Re:Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid...
by generalizations on Sunday January 22, 2023 @01:49PM
(#34480844)
A 250 person organization assembling semi-off-the-shelf components and gluing mostly-preexisting software together is a very different proposition than 20-50 people building a modern CPU from scratch. That's an order of magnitude more complexity than the steam deck, and an order of magnitude fewer people.
Re:Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid...
by ghaff on Sunday January 22, 2023 @01:57PM
(#34480942)
Right. It means there's a lot of things that don't get created--or companies cooperate in some sort of fairly tightly coupled network that doesn't look that different from one big company. (But probably less efficient if you follow Coase.)
Re:Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid...
by andai on Monday January 23, 2023 @11:50AM
(#34491348)
How many people designed the CPUs we use? I read a few days ago that due to deadline pressure, a single man did most of the work on (I believe it was) the 8080. But that's obviously a "trivial" design compared to the monsters we have today.
Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online game store, and several high quality AAA games, and the valve index. They apparently have around 250 people according to a quick Google search, but that still goes against the mindset that you need 10s of thousands of employees to make a successful large scale tech product (whether that's software or hardware).