Edit: even though i inaccurately associated Bungee with MS, they are not. However, the comment stands when you replace it with any of the other successful studios like Bethesda, Id software, Blizzard etc. A bunch of studios and their ips were gutted not because their games sucked, but because they didn’t meet the profits Microsoft expected, which is ridiculous.
> Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
A company that sells consoles complaining about not having enough games after 25 years in business and acquiring most popular game studios is hilarious.
They keep cutting game studios, killing games and then set ambitious profit margins. At some point you have to question, do the people in charge understand their own business at all?
They just gutted bungee and basically killed Destiny 2, not because the game won’t sell, but because it won’t generate the profits they unrealistically set.
Correct. That is what I was trying to hint at. Yes, massive compute is needed to train ai, but it isn’t the only thing. A lot of research and experimentation goes into moving the marker just a little bit. Innovation can’t be forced into weekly sprints, it takes its own time.
More than that, I think people overestimate how much AI will progress as you throw more compute at it. It’s the “9 women can’t deliver a baby in a month” equivalent of AI. Additional compute won’t magically give you AGI.
Very rarely have I heard an engineer look at a functioning piece of software and go “let me rewrite this because it’s not a language or framework I am familiar with and fond of”. If that does happen, it’s usually inexperienced (or bad) engineers.
Rewrites usually start with a gap in what is available and what is needed: missing functionality, existing frameworks getting obsolete, difficultly maintaining code because of the existing implementation complexity, costs, scalability issues, compliance challenges, etc. Most of these things serve the business more than the engineers.
You’re ignoring the context of the comment to make a point. The comment was directed towards a specific type of discourse which was based on personal experiences. This is very different from a discourse where the opposing viewpoints arose from different information or interpretations of the same information, the information being grounded in a standard other than “my personal limited life”. No one is calling for unquestioning belief for ALL conversations, but a few of them don’t need to be cross examined.
If someone shares a story of a terrible interview experience on HN (which happens often) and I claim that bad interviews don’t exist because I’ve never experienced one, do we now expect people to litigate the fact that bad interviews do in fact exist? Or do we just downvote my terrible take and move on?
It’s easy to dismiss something by saying “it’s not been my experience”. It would be a huge waste of time if every such claim requires expending resources verifying and characterizing the difference. There should be a higher bar for discourse on HN.
At some point you’re just picking items and responding to them. This is taking the discussion away from your core argument. You talk about Costco but conveniently leave out in-n-out because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
My core argument has been that corporations offload tasks onto customers and then use the money saved to boost their own profits.
Your argument is that the cost saved is passed on to the customers.
I’ve provided examples of why that doesn’t happen, and provided examples of companies that don’t sacrifice customer experience while maintaining lower prices to show that the rest of them are not doing the same.
I am yet to see any substantial evidence from your end to prove that savings are indeed getting passed on to customers. And unless that’s something you want to discuss, we should end it here.
> Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
> If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices
You’re also responding to a partial statement of a sentence and not a complete argument. The argument being companies don’t necessarily lower prices to compete with one another even if they can.
And finally, why do companies don’t raise their prices infinitely? (A complete tangent to the discussion) Because well, business 101. Prices increases are a slow drip. And there is a limit after which price increases hurt the sales. And you always want an external excuse to point a finger at to make the prices palatable. Some companies can increase prices faster than the others. Apple made hundreds of billions in profits last year and they just increased the prices of MacBooks by hundreds of dollars. They could’ve easily not raised prices but why would you not when you have a loyal customer base that won’t mind paying a few hundred dollars extra?