Well “Going private” doesn’t mean anything. It can mean PE. It can mean “traditional” personal/family ownership (e.g. Musk with Twitter). It can also mean moving to a co-op model (theoretically I don’t think anything stops a bankrupt publicly-traded company being bought by its workers). “Private” doesn’t sit anywhere on the political spectrum; even Marxists can generally agree that co-operatives are in principle better than publicly-traded companies.

Unfortunately PE firms are usually the ones who win the bid when a company “goes private” because the PE business model is driven by speculation and leveraged buyouts, and (at least in the US) supported by advantageous tax rates. Even from a purely capitalist perspective it’s an objective failure that harms the macro-economy. It’s not even capitalism anymore; it’s oligarchic.

Ding ding ding. People hear “going private” and think “mom 'n pop shop”. But PE firms are vultures. Actually no, that’s mean to vultures.

How Private Equity Consumed America - Wendover Productions

It’s the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid “win” when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?

There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.

I don’t play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you’ll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn’t feel like improvement.

Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.

mentally stable

anakin-padme.jpg

That turquoise stuff and they skybox definitely aren’t real polygons. The trees on the left are kind of transparent. This is just midjourney or similar.

However I reckon existing transformer architectures would manage to output 3D models just fine given sufficient training data and compute power. Generating grammatically-correct files is what GitHub copilot already does with other languages (I tried, it does not seem to support .obj though). It would definitely be interesting for procedural game generation, in fact I would be surprised to learn that nobody is working on something like this.