Ben

@FrankfortDarryl Number go up?

Running a Toronto real estate development company: --- 2020: “Can you survive a global pandemic?” Sites shut down. Sales centers closed. Buyers disappear overnight. Lenders go quiet. You’re sitting on land loans with no revenue and everyone’s pretending this is a 3-month problem. --- 2021: “Still here? Great. Everything is now up 30%.” Land prices rip. Lumber triples. Buyers FOMO into shoebox condos like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon. You look smart—whether you are or not. --- 2022: “Impressive. Now let’s raise rates faster than anyone alive has seen.” Precon buyers can’t close. Appraisals come in light. Your pro forma gets nuked. Construction costs don’t come down, but your revenue just did. --- 2023: “Nice job surviving. Now let’s kill your exit.” Condo investors vanish. End users hesitate. Inventory builds. Lenders want more equity, more presales, more guarantees. Everyone’s ‘interested’—no one’s writing cheques. --- 2024: “You’re resilient. Now navigate policy chaos.” City of Toronto throws zoning friction, Tarion tightens compliance, Home Construction Regulatory Authority adds licensing pressure, and the province dangles incentives that don’t actually pencil. Also: rental replacement rules, development charges, HST confusion—pick your poison. --- 2025: “Congrats. Now build something people actually want.” Not 600-sq-ft investor bait. Real product. Bigger units. Better layouts. Actual service. Oh—and do it with: higher interest carry cautious lenders buyers who expect discounts but demand luxury Margins? Thin. Risk? Yours. --- 2026: “You’re still standing? Good. Now your buyers don’t need you.” AI lets anyone: design floorplans visualize interiors underwrite deals market units directly Your edge—information asymmetry—is gone. Now you’re not competing on access. You’re competing on judgment, execution, and trust. --- Bottom line: Every year strips away another advantage. What’s left is the actual business: picking the right site structuring the right deal building the right product and surviving long enough to see it through Most can’t. That’s the filter.

@himansh36013599 Great call back then. Do you see any kind of recovery, or is the Toronto RE market now entering it's Japanese phase?

Hopefully you had listened to me almost 3 years ago, when I had warned about Greater Toronto Condo market bust.. Good luck to everyone

@StephenPunwasi @ksorbs It's hard to believe in this day and age that people online would jump to conclusions, rather than digging deeper into the story to improve their understanding of the situation.

@ksorbs Nah, he called the technician who found the storage failure, then contacted the people who reported vehicle issues to connect them with his insurer. None of the folks involved in the situation are the ones calling him names, just the rage bait accounts that made up a story.

So he intentionally ruined peoples cars and is upset that those same people are saying mean things online about him? He's lucky that's all they're doing.

@GaryMarcus I heard that if this model were to get into the hands of bad actors, that it would be judgment day for humanity.

Yesterday’s Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown. • Sandboxing was turned off, so test didn’t show much about the real world. • Cheap open-weight models can (already) do some similar stuff • No evidence that Mythos itself is a major qualitative jump. In short, we got played. cc @tomfriedman @RonanFarrow

@Austen Pre-2004 it was called markup

I’m gonna be honest… I had no idea markdown was only invented in 2004. I just assumed it had been around far longer than that.

@dcurtis If they simply split this with every American, they could put $100K into each man, woman and child's pocket.

Tonight’s Artemis II launch to the moon is going to cost every American about $12 each. An Artemis launch costs $4.1 billion, is 95% single-use, and is largely based on technology from the 1980’s. It’s insanely overpriced, but I’m willing to pay $12 to watch a rocket take humans back toward the moon. Can’t wait.

@ahmednadar I feel like the city should commission a study to determine whether these proposed studies are worth moving forward with.

#Toronto Toronto City Council voted today to: - Study putting AI cameras on city vehicles to detect potholes (report due Q3 2027) - Investigate improving pothole reporting - Build an interactive map to track potholes Cost: millions. Timeline: years. SolveTO already does all three. Built in weeks. Live since February. 98 reports across 25 wards, and growing. The city is commissioning studies to explore building what one person already shipped. Council also voted down a task force to figure out why roads keep falling apart. 9-13. That one they probably should have kept. @GraphicMatt

@MattSpoke It's been implemented successfully a few times throughout history.

It’s very possible to vote for a terrible idea. It’s not possible to run this concept efficiently or deliver lower cost food without costing every taxpayer in the city a lot more than the “savings”.

