I worked in HFT. (Though am now completely out of fintech and have no skin in the game). "Flash Boys" traditional HFT is dead already, the trade collapsed in 2016-2018 when both larger institutions got less dumb with order execution, and also several HFTs "switched sides" and basically offered "non-dumb order execution" as a service to any institutions who were unable to play the speed game themselves. Look at how Virtu's revenue changed from mostly trading to mostly order execution services over that time period.
Flash Boys was always poorly researched and largely ignorant of actual market microstructure and who the relevant market participants were, but it also aged quite poorly as all of their "activism" was useless because the market participants just all smartened up purely profit-driven.
If you want to be activist about something, the best bet for 2026 is probably that so much volume is moving off the lit exchanges into internal matching and it degrades the quality of price discovery happening. But honestly even that's a hard sell because much of that flow is "dumb money" just wanting to transact at the NBBO.
Actually, here's the best thing to be upset about: apps gamifying stock trading / investing into basically SEC-regulated gambling.
Honest question - do you think that everyone else thinks this is even REMOTELY what the front page will look like in 10 years?
I comment because I really cannot figure out why you left your comment. Do you think the rest of the commenters think this has predicted the future? It might be one thing to point out specific trends you think will not play out, or unexpected trends you think may show up that are currently left out. But to just remark that the future will contain things we cannot currently predict seems so inherently, unspokenly obvious that I just have to assume that wasn't the point of your post, and I've missed it entirely.
Sorry, I'm really not trying to be mean or anything - i'm just really confused.
Your confusion seems to stem from the assumption that, making a statement is an implicit assertion that most people believe the opposite of that statement.
In reality, statements are often made rather for the purpose of emphasis or rhetoric.
To answer your question: I think that GP mostly wanted to share the insight that the future zig-zags, which is kind of non obvious and a fun thing to think about. People often like leaving comments about interesting thoughts or ideas, even if they are only tangentially related.
Java honestly just does not have this. By the time java collectively decided that being able to spend your time writing your actual product instead of fucking with config shit forever, the age of the monolithic SSR templated backend app were gone. So now most modern things like helidon focus on being microservicey like go, or they have very soft template rendering offerings and don't really do batteries included.
I feel your pain, I myself am working on a react frontend + spring boot backend and fiddling with it to integrate with spring session, security, etc properly was a HUGE pain because neither world knows anything at all about each other. If I did it from scratch I'd just "rails new myapp" and be done already.
Yeah. Random example: I have better "ambient awareness" remotely because with slack I am in every hallway simultaneously, and can skim the conversations and set up highlight words
I wonder how much of that comes down to culture. Since going remote I have come to wonder if a direct-message-first chat culture is harmful to collaboration.
DM-first is an extremely frustrating culture. That kind of operation tells me that that folks are too risk averse and political to discuss things openly. Typically this is led by panicky managers that are worried about involving too many people or having to explain things to folks they don’t want to deal with, and it escalates from there and gums up ALL the things. It makes Slack basically useless.
The same people DMing however will also extol the virtues of posting in public and lament why there is not more conversation happening in the open.
IMHO most companies encourage public-first conversation, but still end up with DM-first as their employees don't have enough trust in how their messages will be received.
It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
It is. You need to be aware of it and have people that can set examples about chatting in public rooms or who can recognize when to stop a dm chat and move to be public
This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.
It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion.
I have a super high opinion of Valve. Sure, they have loot crates. But sensible people don't buy them. I guess you could blame them for having it in the first place. That's fair I guess. But I've never for a second considered buying any of that junk.
I just buy single player offline games with no IAP, and Steam is amazing. It's a million miles ahead of the competitors, and it's really surprising that EA/Ubi etc.. try to compete but don't get the reason they're losing. They screw customers and then act surprised that customers hate them.
The problem with loot crates, and the reason why they're being slowly regulated against in several places, is that "sensible people don't buy them" has never stopped people to lose their life to gambling.
I hope everyone who is so outspoken about loot crates are also fighting for TCG packs to be banned/regulated because they are literally the same level of "gambling".
I think we can ban companies selling packages without disclosing exactly what is in those packages. I think we can regulate companies in that way without finding ourselves hopelessly slipping down some silly slope.
I can totally see EU making unwanted "dark" products returnable for full refund. I understand that already applies to anything that tries to force contracts terms on you after the purchase: you can choose not to agree and get a full refund.
I think it's difficult to just call things "self control" when there have been entire college majors / studies / casinos dedicated to tricking us into making the choices they want.
