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Where are the builders?

at are the brightest and most ambitious minds of our generation currently working on? - Here is a video from someone who spent 7 months building minecraft inside of minecraft by painstakingly constructing a redstone computer inside of it with its own graphics card and screen - Here is someone who spent 5 years constructing a 3D game within a 2D geometry game by building primitives and constructing 3D illusions from them - Here is a video from someone who spent 6 months building a factory inside factorio which recursively self-expands using a lua script - And here is someone who spent 4 months building a shader to let the linux kernel run inside of VRchat via writing a RISC-V CPU/SoC emulator in an HLSL pixel shader I find the above examples fascinating from the meta perspective: while there’s nothing wrong with having fun building inside of games, these are the very same skillsets which tech companies would pay six figures to have on their side! (of course they may enjoy the games more – this is discussed later) Sometimes people of this caliber even have trouble finding a job – they often don’t really know where to go besides apply online to boomer companies who reject them when they see a lack of credentials. They love building things and are very smart and hardworking, but their milieu is an environment which captured them from a young age (often a video game or social media) and sometimes also ensured that the value they produce is within a pre-existing platform (e.g.

In hindsight it’s really interesting thinking about past-me playing these games, because I was young and knew so little about the world, yet my counterparty was hundreds or thousands of well-educated adults optimizing for my addiction and spend. This is a fully general force too – If my friends and I only had a forest to play in growing up, we’d probably have invented some status game of who can climb the highest tree and would eventually have our own local culture, lexicon, and so on. Before this statement appears obviously fallacious to many readers, I need to add the necessary context that most people I knew in MMOs would also play them for ~100% of their free time, easily reacing 8-16 hours a day (yes, there’s a strong selection effect here).

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