The only reason to buy Nintendo hardware is so that you can play Nintendo's exclusive games. In the past, I felt that it was worth it. In the recent years, there haven't been many good Nintendo releases, definitely not enough to justify buying Switch 2.
I feel that Nintendo should really become just a software company. All consoles are converging towards using more or less similar PC hardware anyway, so having your own hardware platform doesn't seem very useful anymore.
> The only reason to buy Nintendo hardware is so that you can play Nintendo's exclusive games
Nintendo also pushes gaming innovation in different directions, enabling interesting experiences. It's not always successful, but is rarely boring: virtual boy (proto-VR), dual screen gaming (DS, 3DS, Wii U), asymmetric multiplayer (Wii U), split controller with motion controls (Wii, Switch), advanced haptics (Switch), screen-free gaming (1-2 Switch), glasses-free lenticular 3D (3DS), hybrid cardboard gaming (Labo/Switch), slab handheld (2DS), hybrid handheld/TV gaming (Wii U, Switch), asynchronous network interaction and game data sharing (3DS street pass), moderated social networking (Warawara Plaza and MiiVerse on Wii U and 3DS), etc.
The consoles are carefully designed. Game Boy had a non-backlit, reflective display that enabled it to be used in broad daylight and helped it achieve a 50-hour battery life. GBA SL and Nintendo DS/3DS were attractive and functional clamshell designs. GameCube (a compact and rather charming purple cube design) had a handle to encourage people to move the system to different TVs or bring it to friends' houses. Switch has a kickstand and a dock system to enable quick switching between handheld, tabletop, and TV-attached gaming, all without restarting the game.
It's just due to one person (GabeN) holding majority of the stock and choosing to run the company this way. Gabe will retire or die at some point and then anything might happen.
I gave the same prompt to Gemini pro. It thought for maybe 3-5 minutes and gave the wrong answer (it claims the statement is not true) with some arguments that I can't understand well enough to disprove.
> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.”
Here it is.
I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google.
I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).
Idk, it seems like the marketing process on tiktok doesn't constitute trying to get people to go out of their way to interact/click with your content, tiktok users are just involuntarily fed content on some level (you don't know what the next autoplayed video will be)... how can it not be trival to manipulate that userbase with, in this case, a band whose music is just-good-enough for mass appeal?
"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up.
The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.
There can also be an argument that laws are always only an approximation, and they should be broken in corner cases where they clearly don't work as intended.
Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.
We've had the AI tools for maybe two years, and they have only gotten really good in the past half a year or so. For fuck's sake, adopting electricity took like 50 years, why would you expect to see any kind of effect from the AI so quickly? The tools are still developing - rapidly - and people are still figuring out the best usage patterns for it.
Electricity analogy is fairplay, but ChatGPT had something like 110% global adoption 5 minutes after its release. The infrastructure and the electrical appliances had to catch up, but the Internet is all built out already.
So I think it's fair to be looking at results a few years in.
Andrey Karpathy famously mentioned in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel [0], that the computer doesn't show up on GDP numbers, there's no noticeable jump or change in slope. Even if Excel is so damn fast, people are likely not drawing its full potential, and institutions are likely actively resisting change anyway.
My take is that the general population hasn't found the productive levers yet, they're at the stage where they're happy to drag down and auto generate the date list in Excel, but don't know to adjust diagrams or read function docs, not to even mention VBS scripting. And the enthusiast (dev) community I'd say is starting adoption with internal tools, and shot-in-the-dark apps, but big successes need time to mature in all the other ways (design, reliability, user feedback, marketing...), which comes back to what you said also, that needs time. Product Market Fit isn't happening automatically by chance or good prompting, I would like to think.
I agree. I'd also argue that local effects of productivity were already visible since the start of ChatGPT. I was already using it a lot back then for writing tests and as a "smarter scaffolding", even before Copilot and such. Often cutting the time of doing something from half an hour to a few seconds.
IMO the bottleneck remains the same: doing proper engineering is more than writing code. Even 20 years ago a big corp would spend a few years writing something that a startup would do in weeks (and yes: even 20 years ago) just because of laser-focused requirements, better processes/less bureaucracy, using the right tools for the job and having less friction in tooling. That hasn't changed.
I've had the same idea. Especially regarding anxiety. You start getting anxious and scared of everything, because your brain knows that your body is out of shape and incapable of dealing with stuff if anything happens. If you can't deal with any problems, then you must constantly be on lookout for them so that you can avoid them.
Every major technological invention nowadays quickly breeds open source clones that evolve to be on par with the commercial ones on some time scale. Why hasn't this happened to Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica? I know there's Sympy, but it's so far behind Mathematica that it's not even comparable. Is the heavily mathematical nature of the tool somehow an insurmountable obstacle to the open source community?
It’s a great question. As soneone who has been fascinated by Wolfram Aplha for a loong time (and might or might not have thought about cloning it), i think that growing up i ended up realizing that Mathematica in the real world just doesn’t… Do much?
Maybe i’m just missing something. But it looks like nobody is really using it except for some very specific math research which has grown from within that ecosystem from the beginning.
I think one of the basic problems is that the core language is just not very performant on modern cpus, so not the best tool for real-world applications.
I used to be a university researcher in theoretical physics and, in that field, everyone uses it, but I suppose that would count as "very specific math research" Any kind of complex integrals, systems of equations, etc. and Mathematica is invaluable, and, as I said, so much ahead of Sympy.
You could do stuff other than theoretical physics research with Mathematica, though. I has a lot of functionality and I always felt that I used only a tiny fraction of it.
What you're missing is everything not on the public Internet. Everything hidden away from you and me. Everything done in secret. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound?
What Micoloth is missing or what I'm saying, is that people are using Wolfram Alpha but don't feel the need to post to Instagram or wherever about it, so Micoloth isn't hearing about it. Micoloth is assuming that because they aren't hearing about it, it isn't happening. I'm pointing out that things can happen that you don't hear about.
I think in practice it's less of a programming language and more of a scripting environment. It's like excel for math. There are many more people using it to produce mathematical results (like how excel is used to produce reports and graphs) than people who use it to produce programs.
This is why its not particularly problematic that it is closed source. Most people I've worked with who use it produce mathematical results with it that are fully checkable by hand.
I feel that Nintendo should really become just a software company. All consoles are converging towards using more or less similar PC hardware anyway, so having your own hardware platform doesn't seem very useful anymore.
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