Look at the Apple price ladder on ipads.
Look at any tactic by a casino - go to Reno and see many retires at the beginning of the month drop their whole social security check in the casino.
Look at why they label things $9.99 instead of $10.00
Look at why they put all the overpriced candy at the cash register in a super market.
Look at how they create junk food to be "perfect" and addictive
source: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/world-hunger/trade-and-food...
I have a lot of friends that stopped playing gacha games because they would come home drunk - the game would incentivize you to login - and then blow more money than they truly wanted to.
At some level it's unfair to say we should just "have self control" when you have entire academic institutions and entire industries figuring out how to get you to "crack" and make a bad decision that favors their pocket book.
So yeah - I agree - we need more self control - but it's being purposefully assaulted every second of our day by EVERYTHING.
Yeah, existing in the modern world you're surrounded by mind-hackers. Everywhere you go there are hacking attempts against your mind, trying to get you to buy stuff you shouldn't or want stuff you don't. It's really absurd.
Well then regulation should help. And people should stop doing outright stupid things - you have no reason to be in casino, in same way you have no reason lighting that cigarette or doing another round of binge drinking (or those gacha games, had to google WTF that is, same mind cancer as the rest, no thank you). You, nor me are not stronger than those addictions. Billions of miserable poor fuckers before us are proof enough, learn from their mistakes.
Attack from both sides, heck all sides - from the top with regulation. From the bottom by being mentally more resilient, there are endless ways to get there - ie do rock climbing (yes, not joking, it will change you for the better for good if you stick long enough). Or other sports and activities that challenge you, your fears, your laziness, push yourself physically. Do it 10 times and something clicks in the mind and it goes almost on its own afterwards.
Another angle - shame those working in such business. Goes for fuck ton of FAANGS and many others. I know its blurry and whatever else of an excuse will fly around, don't care. Have a clearly moral work or accept shame, or change for the better.
Its a terrible situation but by far the biggest mistake is throwing hands in the air and giving up immediately just because some greedy sociopathic billionaire wants a bigger yacht or rocket to compensate even more for their fucked up childhood, and thus pushes a lot of psychology phds against you. You don't have to even start to play that game, not even for a second. We are stronger, much stronger than that and real good life (TM) is not about anything digital in any way.
Depending on how your brain got wired, self-control condemns you to a life of misery while not being exposed allows you to live a normal life. Of course you cannot ask for societal experience to be tailored just for you but there seem to be a consensus on protecting the most vulnerable people from the most destructive habits. Where to draw the line is for everyone to find agreement upon and if that's not good enough for you, you need to find a safe haven.
Self-control is like a tourniquet on a severed leg, it can buy you time but you need an hospital at some point
Most people have perfectly well avoided blowing all their money on baseball card packs or whatever other random "box of randomized items" without enduring a life of misery...
If self control were reliable we wouldn't need seatbelts, antilock brakes, bumpers, and other safety mechanisms. We would all just drive safely all the time.
But that would be silly. Self control is not as simple and reliable as we want it to be.
I agree that humans are fallible, but the analogy is still off despite being catchy, yet flawed. Seatbelts are passive mechanical systems; self-control is a complex, context-dependent cognitive function. Conflating the two oversimplifies how human behavior actually works.
There's definitely a double standard in the gaming community where people don't treat TCG packs as ethically fraught in the same way, despite being the same thing.
And loot boxes in Valve games never bothered me, because if you want a particular skin you can just buy it off the market. I can't remember being angry at Valve for having loot boxes.
All other games require you to keep opening loot boxes to get what you want.
Well not with their battle passes in Dota. They employed a lot of FOMO tactics where you had to spend hundreds to guarantee a set that you'll otherwise never be able to get again.
The author is completely ignoring that you didn't have to BUY these hats. For example, you could (and still can) craft the Milkman hat with 1 refined metal + 1 special delivery weapon.
Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail.
But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
Whatever the reason for their policy, it provides a nice sense of safety to Linux gamers. They can buy the game without worrying about compatibility; if the game doesn't run then its two clicks for an automated refund.
Sure, but I imagine they saw the dominoes falling and realized that the optics of going down kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights would be exceptionally bad. If they hadn't fully conceded then the EU would have been up their ass too before long.
AFAIK Steam has this too. The Subscriber Agreement clearly states that you're not guaranteed continued, free access to Steam. If they decided they wanted to charge you to access games you already bought, they could.
