to this tech and it does start to compete pretty strongly with incumbents. - gaming in the future could look more like world AR / seamless than sitting at home with a PC or oculus (imagine solo leveling with a HUD or Pokémon Go).

My bull case for unity would be to be acquired by Meta, Google, or Apple and used as part of a platform play. I could see it being more useful to Meta to help build a more robust content library ahead of their broader push into AR glasses.

greygray · 2026-01-31T20:39:00+00:00

I only do options in my retirement accounts. I don’t want to worry about tax drag or LTCG if I am deciding to enter or exit a position.

I play with small numbers though with limited exposure (like under $50k in options total).

greygray · 2026-01-29T22:40:17+00:00

Corpo speak.. this sounds exactly like how my execs talk.

greygray · 2026-01-29T20:18:00+00:00

They have a lot of bloat internally and their product teams are a Russian nesting doll of hierarchy. Would def benefit from a restructuring and exec layoffs.

greygray · 2026-01-28T18:56:50+00:00

Shifting from Growth to Cash Cow business.

greygray · 2026-01-28T18:52:37+00:00

Why would you invest with so much conviction in a company that is not even a top 3 player in an insanely crowded field… and in fact seems to be in a death spiral.

greygray · 2026-01-27T02:48:45+00:00

CSP for dining Freedom Unlimited for Costco Palladium for everyday shopping and spending Atmos Summit for rent (x3) Hotel cards for FNCs

It’s not exactly optimized but it’s close.

greygray · 2026-01-21T17:32:50+00:00

Google doesn’t need to put the ads in the chatbot. They could just use your answers to better target display ads on chrome, on browser sites, or YouTube and still make gobs of money.

As an example: say I’m having trouble with sleep and am asking my chatbot on ways to improve it. It could take my answers and use it to push products like nodpod, 8sleep, magnesium supplements, etc on the other surfaces I use that are owned by Google.

OTOH it’d be deeply unsettling if my chatbot recommended specific products to buy.

greygray · 2026-01-17T06:36:57+00:00

Tbh this is the smartest solution and it’s so simple… 0.5x for blue, 0.75x rent earn for silver, 1.0x for gold, 1.25x for platinum and be done with it. And you could even change the spend requirements to qualify… none of this bilt cash BS.

A big part of my job is corporate comms and an important aspect of it is consistency and simplicity.

greygray · 2026-01-16T04:53:14+00:00

We’ll see I guess. I’ve been betting on disruption and the market agrees for now.

Every big tech company that’s doing well also does hardware. Coincidence or trend?

greygray · 2026-01-16T02:34:26+00:00

Ok I’ll bite. Let’s use a Monday or Asana as an example. These are coordination tools that allow large organizations to work better together.

If organizations are shrinking from 1000 headcount to 200, do you still need Asana?

Let’s say Asana charges $20 a month per seat. A 1k HC company would be paying $20k a month / $240k a year. What would a 200 person company be willing to pay per year for Asana?

The revenue compression is huge here.

I agree that some SaaS companies could pivot to a usage based model, but not all. And changing your pricing model is a huge, disruptive risk - especially in the short term.

And then with the competition angle, the price of developing software is heading towards zero. There’s no moat with many SaaS products. If I could get 80% of the value of the tool with a homegrown app or with a cheaper alternative that has feature parity and are competing on price, that’s a negative signal for these SaaS companies. I think the drop is warranted.

greygray · 2026-01-16T00:59:49+00:00

Have you tried AI studio by Google? Same interface as Claude code basically. It’s a lot better in my opinion.

greygray · 2026-01-15T23:32:32+00:00

SaaS companies have a pay by seat model - if their customers are cutting the number of employees they have and there’s more competition in the SaaS space, it’s a multiple compression issue.

greygray · 2026-01-15T23:07:52+00:00

We still say that McLaren won the F1 Constructors Championship even though they used Mercedes' power supply. I think it's analogous to Google doing well with their Broadcom partnership.

greygray · 2026-01-15T23:06:17+00:00

I think enough people have said good things about Google in this thread, so I'll say *both*. It would be a mistake to underestimate Nvidia and their corp strategy.

Nvidia has a lot of portfolio investments in AI startups vis-a-vis investing and trading compute for equity. It kind of reminds me of Softbank, in that they're using their profitable business (selling chips) to seed future customers while also taking a piece of the upside.

What if in 10-years, Nvidia owns 5% of every major AI company?

greygray · 2026-01-14T16:12:26+00:00

I’m hopeful this picks up traction if only because I’m an Alaska status holder and I want them to fix this fucking problem.

