ironman1478

6 hari yang laludiscuss

If every employee makes 100k (let's say that's an average. Some make more, some make less). That 50m in salary alone, not including benefits like 401k or health insurance. And that's just people costs. Doom dark ages sold somewhere between 800k-1m is the estimate. At 70$ a copy they might not have broken even if the lower end of the sales target is what was hit if you take into account benefits and people buying the game on sale.

I'm not saying to sympathize with the MS, but they blew a lot of money on a worse game than doom eternal or 2016 doom. It's just not penciling out I guess.

Game companies are always going through this and the only way to stay around a long time is to stay lean (like valve) and/or find a really lucrative business model.

ironman1478

6 hari yang laludiscuss

The point is that MS is spending a crap ton of money to produce a product that is marginally better gameplay wise than a game like DUSK, which was made by a few people (I actually liked DUSK more but this isn't a game review thread). Not every game should be made on the cheap, but these game studios do cost a lot of money and suffer from diminishing returns. For how expensive these games are to make, they should be churning out ES sized games all the time. Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement.

It's not fair to these people that they lost their jobs but also they work in a risky low margin business and as you go for more and more advanced graphics and tech, the lower the margins.

ironman1478

6 hari yang laludiscuss

Just to play devils advocate, was all of that worth it? There are equally fun or more fun indie games that don't have great graphics, but the gameplay is astounding. DUSK is an example of this.

I love that these teams are pushing boundaries of technology, but it also points to an issue with modern game AAA development. It's expensive to make these beautiful games and it's not like they are more enjoyable than games made cheaper.

ironman1478

10 hari yang laludiscuss

I think a lot of people buy furniture and clothing on Amazon. It's extremely cheap and easy to return, or just throw away if you can't return it (not endorsing that).

ironman1478

26 hari yang laludiscuss

I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish

ironman1478

27 hari yang laludiscuss

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts.

I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.

ironman1478

30 hari yang laludiscuss

It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.

Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.

I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.

ironman1478

bulan laludiscuss

All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population.

Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.

ironman1478

bulan laludiscuss

I think it's just indians being racist. The person could've put any other non white category and it would've happened.

ironman1478

bulan laludiscuss

How do you make use of something that you don't understand?

ironman1478

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

The decision to buy vs. rent is completely dependent & goal dependent. If you're in the bay area, buying really only makes sense if you have kids and want them to be in a good public school district. Otherwise, many houses are oversized and have extremely high repair costs. Finding a good rent controlled unit could be better, especially if you find a landlord who will repair things.

And anybody who is saying their property value went up, so it was worth it, you really couldn't know that at the time. It wasn't a given (tbf neither is the market going up). Also, it's not like the property actual increased in value due to some quality upgrade, it's due to artificial scarcity. If the political winds change to encourage more housing, that trend could reverse.

There are arguments that you can customize a house you own more and that's true, but that's not a financial argument. I don't think a lot of big renovations pencil out anymore the way people expect. Paying X to renovate a kitchen doesn't increase the value of the house significantly over X anymore because the costs are so high and the high inflation erodes your dollar value much more quickly than in the past.

ironman1478

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

People keep saying open source is an example of how copyright doesn't quite matter. However, many of the biggest open source projects are contributed to by massive corporations. Linux has lots of contributions from all the FAANGs, Red Hat, etc. Yes, it's not protected by copyrighted, but also the way it's produced is wholly different from how an artistic work is produced. Contributing to Linux is nothing on the balance sheet of Google for example, whereas producing art for an independent person or a whole company who's purpose is to create art can be very expensive.

Artists are taking risks and need legal protection if they want to make art for a living. If artists were making FAANG engineer compensations or all worked at institutions like universities (with all their protections) then maybe they wouldn't care about copyright, but that isn't the living situation for every artist.

You could say an artist shouldn't rely on making art for a living, but that's actually a different discussion.

ironman1478

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

It's highly cynical, but people need to work. It provides structure and most people don't do well with unstructured time.

Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.

ironman1478

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Meta programming in C++ can enable you to remove lots of runtime branching in your code at the cost binary size.

ironman1478

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

People here are making some warranted snarky comments. I ended working at Meta for a few quarters and quit. I will say many employees are so abstracted away that you sort of forget that you work for Facebook to some extent. I also noticed that people really believe that what Facebook works on is a net good. I don't agree and maybe we don't agree, but saying "haha now it's happening to you" isn't the gotcha you think it is to those people if those people believe the products are a net good.

I disagree that the products are a net good, to be clear. But working there lots of people drink the koolaid

ironman1478

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

You don't need a 4.0 to graduate. And even if you got one, a lot of grades are composed of tests, not projects. You can just memorize your way through things if you were dedicated enough.

It's not really that hard to get a degree in engineering if your only goal is the degree itself.

ironman1478

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

This article is about London, but it's a problem in SF too. The problem is that cities aren't made for ride sharing, robo or otherwise. If the cities actually wanted to make ride sharing less annoying they'd have designated drop off zones on streets and make an effort to build truly separate bike lanes. That requires actual work though, so very cities will proactively do this.

ironman1478

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

I worked at Meta and they're spot on.

ironman1478

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

I have an all-in-one amp / pedalboard and it's just more practical, even though all I do is just pick an amp, plug in my guitar and play. They take up less space and cost less money in the long run if you actually do want to use many pedals.

I get what you're saying but in general this specific case I think the all-in-ones win for most people.

ironman1478

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

I didn't realize how I learned to develop software from 2011-2015 was the old way lol. (Am I old now?).

I appreciate that the author understands why doing everything "the old way" is good. AI is a tool, it can't be a replacement for how you think and it can't be a replacement for the actual work.

I wish more people had a desire for the inner workings of things because it makes you better at actually using tools. Implementing compilers, databases, OSes, control systems, etc. is like practicing swimming. Yeah, you might not ever swim again but when you need to the muscle memory will be there when you need to get out of the ocean (I know this is a strained metaphor).

Knowing more can only be a boon to using LLMs for coding and it's really a general problem in ML. I work in a science field as hw / sw engineer and I've seen so many pure data science people say they can replace all our work with a model, flail for 2 years and then their whole org gets canned. If they just read a textbook or collaborated (which they never do, no matter how polite you are), they'd have been able to leverage their data science skills to build something great and instead they just toil away never making it past step 0.