timunderwood

@PalmerLuckey @NathanJRobinson @PalmerLuckey it true that you'll be War King of Long Beach sometime soon? Welcome to the neighborhood

@NathanJRobinson Hey Nathan, there are quite a few false claims in this piece, but two very easily correctable ones: I was fired in 2017, not 2018, and calling me The Silicon Valley War King is pretty dumb given that I hate Silicon Valley and live 400 miles away from it.

I realize the title of "worst billionaire in America" is highly competitive, but I wrote about why I think Silicon Valley "war king" @PalmerLuckey deserves the prize: currentaffairs.org/news/palmer-lu…

@Apogee_Ent Marathon

What’s the most underrated FPS of all time?

Inspired by the great flip board UI war of March 26, another flip board - this one with overhead flight data: flipflights.vercel.app

@levelsio @lukathedev Works great - lag is rough - can I host a server somehow?

✨ You can now play q3.pieter.com on your phone too with the new touchscreen controls @lukathedev added! It's not the easiest to play like this but it's something Also we need to fix the iOS select problem (see end)

Gliding it into LHR to make a couple quid...

@Flighty @traveledenough Makes sense to offer a short term option - vast majority of people who fly do it once a year. Maybe a 'one trip' option, if that's feasible.

@traveledenough Weekly is for aligning to length of 99% of trips. We are not the same as EF – haven’t done that in 8 years and not starting now.

Hi @Flighty love your product and I’ve paid for a while. But if you’re going to make me choose between a weekly and an annual plan to extract more cash out of me, then, sorry, won’t be paying. Weekly is a massive price increase and I’ve been burnt by services like Expertflyer breaking and not providing promised functionality to pay for annual.

@levelsio Does it reference a pak file? the textures are in there so you need full game pak0 and pak1

Installed a new map but I think some textures are missing? Any idea how to fix? I think it's because Q3JS runs on the demo of Q3?

@SandyofCthulhu I'm starting to think that Tim Willits was the good guy.

America: be a major oil exporter Prices go up: America profits massively Idiots: “o no oil went up what will we do?” Are they still mentally living in Nixon’s gas crisis USA?

@SandyofCthulhu Hi Sandy, hope you're well. Did you watch the video, or even, look at the thumbnail? The clue is the words on the screen.

Wait … do the New York citizens get free healthcare?!

@SandyofCthulhu You're not going to believe this, but in Quake - it's a game from the 90s - you can just type stuff in the console and it'll give you all the weapons, or walk though walls, or fly. So if you get stuck in the game, you can just type this and you're done. Hope you're well.

I’m 70 years old. I get as much or more frustration at a tough challenge as anyone. But I don’t want my computer to beat the game for me. Give me difficulty levels or a bypass. Not a built-in cheat.

@duke_unreal I remember it well. good times.

@timunderwood Yap, its Q2test.

Quake 2 test prototype version from 10/19/1997, by idSoftware.

Sonic being on Mt Rushmore is some boomer shit. He had a good run for a couple of years in the 90s and hasn't been relevant as a marquee title character for over a quarter century.

@djlogansama independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

Reform exists to benefit millionaires and billionaires.

@davidmarcus Donahoe was a historically bad ceo. Wasting a year fighting Ichan, a catalog of failed acquisitions, losing billions on GSI, no coherent strategy for marketplaces, massive fail on Magento and leaving with a massive bonus.

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left. I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up. I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet. But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting. I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn. It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team. This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time. In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back. After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization. Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses. During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived. Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well. The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails. On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else. The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature. The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails. More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it. Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype. None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions. The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct. But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure. In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year. This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years. I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company. The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction. I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability. Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes. That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

Brace for disappointment.

@danielweberdlc @ID_AA_Carmack that is incredible. I emailed Carmack a question about the hyper blaster once and he replied. The internet used to be a much smaller place.

@ID_AA_Carmack I lived in Dallas when I think Wolfenstein came out and I actually drove over to the Id software office to personally buy a copy. Always wondered if it was John who sold me the copy. I got the impression they didn't have many people stop by.

Marty at Id did ask for a video from me, but there was a miscommunication about when he needed it, so I didn’t get it done by the actual anniversary…

historically bad idea

We've made it, kids: theguardian.com/games/2026/jan…

@jphorism Where you getting the flight pricing from?

i built a powder day + cheap flight engine this afternoon with claude code so you can plan a short notice ski trip without opening 47 tabs it's tough being a powder hound in nyc. windham left ikon this year. never a better time to look at other options. if this gets enough likes / reposts i'll ship it weekday trips work too