and "the Digital Antiquarian" just did a great, deep two-parter on the history of Looking Glass last autumn. (covers Thief, Thief 2, System Shock, and some forgotten oddities)
I personally got started as the IT guy at a newspaper. Went from managing the network to digitizing their ad tracking (they literally used a clipboard) to going head-to-head with Craigslist.
Being the only person in the room who can “do computer” is an easy way to make yourself indispensable fast.
(It feels like tech is one of the few industries where graduates just slot into a job in their chosen vertical. Everyone who studies literature, art, fashion, etc. takes it for granted that they will have to work in some other industry for _years_ before they can pivot into the field they’re actually trained for.)
It's the rate of change. Things like NAFTA took many years to implement, and were debated and developed in the open. Everyone understood what would happen to the economy and that there would be a decade of transition.
> A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.
That is a big deal. The US has for a long time been seen as a stable economy that's easy to trade with because policy changes would take a long time to come into effect by which everyone had had the time to adjust.
Compared to the various stuff that was happening in Europe in the previous decades (at least here in the east) the US were a stable safe heaven where you could trust things wouldn't drastically change overnight.
That's what I thought after the first Trump administration. But the fact that we re-elected him proves that it wasn’t a one-off, we will always be four years away from the possibility of a wild regime change.
That’s why it would jar to be Vance and this reigime, Kay without Trump. 10 more years of both red and blue and enough change to undo and prevent this in the future could get it out.
Germany was reformed, Japan was reforms. These things take time
But the problem is the American people want this. This isn’t some dictator in Korea or Iraq or Venezuela, this is someone with full democratic support. There are many checks and balances in the American system to avoid a single person doing this amount of damage without having widespread support.
I’ve been knocking around and getting various false starts on three ideas for a while…
- a videogame. I've got a pretty killer idea in an open niche, but the indie market is so massively oversaturated that it feels impossible to get eyeballs.
- a next-generation post-RSS newsreader. But news is so depressing these days. I think most of the world wants to ostrich and I don't blame them.
- a reboot of Svpply, my own shuttered startup. I'd love to just make (another) thing that's about excellent clothes and shoes and artisanal pocketknives, but the way the economy is going, this feels grotesque. I was lucky to make it the first time when luxury goods were attainable _and_ normal people could pay for necessities; that window has closed.
I actually doubt that. Irwin was a philanthropist and a scientist, with a decent sense of humor. This is a basically profitless project for public good. I think if the founder has bona-fides, Irwin’s estate would jump at it.
Hmmm we've never approached the Irwin estate, even though all our work is about stingray sting prevention and treatment. We do need to make profit to stay in business, so it's not entirely charity. Maybe we should see how they feel though. I also worry about the optics of advertising so directly on somebody's death. Especially because none of our products would have prevented / helped in his scenario.
Love this, I'll keep an eye on it. I'd happily use it with my apartment building's clothes washers, which are connected to the internet via a painful UI.
Amazon used to have a thing for books that didn't have Kindle editions, "Click here to tell the publisher you'd like to read this on Kindle." You should develop in public (X/Bluesky/Mastodon), and have a prominent form for wonks like us to forward "I want Aivi" to various manufacturers.
It was a lot of micro-USB and some Lightning. CAT5E and lower. HDMI 1.4 and lower. All still useable cables for many people. It went to my local hackerspace.
https://www.filfre.net/2025/10/a-looking-glass-half-empty-pa...
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