Video Game Speedrunning Misallocation

Video game speedrunning might be the largest misallocation of human capital of all time You have 150+ IQ gigaautists devoting their lives to beating Mario Kart levels 0.00001 seconds faster instead of curing cancer or something Speedrunners literally decompiled The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which took two years, in order to better figure out how to manipulate game memory through bugs, which led to an arbitrary code execution technique and a sub 10 minute world record, two decades after release x.com/tszzl/status/2...

A dark-mode social media post jokes that elite speedrunners devote extraordinary intelligence and years of work to shaving tiny fractions of a second off games instead of solving major real-world problems. The quoted example describes decompiling The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to exploit memory bugs and achieve a sub-10-minute record. It is used as a sarcastic reaction to impressive but extremely niche technical dedication. EN: A dark-mode social media post jokes that elite speedrunners devote extraordinary intelligence and years of work to shaving tiny fractions of a second off games instead of solving major real-world problems. The quoted example describes decompiling The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to exploit memory bugs and achieve a sub-10-minute record. It is used as a sarcastic reaction to impressive but extremely niche technical dedication.

• @gentoomemes / 21846 2026-09-02