Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
Yeah, it is a valid comparison, and assuming the quality is close to par with a macbook, I think it would be worth the extra cost.
I'm someone who doesn't want to go through a new laptop every other year. I've got an M1 mac right now. I've owned it for 5 years and could easily see myself getting another 5 years of use out of it. Only problem is, the hard drive is small, I can't upgrade it. It only has 16 GB RAM, which is fine for now, but I can't upgrade it. One of the 2 USB C ports gave out on me. I can't repair it.
If I had a laptop that I could repair and upgrade that also ran Linux? I would absolutely pay $2k for it - as long as the quality is good - because I think I would save money in the long term by making a laptop like that last a long time.
> why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists.
I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.
Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.
As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.
I'm someone who started programming when I was in middle school and went into this career field for the passion. But my passion was and is programming, not corporate office work.
In my career so far, I've spent most of my time troubleshooting AWS configs, combing through cloudwatch logs, and wringing requirements out of people, and a lot less of my time actually solving interesting problems.
The walls of my office are gray, as is the carpet, the desks, and the walls of the bullpens. There are awful fluorescent lights overhead, and my eyes are dry and tired. I am exhausted at the end of the day because of the sensory overload of people being on constant teams meetings all around me. They speak with their outside voices, like children.
So yes, I love software development, and maybe someday I will find a better job in this field that gives me the kind of challenging work and problem solving that I signed up for, but working outdoors? surrounded by the sounds of nature with the sun on my face? I'm sure there's a catch, but it sounds nice.
Yeah, the games industry is in a pretty big crisis right now, and I think change needs to happen both ways:
Consumers need to understand that keeping games at the same price for decades despite rising costs and inflation is not realistic. If they want the industry to thrive, they need to be ok with games being more expensive.
Meanwhile, developers need to stop making games so expensive. This is an entertainment industry / corpo problem, really. Companies have seen the big profits and decided that only the big profits will do, which means you need to make a big open world cinematic experience, which is expensive, and because it's expensive, they won't take risks on making anything actually interesting.
The only way gaming moves forward is if we make riskier games that cost less to produce, which is why indies are the ones making the good games these days.
I don't know if the Starbucks example is quite the same as the band example. If anything, their focus on iced desserts shows that they know exactly what their audience wants and is paying for.
When I think about the band shirts, I think about this time an indie game dev youtuber did a full breakdown of their different revenue streams. They were a "full time indie gamedev", but the overwhelming majority of their income came from gamedev Udemy courses.
So really, they were an online course seller that used their gamedev youtube content to convince people to buy the courses.
While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.
There are plenty of stories of ATC helping to guide pilots back to the ground after an engine failure or after a student pilot had their instructor pass out on them or something like that.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
But that's why they said it was tenuous. Google's Pixels have been one of the most open Smartphone hardware lines so far, but Google could change that at any time.
I think we should not even generalize it down to a rule of three, because then you're outsourcing your critical thinking to a rule rather than doing the thinking yourself.
Instead, I tend to ask: if I change this code here, will I always also need to change it over there?
Copy-paste is good as long as I'm just repeating patterns. A for loop is a pattern. I use for loops in many places. That doesn't mean I need to somehow abstract out for loops because I'm repeating myself.
But if I have logic that says that button_b.x = button_a.x + button_a.w + padding, then I should make sure that I only write that information down once, so that it stays consistent throughout the program.
I tried looking through some of the spec samples, and it was not clear what the "language" was or that there was any syntax. It just looks like a terse spec.
This is a good point, though maybe means that "understanding the underlying problem" requires a degree of humanity.
I think it's fair to say that Blizzard at a certain point went corporate and "lost the plot", so they thought they knew what people wanted, even though they really didn't (don't you guys have phones?).
They are just gotos, but does that mean that they are bad (along with their friend try/catch, who is also a goto?), or does that mean that gotos can be useful when used with restraint?
Gotos get a bad rep because they become spaghetti when misused. But there are lots of cases where using gotos (or break/continue/early return/catch) makes your code cleaner and simpler.
Part of a programmer's job is to reason about code. By creating black and white rules like "avoid gotos", we attempt to outsource the thinking required of us out to some religious statement. We shouldn't do that.
Gotos can be useful and can lead to good code. They can also be dangerous and lead to bad code. But no "rule of thumb" or "programming principle" will save you from bad code.
I think 512GB is a fair minimum for a computer these days, but I agree with your "Where does it stop?" sentiment when it comes to RAM.
If browsing the web takes 12GB of RAM, at what point do we stop chasing after more RAM and instead start demanding better performance and resource usage out of the web?
I wouldn't call my personal project "heavy load", but I have a cross-platform C++ project that I am developing on both a Windows gaming PC and a 2020 M1 macbook air.
I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.