On the one hand, we say we want more mobility for economic prosperity. On the other hand, we lament the decline in social fabric and support systems that prevent loneliness and enable young people to have kids by said mobility. We eventually must come to terms with the fact that we can't have it both ways.
We can't have unlimited amounts of both. We can have some of both at the same time, though. You can move and make new friends, and keep some of the old, and have some social fabric and some mobility. You can't have as much social fabric as if you never moved, though.
I think we can definitely have more of both than what we currently have, the primary issue today is mostly political dragons standing in the way of some reasonable economic fine tuning.
So like every Bay area tech worker jumping on a bus at 8:00am until leaving the office after 6pm. And those few of us who don't want that are pressured by managers happy unleash a PIP.
You're making my point. People, including my grandfather, are moving because they put their career above people, family, friends, and relationships. And when they get there, they're still themselves and the grass isn't greener, but they get a Lexus rather than a Camry -- woop-de-doo.
Bell Labs was a monopoly granted by the US government where they were literally compelled by Congress to invest in research.
I also don't buy the notion that industry is better for science, maybe if you want to research ways to damage humans and the environment sure but most people don't want these things.
Is this really tolerance and not just monopolistic companies abusing their market position? I mean workers can't even choose what software they're allowed to use, those choices are made by the executive/management class.
Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are all three programs that have massive approval from US citizens.
Even saying the military is a dumpster fire isn't accurate. The military has led trillions of dollars worth of extraction for the wealthy and elite across the globe.
In no sane world can you say that the ability to protect GLOBAL shipping lanes as a failure. That one service alone has probably paid for itself thousands of times.
We aren't even talking about things like public education (high school education use to be privatized and something only the elites enjoyed 100 years ago; yes public high school education isn't even 100 years old) or libraries or public parks.
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I really don't understand this "gobermint iz bad" meme you see in tech circles.
I get more out of my taxes compared to equivalent corporate bills that it's laughable.
Government is comprised of people and the last 50 years has been the government mostly giving money and establishing programs to the small cohorts that have been hoarding all the wealth. Somehow this is never an issue with the government however.
Also never understand the arguments from these types either because if you think the government is bad then you should want it to be better. Better mostly meaning having more money to redistribute and more personal to run programs, but it's never about these things. It's always attacking the government to make it worse at the expense of the people.
Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money.
There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
Isn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps.
Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.
Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for the industry or for humanity in generally. We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots confidently misleading us.
> Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but:
1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly prestigious, and has published far more papers than Google, based on their respective research websites. (To be fair, Google started much later.)
2. If you're talking about product development, MSFT is vastly more diversified in terms of revenues than any of the "Magnificent 7" because of their varied product lineup.
3. The basis of their relationship with OpenAI is literally them investing double digit billions to catch up on the AI race once they recognized the opportunity.
> OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market.
I'm not sure about Microsoft's influence in OpenAI's strategy, but it's pretty clear Google was caught flatfooted by their own strategy of locking away transformer technology behind products that didn't threaten their search monopoly. There's a reason the researchers who invented transformers had to leave and start a different company to bring its true potential to the market. Which, even if it was just a chatbot, is what has kicked off the AI boom.
Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people I've worked with in my career but the core early contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed separate research divisions as a bad idea.
Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Having a separate research division being an anti-pattern is an interesting topic! I remember getting into a related discussion almost a decade ago with a professor who left academia to join Google, his point being product-driven R&D was strictly "better" than "bluesky" R&D because (IIRC) the work is more directly related to market needs.
My contention was that this ignores the transformative potential of long-range theoretical research. For instance, somehow very few consider Xerox PARC to be an anti-pattern.
From what I hear in the last few years even MSR has changed its ways to steer its research more in line with needs of product divisions, and I actually consider that a loss. Who knows what paradigm-shifting inventions like GenAI are being steered away from?
> Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Hmm, at the risk of relying on sycophantic bots, AI overviews suggest most recently Microsoft spent 13.2% of revenues vs 14.8% for Google (and 30% for Meta!) Of course even a single % point is in the millions at their scale, but there are a ton of confounding factors including differing product margins and payscales (and CEO obsessions like Metaverse!) At least at a quick glance MSFT and GOOG seem comparable.
The problem here is how "R&D" is defined. Unfortunately, even day-to-day product development is lumped in with R&D. I've done "R&D" in academia, private research firms, and big tech, and they are all poles apart. "Actual" R&D is very researchy, often based in discovering new aspects of reality, whereas "product" R&D is just regular product development. Which could be considered discovering new aspects of the market I suppose. They are both valuable but on very differnt timelines.
I think the parent commentator is lambasting storytelling in video games as being very poor. I can’t disagree if this is what they mean.
Been playing games my entire life and even the most popular games like the Zelda series have average writing. Just because it’s serviceable doesn’t make it long lasting.
Even those games with interesting stories like Bioshock or Red Dead Redemption don’t hold a candle to what literature can offer.
They all really feel ephemeral compared to books which seem to last beyond the life of their authorship. Are there any games that will be the same? The medium itself means that it’s highly unlikely any of the games will be available in 200 years from now compared to the biology book I have from 1850s that still works fine and still bounded together.
Only games that seem to have escaped this in my memory are Disco Elesium and Planescape Torment I'm leaving out interactive fiction but there's some very good writing in that niche.
I haven't played it yet but all the other comments mentioning it is making me think I should check it out.
I did enjoy "Slay the Princess" but my beef with such type of "games" is that they could have easily been in a different format with minimal loss of storytelling, like a webpage for instance.
Disco Elesium seems really cool and way different than what I imagined.
Also Planescape Torment looks great too, I actually like those type of games (forgetting the genre name ATM). Definitely bought both of them, excited to see how they handle storytelling in the medium.
While on the subject, have you ever played the Legacy of Kain stories? I hear those have great stories as well but from what I can surmise (and read on wikipedia) is that those would have been best seller fantasy books if in a different medium.
Disco Elysium is not just good writing, its also good political commentary (from members of far left ideologies, but also not sparing far left ideologies from intense criticism)
To the point where theres something like 4 teams making games right now claiming to be the true successor to Disco Elysium, as the publisher fired the original writers/developers and pivoted to mobile game development.
I cannot recommend it enough. I played Outer Worlds in the same month, and Outer Worlds has the depth of a fox news rant in comparison.
I mean, I like the writing and I mostly enjoy the game. That said, it is not amazing political commentary? Specifically, it takes a rather expected position on topics. What parts seemed amazing?
Depends what kind of story you want? Games like Slay the Spire didn't need a ton of writing to still have a very fun experience with interesting characters. Ico had minimal story, but an absurdly high atmosphere and emotional impact with what they had. Bastion's story was fun, if farcical. Hades literally won an award.
There are games that carry in gameplay alone but not every genre can do that. A good story can really help bump a game from c tier to b tier or even a tier. Space based and open world games are prime candidates.
Like palworld was good but palworld with a story would have been a multi billion dollars Machine.
I'd argue that every genre can, in fact, do this. I can also agree that good writing can help bump up a game.
Palworld is an odd example. It isn't like the writing in Pokemon was top tier? Does Monster Hunter even have a story? Not one I've ever heard spoken of.
I don't see anything special in RDR(2)'s writing. Many of the characters' motives were left unexplained (even the most important ones), and Arthur often said contradictory things minutes apart
I mean... the storytelling in most stories is very poor. Full stop. All the more so as they try and be more sophisticated. Is obnoxious how "adult" has come to mean either very violent, or overly sexual. And I realize that isn't exactly new.
Really feels like this generation of devs do not see the value in YAGNI, mostly appear to chase complexity because that's how you peddle courses, talks, books, etc.
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