@max_spero_@Jack_Raines Your insight really hits. This isn’t casual observation, this is the mark of someone who knows.
Just kidding. 😉 Once you start to notice it, the stink is unavoidable.
I would trade all the money I have and start over if I had to choose between wealth and my kids.
No one wishes they spent more time working for others or had more stuff at the end of their lives.
Friend of mine is 35 years old, married and doesn’t want kids.
His household income is roughly $300k/yearly and his house is nearly paid off.
They invest a good portion of their income for retirement, take multiple yearly vacations and live a nice life.
I think people like this are going to regret not having kids in their future.
One day when he’s old all he will have to look back on is the random stuff he bought and wasted money on.
Instead of putting that money towards having kids and building a family he’s choosing consumerism.
This just seems so wasteful and boring to me.
@scaling01 Good, I need more ways to spend ridiculous amounts of compute. 🫠
Can’t wait to see the benchmarks and hope they find a more aligned public name.
Unilever makes 250,000 job applicants play video games before they’ll even look at a resume.
For their Future Leaders program, instead of reading cover letters, they run candidates through 12 neuroscience-based games built by Pymetrics (now owned by Harver) that measure how you make decisions under pressure, how you handle risk, and how fast you learn. The games cut their hiring time from four months to four weeks and saved over 50,000 hours of recruiter time. JPMorgan, BCG, Accenture, Mastercard, and McDonald’s all use the same platform.
There’s real science behind this. Researchers at three European universities put 40 business students through Sid Meier’s Civilization, then ran them through a Fortune 500-style management assessment center. Published in the Review of Managerial Science in 2020, the results were clear: students who scored highest in the game scored highest on problem-solving, organizing, and planning. They also had better grades.
A 2013 study at Queen Mary University of London found the same pattern with StarCraft. 72 volunteers got 40 hours of training. The StarCraft group showed a significant improvement in cognitive flexibility (your brain’s ability to switch between tasks and think on your feet) compared to a control group that played The Sims. The statistical evidence was 40 times stronger than what you’d expect from chance.
SimCity specifically has been used in university urban planning courses since 1994, when a professor named John Gaber started assigning it to teach systems thinking. A 2025 study found students who played it showed a 26% improvement in understanding sustainable city design, and 81% applied what they learned in the game to real projects.
The Civilization study was a proof-of-concept with 40 students, not a 10,000-person trial. But the pattern across multiple studies, multiple games, and a $20 billion gamification industry keeps pointing the same direction. The meme is a joke. The science behind it isn’t.
@alexrkonrad@ycombinator@flexport Agents, done well, have so much impact you can invest a couple days and see real gains in the same week. Worth it.
The verification bottleneck that comes is a doosy though.