I truly believe that Valve has two fundamental things working in their favor:
Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.
Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.
Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)
Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!
So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.
Yes everybody is trying to find rational reasons but to me like in recent politics a lot has to do with irrational tribalism.
I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.
Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?
It isn't tribalism, at least not from my side. There's a tangible, noticeable, immediate difference between buying a piece of hardware from Valve and buying a piece of hardware from Google or Apple. I really resented Valve after the Steam box debacle that left me with a $1,200 paperweight, but since then, they've done enormous amounts of work to regain my trust through tangible increases in the quality of the gaming experience, including not having to use Windows to game anymore, and providing me with open hardware that I can install whatever I want on, including using their hardware as my own personal PC when e.g. traveling.
Its weird to me that people choose what companies to buy from on the basis of whether or not the CEO owns a yacht or how rich he is. That is not the operative criteria when I choose what products to buy, but rather how well that product suits my needs and how much I trust the relationship with the company that produced it.
Valve is just miles ahead of every other manufacturer in this regard.
Hard disagree. The difference between "good" and "bad" billionaires is in how the operate the entities they control. No matter how much money Bill Gates gives to charity, he should mainly be judged based how Microsoft acted while he were in control. Similarly, Gabe Newell is a much "better" billionaire than Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos.
What does it matter if Gabe has a yacht? He has multiple of them.
Gabe also have an undersea research company called Inkfish, which is a non-profit company designed to "conduct deep-sea research and explore, map, and study the least-explored parts of the ocean".
In 2020 he donated $300,000 to the Starship Children's Hospital.
In 2020 Gabe Newell arranging free concert for New Zealand.
In 2014 Gabe founded a Racing Team which helps support Grassroots motorsports, the Heart of Racing Team also supports the Seattle Children's Hospital.
Game is also the co-founder of a company called foundry10, which is an education research organization focused on youth philanthropy.
Gabe is not the evil person you are trying to make him out to be. He has visited numerous schools, colleges and universities and done free talks out of goodwill. He has put millions into research and development of Linux software for the bettering of Linux community as a whole. He doesn't "Just like Linux", through his investments and care for the Linux community, Valve has made Linux a viable gaming platform, which it would be likely a decade behind without his investments.
It's amazing that an always-on DRM company can become the "good guy" by staying the same level of asshole they've always been, while every other company became much worse assholes.
Steam itself is DRM, especially when games depend on it to even run, which many of Valve's games do. They don't have additional DRM on top of that but why would they when they already control Steam.
Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.
There are disadvantages. e.g. if you don't want to update a program (maybe the new version breaks your modded setup), too bad. Or if you need Windows still for compatibility, it no longer supports Windows 7, so you have to go hunting for old versions of the client and fiddle with it to prevent updates (if that still even works), at which point you'd might as well just mod it to remove the DRM instead.
Basically, it creates a failure point for setups that should otherwise last and be stable several more decades.
Not that I see. The publisher can add old versions as a "beta" that you can select if they want (e.g. Kerbal Space Program and Factorio do this), but otherwise you can only run the latest. Your choices for updating are "when launching", "when Steam decides", and "immediately". There is no "when I decide" or "never". e.g. Bethesda has apparently broken Fallout 4 multiple times over the last 1.5 years with no ability to revert after it had been stable for 5 years.
> always-on DRM is actually just purely an advantage for the consumer
Look me in the eyes and read this quote to me again. Then think about how yourself from 20 years ago would feel about reading this quote from someone else. You've gone so far down the rabbit hole but you don't realize you're in one.
Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.
My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.
It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
In case you launch the GOG game because of Proton, then I suggest using Heroic launcher to start it instead. You can use Proton there too, automatically downloads and everything, same as Steam. And there will be no clashes with Steam.
You don't need to launch your GOG game via Steam, you can just remove its shortcut from Steam and launch it separately. Then your son can launch and play the Steam game in parallel, so both of you can play coop.
DRM is optional on Steam, many games don't have it (or roll their own). In many cases of Steam DRM, activation is only one-time, after that, granted the hardware doesn't change significantly, the player can be offline indefinitely.
I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".
On a personal level I just don't give a shit about the loot crates or cosmetic stuff because I don't buy them, they hold no interest for me, and they typically don't impact gameplay.
I acknowledge that there's a legitimate ethical concern there the same way there is for, say, Magic the Gathering or other card games. But much like MtG, I can't bring myself to be all that upset about it.
You don't become a billionaire by having your hands clean. But what set them appart to other companies is that they go out of their way not to be hostile to their users.
