About Garbage Collected

Some thoughts refuse to be garbage collected.

This entire blog exists because of a single dismissive Reddit comment – “it’s just a prebuilt”. This was on a thread about the announcement of the Steam Machine, and I was midway through composing a rebuttal in my head. Then it hit me – that comment stuck in my craw because it was missing the forest for the trees, i.e. the Steam Machine was a culmination of Valve running the Apple playbook in reverse. That thought proceeded to lodge itself in my head, and wouldn’t let me focus on anything else until I dug deeper.

Hence: “Garbage Collected – Reclaiming heap space to prevent overflow.”

Who Am I?

I’m Bharath, software engineer by day, and someone who writes multi-thousand-word analyses of platform economics instead of touching grass on weekends (that’s not a joke – I did a lot of the initial research and outlining for that Valve article on Thanksgiving weekend).

What to Expect

Honestly? We’ll see. Often I sit around pondering “wait, why is Valve doing that?”, and this might well be where I work through that. Gaming, tech, and business/econ will probably dominate, but I’m also the kind of person who’ll disappear into an isekai rabbit hole for a season and emerge with Thoughts. No promises on frequency or focus – this is just for when `/dev/null` feels too harsh a destination for things I’m thinking.

AI Disclaimer:

While the ideas and drafts that end up becoming posts are mine, I do use LLM assistance for proofreading, copyediting, and other similar stuff at which I suck.

Views Disclaimer:

At time of writing this, I am employed by Google. However, no statement here should be taken as me speaking in any official capacity ; I am not authorized to do so, and anything posted here is my own personal view.

(below is what Substack already put on this page before I got around to saying who I am; I’ll just leave it here for now)

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Reclaiming heap space to prevent overflow.

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