Not to mention this is the only glossy display he's used, which is visually going to be much more pleasing than a matte display until you can't stand the glare.
I don't find that particularly hard to believe. Reading a pitch deck is like reading presentation slides - you can't really know what the author had in mind unless it's really good, and you tend to fill in the blanks with your own biases. That makes reading most decks a bit redundant. It's probably better just to talk to the founders and actually see their pitch.
People considering him a genius as opposed to a narcissist who accidentally got rich likely fuels his need to drop nuggets of "wisdom" to the peasants like this.
His essays are usually a big pile of “focus on the important things and add value or whatever”-type platitudes. It’s funny that each one has been proofread and revised based on comments from the Who-is-Who in SV, a typical Emperor and His New Clothes situation.
To be fair though, 99% of wisdom books from successful people are like this.
Calling it platitudes is harsh. The Airbnb founders have repeatedly said that their company was going no where but for Paul Graham's mentorship and the series of advice he gave them, amidst an economy in dire recession.
And btw, before YC, the whos-who of SV were a closed-knit, exclusive group. You underestimate the very radical nature of YC when they started in 2004.
I think that is an important fact to know considering the confusion in this thread.
There are people commenting that pg surely can't be a genius because this or that he engages in isn't ethical (to them).
But that's the thing, the IQ says absolutely nothing about ones ethical responsibility or the amount of empathy one has.
It is purely measuring "logical thinking ability". Things like "continue this sequence", "recognize a pattern", etc.
I also often see this dangerous assumption that ones political opponents or everyone with a different opinion than the one which seems most rational to ones own must be "stupid". In reality, the problem is that we focus on something as (arguably) unimportant as the IQ, which measures only something very narrow.
Another misconception about IQ is that those who are more poor or have less favourable job positions must have a lower IQ. To give just one counter example to that, very often, people who have some sort of handicap (ASD, ADHD, etc.) are also "gifted", have a high IQ, are good when it comes to logical thinking. But their handicaps still make their lives more difficult in general, so they face more adversity than someone who is "normal".
Sorry that i wrote a wall of text, was just thinking out loud.
In my personal opinion, the IQ is already a little dangerous, because it assigns a "value" to a human life, but that is an entirely different discussion.
I'm no particular fan of pg and for sure I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to VC, but it is my understanding that at the very early stages of investment pitch-decks are pretty much useless, it surprised me when I saw all those people attacking pg for this particular issue.
Maybe he’s read one for Viaweb or to help someone pitch? But I believe it in the context of PG as an investor, similar to how Warren Buffett could say he’s “never read” an investment banker’s report.
There's an obsession with pitch decks and whitepapers in some communities that borders on form over function.
Imagine showcasing a complete Dapp with a tutorial, basically ready for launch excluding some UX changes, and then getting questions about, "What's your roadmap?" or, "Where's your whitepaper?"
I appreciate his perspective here. Words must mean action. Talk is cheap.
That's not what most people mean when they say pitch deck, IMO. Most people are talking about a multiple-slide PowerPoint, covering a bunch of standard topics (team, market, etc).
There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".
I wasted so much of my life on this game around 1999-ish. I think one year I looked at my play time and about a third of my waking hours were spent playing.
Got the CTO of the startup I was working at into this game. One day his wife came in and saw me playing and said "Oh, you play this too." And I told her "Yeah, I was the person who introduced So-and-so to it." She hissed out "That was YOU?!" and walked away real fast. Never spoke to me again.
Amazing game - I spent several years in the early 2000s playing a spinoff called Infantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_(video_game). Sony ran it into the ground and I wound up trying SubSpace since it was supposedly the predecessor and had the same engine, but never got into it.
While typing this up I discovered Infantry is actually still alive, resurrected by some diehards on free player-maintained servers! Can't imagine that happening for any of today's games in twenty years. It's probably just nostalgia, but to me the early 2000s were a special golden age of PC gaming and community that will never be topped.