Loot boxes done well are not user hostile, players pay because they like them, and sure, it uses all the tricks from the gambling industry to get as most money as they can, but player don't feel scammed or considering it an obstacle to their goals. It is just an additional feature they may or may not use. Compare to say, locking part of the game behind a paid DLC, players don't like that, they feel forced. Same end goal, that is to make their money your money, but the latter is considered hostile.
And ads, Steam is full of ads, from recommendations to the store page showing up right as you launch steam. But they won't put a popup between you and your game. They show you the ads you want to see... And you buy games you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
And Steam has DRM, that's weak DRM, but effective at what it does, and importantly, if you bought the games legally, you won't even notice, contrary to some other company intrusive practices.
"we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AIwe can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI"
But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).
Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.
LLMs are severely overhyped, have many problems, and I don't want them in my face anymore than the average person. But we're not in 2023 anymore. These kinds of comments just come off ignorant.
I dunno, I'm not fully anti-LLM, but almost every interaction I have with an LLM-augmented system still at some point involves it confidently asserting plainly false things, and I don't think the parent is that far off base.
Agreed, some days I code for 4-6 hours with agentic tools but 2025 or not I still can't stomach using any of the big three LLMs for all but the most superficial research questions (and I currently pay/get access to all three paid chatbots).
Even if they were right 9/10 (which is far from certain depending on the topic) and save me a minute or two compared to Google + skim/read-ing a couple websites, it's completely overshadowed by the 1/10 time they calmly and confidently lie about whether tool X supports feature Y and send me on a wild goose chase looking through docs for something that simply does not exist.
In my personal experience the most consistently unreliable questions are those that would be most directly useful for my work, and for my interests/hobbies I'd rather read a quality source myself. Because, well, I enjoy reading! So the value proposition for "LLM as Google/forum/Wikipedia replacement" is very, very weak for me.
There are two types of LLM defender; those who claim that it’ll be non-shit soon, just keep believing, and those who claim that it is already non-shit and the complainer is just stuck in year-1 where year is the current year.
Given that this has now been going on for a few years, both are wearing thin.
Like, I’m sorry, but the current crop of bullshit generators are not good. They’re just not. I’m not even convinced they’re improving at this point; if anything the output has become more stylistically offputting, and they’re still just as open to spouting complete nonsense.
Everyone deserves freedom. Tinkerers and regular users, software engineers and grandmas, artists and Paint users.
Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.
This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.
And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.
We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.
Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.
And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.
Are navies allowed to just kill people on boats for not flying a flag? Arrest them perhaps, I could see - but just kill them with no attempt to find any other recourse?
Define "allowed", esp. whom it is doing the allowing.
Any and all current international treaties are visibly toothless these days. Russia invades Ukraine and the UN shrugs while they say "hey, cut it out!". Israel colonizes parts of Gaza that it has specifically agreed not to colonize and the response is the same. The US commits a war crime with it's morning cuppa and every time the international community sorta whistles and heel-turns hoping that they're not interesting enough to be next.
The problem is that IOT have any kind of effective enforcement mechanism, you have to have the bigger stick, and we've just allowed countries to do nothing but build bigger sticks since the 40s.
It's a fair question. I was only able to rabbithole on this for so long before realizing I had to get back to work, but if anyone wants to continue the search here's the most relevant document I was able to find. It's dense and very legalese:
From what I was able to gather, there are a lot of holes in the convention that are large enough to drive a gunboat through. What I mean is, in the places where a clause might say something like "don't indiscriminately sink ships", it will also say "unless effects of criminal activity extend to sovereign land" or something like that. This is vague enough that your lawyers could grind the wheels of justice to a halt on the premise that "we are protecting our citizens from all that dangerous cocaine" or whatever.
Frankly, I wonder what changed between when we were putting the stuff in cola sold on shelves and now that it justifies batrillions of dollars fighting an unwinnable war to suppress.
Flash Boys was always poorly researched and largely ignorant of actual market microstructure and who the relevant market participants were, but it also aged quite poorly as all of their "activism" was useless because the market participants just all smartened up purely profit-driven.
If you want to be activist about something, the best bet for 2026 is probably that so much volume is moving off the lit exchanges into internal matching and it degrades the quality of price discovery happening. But honestly even that's a hard sell because much of that flow is "dumb money" just wanting to transact at the NBBO.
Actually, here's the best thing to be upset about: apps gamifying stock trading / investing into basically SEC-regulated gambling.
reply