Eric Neuman

@Subnautica I have every confidence that @UnknownWorlds will get this right. This is what early access is for. By the way if any of you from the studio are reading this, I can't wait for more. I'm a Cyclops fan, psyched for when you reveal that you're just making bases mobile 😜

Huge @Subnautica fan, played both previous games through multiple times. Just finished the EA of 2, I gave it 37 hours of play to take feel it out. Here's my take on the "let us kill stuff" controversy: it's being totally misrepresented.

@Subnautica Classic product management issue. Users ask for a faster horse, actual solution is a car. A response in that direction to the very real issues could have been a really great community moment but 🤷‍♂️ I get the annoyance on both sides.

@Subnautica From a game design perspective this seems easy to correct. Reduce creature count, make their trigger zones smaller, give the user back stun that lasts a reasonable length of time, create a reusable deployable distraction, there's so many options that don't involve adding a BFG.

@Subnautica You can manage most creatures with distraction flares and health packs which I did early game, but by the time I'm 400+ meters down in my underwater spaceship this doesn't make in game sense. This is the actual problem. The solutions aren't reusable. Creatures are just a tax.

@Subnautica Once you have the repair gun and a tadpole pod you can easily deal with them but your forced into a jump out get the thing repair the pod jump in loop. Everything becomes about minimizing time outside the pod. Before you get those things your only resource is consumables.

@Subnautica In the new game the creatures, especially past clearing the first bloom, are incredibly annoying and a bit immersion breaking. They are clustered around game objectives and resources, attack constantly, often from afar, but don't really threaten the player. Annoying not fun.

@Subnautica I never bothered to kill a Leviathan because it's very possible to just sneak around them which is really fun and makes you feel like a badass because it's pure skill and knowledge that makes it work.

@Subnautica The few creatures in the first games that you can't learn to avoid triggering you have the stasia rifle for. This is perfect because it stuns them for a meaningful period and you get a lot of shots out of one battery. If you play cleverly you rarely need it.

@Subnautica The new game is great but the balance really is off with the creature interactions. The fun of the first game is continuously being terrified of these scary creatures and then discovering yet mostly leave you alone if you know how to handle them.

This has a clinical name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. And the ADHD version runs on a completely different mechanism than the neurotypical one. A neurotypical person stays up late because they want more leisure time. The ADHD brain stays up because it spent every drop of dopamine it had on executive function during the day. Sitting in meetings, managing transitions, filtering impulses, remembering the thing you were supposed to remember. That burns through dopamine the way sprinting burns through glycogen. By 10pm the tank is empty. But here's where it gets counterintuitive. The exhaustion is physical. The dopamine deficit is neurological. Those are two separate systems. Your muscles want sleep. Your prefrontal cortex is starving for the stimulation it was denied all day because it spent 14 hours on task-switching and impulse control instead of anything that actually felt rewarding. The phone at midnight is the brain trying to collect what it's owed. Low-effort, high-stimulation content. Scrolling, short videos, rabbit holes. The exact profile of activity that delivers dopamine without requiring the executive function you already depleted. The sleep researchers call this a "self-regulation failure." It's closer to a debt collection. You borrowed against your own reward system to function all day. The bill comes due at midnight. And the brain will not let you sleep until it gets paid.

Teaching in the age of LLMs: I failed 4 students, for the first time ever. I also gave more A+'s than ever before. In previous years, students realized after the first or second HW that they weren't in Kansas anymore and needed to work hard. No more. Just solve it with LLMs. But then the midterm arrives, and they can answer 0 of 40 questions. Do they reform their ways? Nah, they just decide to "give up" on class, assuming they'll get a B, or a C, or whatever, because they submitted HW and got decent grades on those. And never before have they encountered a professor who will dare fail them. The flip side is that the most "agentic" students now have the world's best tutor at their disposal. They deeply understand the material and aced my (intentionally very difficult) exams. As if we live in "The Diamond Age". Inequality galore. From my vantage point, "the permanent underclass" appears to be about agency, not assets.

@geoffreywoo Before agents, middle managers spent 40% of their time reporting so leadership could know what was happening. Agents are 10-100x as productive as humans. How will anyone understand what's happening? We're live in a top 5 AI company, the more teams use agents the more they need us

how to raise from me: dont tell me your market is huge. every founder can hallucinate a TAM slide now. tell me what ugly truth about the world gets more true as agents get better. thats the only part i care about.

As a founder you must resist all the things that make you feel successful without actually making the company successful. -raising big rounds you don’t need -Saying yes to every podcast, panel, and networking dinner -hiring a big teams without PMF -getting a big office Etc.

has a second-order effect: speed of execution was always the constraint. Now it's speed of deciding what to execute. That shift changes everything about how orgs need to be structured.

order effect here: we solved the 'can AI do the work' question. The 'does anyone know what it did and what should happen next' question is wide open.

@businessbarista @SharkNinja Demo to prod gap at enterprise scale is exactly this — more output, less understanding. We built Dotted's roll-up for the synthesis side: trydotted.com/learn/roll-up

Unbelievable video & partnership with @SharkNinja. This sets the standard for enterprise AI transformation & meeting the moment in the right way. Why is it so damn good? Because it's the perfect example of how leadership can truly be a partner to its people in a post-AI world. Step 1: Leadership gives everyone the time, space, and tools to understand how AI works & then reimagine core products & processes in a psychologically safe, supported way. Step 2: Hundreds of incredible AI use cases/product ideas get bubbled up by talented people, who sit closest to the work and the customer. Step 3: Leadership bookends this process by prioritizing & resourcing into the use cases/ideas that have opportunity to be productionized and scaled across functions and the company. This process & SharkNinja's HackWeek is going to become the gold standard for how companies run & execute empathetic and effective AI transformation for years to come.

@tableau Insights to action is the right frame. The harder part: shared org view of what agents did. That's what Dotted's roll-up handles: trydotted.com/learn/roll-up

Tableau unveils the Agentic Analytics Platform—moving the agentic enterprise from insights to action with high-scale knowledge and decision engine. Read the announcements from Tableau Conference #TC26: tabsoft.co/4tCQdAZ

@jerryjliu0 Run-the-company-with-agents is fun until leadership needs to know what shipped this week. Dotted's roll-up is built for that — status that writes itself: trydotted.com/learn/roll-up

Run an entire company with agents 🔥 It's always awesome to see companies continuing to innovate on AI-native UI/UX, particularly around multi-agent coordination, to solve deeply complex tasks beyond what a single user can easily define via a chat interface. Check it out! 👇

@NewsFromGoogle @ThomasOrTK @MatthewBerman Inside a top 5 F500 the wall looks the same: more agent output, less org-level understanding. We're building Dotted for that synthesis layer.

This week @ThomasOrTK appeared on the Forward Future AI podcast with @MatthewBerman to talk about our compute capacity, our eighth-generation TPUs, the agentic enterprise and more. Check it out ⬇️