@levelsio @StevieZollo The 1 billionth app with a stripe integration on the Internet. 1 more grain of sand on a very large beach.

✨ To prove my friend @StevieZollo (who's visiting me in Brazil) you don't need an idea, or even a lot of time these days to ship a little app that might make money I took the top idea from IdeasAI.com: "A startup that uses AI to generate personalized bedtime stories for kids based on their interests, family photos, and daily activities, delivered via a voice app. (❤️ 110 likes, 3 days ago)" So I copy pasted it into Claude Code and asked it to build it The first version of course didn't work, and I had to tell it some endpoints didn't work properly but then it fixed it The bedtime stories are generated by @xAI Grok 4.1, then sent to TTS with @GoogleAI Gemini and payment with @Stripe Checkout Total time from start to live: 24 minutes

@GuruOfDuhDuh @Kalshi You don’t think it’s wise for Earth to have a forward outpost base? Do you also leave your house unlocked at night?

@Kalshi Why? What fucking purpose does that serve besides wasting money?

JUST IN: NASA announces $20 billion plan to build permanent moon base

BREAKING🚨: NASA just confirmed this green fireball was spotted by hundreds of witnesses in the western U.S. on Sunday night, March 22. NASA stressed that this fireball isn’t related to the other 8 we have saw last week.

Serious question: Was that one of the worst fights in UFC history?

@ShrinesLegacy You should, can’t Unity just compile to each console?

@BenPie9 Hopefully later this year! We originally intended to do Switch first, then the other two consoles but we're considering releasing on all major consoles simultaneously.

Shrine's Legacy is 25% off ON SALE now until March 26th! Links below! 🐍🏜️👇 #indiegames

@exQUIZitely I couldn’t beat the first level lol

Raise your hand if you were a fan of this one. Some games excelled at storytelling with minimal or even no dialogue. Another World comes to mind, but Flashback (Delphine Software, 1992) did it extremely well too. It’s a great game, often mistaken for a sequel to Another World. However, the two are unrelated, and Éric Chahi was not involved. It was created by Paul Cuisset, who had previously worked with Chahi on Future Wars, which may explain the similarities in gameplay and design. Similar to Another World, Flashback was highly cinematic and story-driven for its era, relying mostly on short animated cutscenes and very brief text-based dialogue. The story unfolded primarily through stunning visuals that still hold up well today. The game was very well received and sold nearly a million copies, a great number for the early 90s. If you were a gamer in that era, chances are you played Flashback. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t have the same "wow" factor that Another World did when I first played it. Maybe the expectation was unfair, since you will always cherish the "original" more, I suppose?

@vasuman Their first mistake was not giving full & absolute control to @ID_AA_Carmack

As someone who worked at Reality Labs: the Metaverse had real legs but was obliterated by middle management completely out of touch with how young people actually use technology. I built a V1 tool that game developers genuinely needed, and the moment it was done, it got shipped to a team in London (to die), and I was reassigned to a "higher-priority project" that zero developers asked for. Multiply that by every team, and you'll understand why this never took off yet cost 80 billion.

@ShrinesLegacy Will buy when it’s on PS5. Looks great

GOG: gog.com/en/game/shrine… Epic: store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/shrine… Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/1435410/Sh…

Take on the elements in a co-op #RPG adventure! 🔥🪨🌬️❄️ Shrine's Legacy is available on PC now! Links below!👇

@ShaziGoalie Costco recently added a new menu item (Caramel Brownie Sundae) and it seems to be quite the hit!

New pre-con line of 2026 in Mississauga Heartland location.

@aminerehioui Artillery hitting infantry should have a random chance of insta-gibbing them, regardless of their health.

improved siege units. The artillery feels more like a siege weapon, with increased range and shoots upward. The MLRS shoots salvos, great against groups. Range and damage balance still not final. Suggestions welcome!

@MarketManiaCa I'd keep an eye on city finances as well, most are broke.

Goeasy’s $1B wipeout isn’t a glitch—it’s the canary in the coal mine. 🇨🇦📉 The subprime crack is the signal. The next 12 months will be a brutal reckoning for the over-leveraged. 3 Disaster Zones to watch: 🏠 Residential RE: The "renewal wall" is finally hitting. 🏢 Commercial RE: A valuation death spiral with no bottom. 🤖 AI Datacenters & Equity: The ultimate speculative froth. The "easy money" era is dead. The cracks are here. Who’s next? 🏦💥