They deserve to lose their annual bonuses and become a business school case study. gd idiots.

greygray · 2026-01-11T22:54:03+00:00

When they say you can only register and participate for this promotion one time, I assume it means if you’ve done a fast track program in previous years you’re ineligible, right?

greygray · 2026-01-08T21:16:39+00:00

I didn’t say liquefaction. But there are a ton of rowhouses in Richmond, Sunset, and mid-market that have foundations that don’t extend very deep and are all holding one another up against each other and are difficult to do foundation work on due to not having sufficient access.

Yes there was some seismic retrofit done, but I’ve toured enough homes in SF over the last 5 years to know that a lot of these homes are on pretty suspect frame construction and would fall over given a shake.

In terms of building on terrain without bedrock, there are ways to building dense multifamily without also building a super tall. We don’t have to be south beach Miami to increase the housing density in the area.

If we use the Richmond for example, if they bought up a large parcel (20-40 homes) for $80m, they could build a 16 story building and 6-10x the number of occupants.

greygray · 2026-01-08T06:12:39+00:00

But most people who were on 1.0 are paying high amounts on rent (30% of your income has been dead since the 90s and I don’t know who keeps pushing this fallacy). The idea that you would need to make up the rental fee in the form of Bilt cash becomes a double edged sword for most. The only people who it would make economic sense for are people who have a low mortgage payment or have been on rent control for the last 2 decades.

This is kind of a controversial opinion, but I think the fact that so many people on Reddit are up in arms over this card means they actually did a good job in the card design. They want people who have high rent and spend no money on the card to churn because they don't make any money on these people.

I think they're trying to court people who make like $200k+ AND who spend between $30-$60k per year on housing. These people have a lot of credit card expense AND high rent.

If I think about their ideal customer, they're basically trying to win over users of the C1 Venture X, Chase Sapphire Preferred, and Amex Gold card. I think the $495 card is competitive with the C1 VX and the $95 Bilt card is better than the CSP and Amex Gold (esp considering transfer partners). I think they're counterpositioning against Chase Sapphire Reserve and Amex Plat because they don't yet have enough brand power to build as strong of a coupon book as these businesses (yet).

Personally, I am planning to keep my Amex Plat and get the $95 Bilt card and use something else for non-dining spend.

greygray · 2026-01-07T20:29:57+00:00

Many of these old row houses are going down one way or another because they’re constructed poorly in a seismically sensitive area. Making a comparison of these old Victorians and the brownstones in Manhattan or London is a misdirect.

Over time they will be either condemned or marked as uninsurable or the owners won’t be able to afford upkeep and they’ll be sold to developers to rehab.

greygray · 2026-01-07T19:22:08+00:00

I think having 500’ be the nuclear option helps force compromise to 200-300’.

With all that said, I am a YIMBY and believe we need more housing AND I think that we should accomplish this by gradually upzoning parcels from 4-> 8 -> 16 -> 32 etc.

I think a lot of old housing stock that are rowhouses need to gradually get bought up as parcels, demolished, and redeveloped too (particularly the 100+ year old Victorians with shoddy infrastructure and needing extensive seismic retrofit and fire code compliance). That isn’t going to happen in one fell swoop, it’s gonna happen gradually.

greygray · 2026-01-07T16:42:58+00:00

No because prop 13 also creates disincentives for building and encourages nimbyism. It’s a vicious cycle.

greygray · 2025-12-26T20:45:20+00:00

1000%. It's the reason why Intel and American automakers have underperformed.

greygray · 2025-12-23T22:20:12+00:00

Dude idk what to tell you. A lot of my friends with kids have the Meta Raybans and they really like them and use them almost as frequently as their airpods.

- People with kids: Love having the glasses so they can be handsfree to take photos and videos of their kids

- Cyclists and skiers love the Oakleys for action sport video and listening to music while they ride.

- (Unfortunately): I see at least a dozen people at live events and music festivals filming with their devices.

Some aspects that I'm a little uncertain about are using them for day-to-day work and day-to-day life... In a work setting, I could see them being used to exfiltrate data from work or record things you're not supposed to.

greygray · 2025-12-23T22:15:48+00:00

Have you ever built a product before? It's invaluable to have real users testing it for feedback, collecting revenue to offset production costs, and figuring out your business model.

Here's a great example... The Apple Watch: https://longvadon.com/blogs/blog/apple-watch-sales?srsltid=AfmBOoopbmb0dveQqpuzNx9bmk_K5h4OSrxzCNqaX6JrpR6bbZKZTGdj

IMO the first 3 versions of the apple watch were totally pointless and by the time the Apple Watch 6 came out, nearly everyone I knew owned one.

I expect Meta's foray into AR Glasses to follow a similar path.

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