Definitely one of my favorite games of all time! I liked the server that had the economic model with all the different kinds of guns, shields, and armors it was super fun.
Extreme Games is my favorite (large CTF game with a bunch of different bases). Unfortunately it wasn't one of the default zones on the client last I checked and you had to go into the client's server view to add it. Really is one of the best zones. Much more interesting than Trench Wars.
If anybody played Infantry, the EOL zone was based on Extreme Games. Though it would blow my mind if anyone knows what I'm talking about.
EGFL has created some of the tensest gaming experiences in decades with teammates from across the globe. Regular 8 or 9 hour games that were hotly contested.
Lag-attaching as a strategy is an incredible example of how innovative gamers were given latency restraints. :) Shout out to Explosive, my first EG Squad.
I dont remember that many drawn out games in EGFL. Longest one i know of was imp vs mut, which was 12+ hours long. Lag attaching was a dirty bug which just added fun :)
Wow that takes me back. Some incredibly thrilling gaming moments with large numbers of people that climaxed after sometimes literal hours of back and forth.
I was in one of the better clans at the time and the sheer skill of some of those players was astounding.
Since www.rshl.org doesn't appear to be loading here, could you give me an ELI5 on how this differs from Trench Wars (which I still play periodically having owned a copy of Subspace itself) ?
Hockey Zone creatively shortens the bullet lengths for ships and decreases the respawn timer to simulate a hockey check. A powerball serves as the puck, and there is both public games (effectively pickup in recreational sports nomenclature) and a 20+ year running league.
Technically Hockey Zone runs on something called ASSS (a small subspace server) which enables significantly more advanced features than the base client such as instant replay and dynamic scoreboard overlays.
That's fascinating and something I should definitely try one day - I doubt it'll replace Trench Wars in my heart but I bet I'll really enjoy experimenting for a bit.
Can I ask what the compelling gameplay is of this game, where people spend thousands of hours on it? From a distance it doesn't seem like e.g. a bit persistent world, but more of an arena, short one-off games kinda thing; I find it hard to comprehend you could spend thousands of hours on that.
I spent a summer there. Even playing solo free for all it was so much fun being the top scorer in a zone, having that little trophy next to your ship, and having people hunt you or get blasted. The ships vary, but there's a fast fighter that can one shot kill most things if you are a very good shot, and zoom by other ships on after burners with a little spin, dodging the return fire. That ship can also put a bullet through the openings in walls and bases and sometimes take out a defender. Even spending an entire summer at it, I wasn't the best shot by a long shot.
That's just my experience as well. There are many other types of ships like bombers with big explosive, slow shots with blast effect, and other ships that can have other players attach to them as turrets. If your team in the arena can escort a bomber safely to a base with some fighters, you can often nuke the enemy right through the walls and capture the flag there. Meanwhile if you are just piloting a fighter it's a big win to take out one of the turret ships. Then there's other ships like ones that can cloak and fire sneak attacks, etc..
I'd say that SubSpace and its predecessors were the first "haiku-competitives" -- a lineage that eventually resulted in DotA and League of Legends.
Essentially: distill gameplay to a relatively small number of rules + iterate balance until it's incredibly finely tuned + let the playerbase go nuts with whatever strategies they can come up with.
The attraction being that they're easy to pick up (few rules to learn) but incredibly deep (complex interactions and strategies).
Coupled with the fact that circa-late-90s, the idea of an MMO was still mind blowing. Games with friends and strangers?!
From memory, SubSpace also had a fairly addictive loot mechanic (tiered materials, item construction, randomly timed rare enemy spawns).
I remember playing one called Gravitron maybe on my old PC. The kind you launch from the DOS prompt. You have to navigate planetary terrain and defense systems while you're ship is in constant free fall, so you give tiny controlled thrusts to keep from crashing and slide left and right.
I remember this was the promo game on pepsi.com for a week (I believe I was busy collecting pepsi points for a Harrier jet at the time) and I ended up spending thousands of hours on it. Fantastic game - can't believe how well it worked on 56k.
