mjr00
This was a problem pre-AI, too. There's more AI-generated slop at the bottom of the barrel but in general people were not discovering games by scrolling through every new release on Steam. And certainly they weren't doing that for anything with the budget of Andromeda or Veilguard.
> As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now.
I think this is on you more than anything, PBZ has been getting heavily hyped up and currently has 60k viewers on Twitch, early on a Monday in the US, which is pretty damn good. The existence or non-existence of AI games doesn't seem to be impacting anything here.
> the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success
All success in the entertainment is "artificially-promoted". Marketing exists for a reason.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
> Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
Again, not sure how this relates to BioWare. Andromeda and Veilguard were both widely regarded as embarrassing failures and both of those were pre-AI. They hadn't released any titles in the AI age before dissolving.
> Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now.
Phantom Blade Zero just came out. It was made by S-Game, which apparently has fewer than 20 core staff members, though the game was worked on by around 200 people when you include contractors. It sold 4 million units in 3 days and is currently the #2 most played game on Steam.
Smaller game studios can do fine. They just need to make good games.
This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.
I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.
When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.
Yes. I was at AWS when Spectre and Meltdown were discovered, and we received approximately a month of advance notice and put together teams to apply mitigations. The work of the team was on a need-to-know basis--even team members' managers only knew they were pulled onto a critical project, not what the specific project was. But there were still 30+ people in the company who knew, and that was just one company (I'm guessing Google/Azure/other cloud providers got similar advance notice).
Now, this is a much wider scale vulnerability, in the sense that Spectre/Meltdown primarily impacted cloud providers, but this attack impacts literally anyone who runs PHP. Dozens, if not hundreds, of companies likely got advance notice that a patch needed to be installed. In those companies there are teams of people applying those patches. All it takes is one of them who wants 15 minutes of internet fame to leak the details.
Why would they add it now? This has been a solved problem since GPT3.5, just prompt it to write in a different style and/or never use specific phrases.
The reality is that for 99% of people and use cases, they just do not fucking care. They're either using chatgpt as a 1:1 chat interface where the AI style is fine, or they're sending off homework/generating reports to send to their boss/etc, which they know will never be read and just summarized by an AI anyway, so what's the point.
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
Yeah you won't get extremely lucky and 200x your money because you bought NVidia a decade ago, but you also won't lose all your money because you bought Enron.
yeah. I spent the first 15 years of my career being amazed at how many problems people came to me with which I was able to resolve in 10 minutes with a simple google search.
I suspect I will spend the next 15 years of my career being amazed at how many problems people come to me with which I am able to resolve in 10 minutes with a simple LLM prompt.
However these apps are really bad. Basically nonfunctional PoCs made to generate a hype wave.
If you've noticed the obscene amount of ports, remakes, and remasters (most of which are done terribly) in recent years, it's obvious why certain people are pushing this as IP infringement. Companies were loving the fact that they could pull from a back-catalog of their PS2 games, get it compiling again, do some minor fixes to support modern widescreen/controllers/etc, maybe do some minor graphical enhancements, then resell a 20-year-old game for $60. Far less work than a new title, and far less risk since it has a built-in fanbase.
It's exploitative and shitty, to be clear, but it's understandable why some people are very upset about this.
Pointing a frontier model to a 10 or 100MLoC codebase and saying "make this code fast, make no mistakes" doesn't work. As an experiment I recently tried this with a relative small (500KLoC) codebase and it got stuck on believing that the primary cause of slowdown was the database not using a connection pool. (Which was completely irrelevant for this specific code.)
You can bring this distinction back to recomps, too -- one area you can't use a vibed recomp over an emulator is things like TAS's[0], since the TAS community has strict rules about staying compatible with the original hardware, including doing things like sending the TAS inputs into an actual console to verify it works properly. A recomp is likely going to have minor (or major) compatibility issues that would prevent this from working. But it won't matter for 99.99% of players.
It really depends on your perspective of what the point of the hobby is. Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
Personally I think it's awesome that PC98 Touhou games are getting recomps. Being able to play the series natively on modern hardware, and all hardware for the foreseeable future, is great and preserves the legacy of the series. I understand that for anyone who enjoys the actual act of reverse engineering it feels like cheating, though.
I think people will get over it. Music is a good example. Drum VSTs and piano VSTs are going to sound way better than you unless you're a 99th percentile musician playing on a 99th percentile physical instrument. But people still play the piano and drums, because it's fun. Same idea; the existence of AI doesn't stop people who love the act of reverse engineering from doing it.
Knowing the right question to ask is what makes a person an engineer.
> What I mean there is that AI can solve those questions for every possible domain application.
Yes, if you know what to ask. You're doing an excellent job of demonstrating my point!
> Armed with Claude any non technical person can make this decision.
You just disproved that by asking the wrong question. Much like you, the CEO won't even know what to ask an AI.
Or maaaaaybe.... an engineer?
Who do you think the will be choosing whether the database uses a pessimistic or optimistic concurrency strategy? The CEO?
This isn't even the right question to ask, I think you've basically proved my point. You are in charge of deciding what the system should do when two users update a record at the same time. It's extremely dependent on what you're trying to do.
> Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it.
What's the one-size-fit-all solution for concurrency management that works for every single domain and application? I'm curious.
> Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".
Who's going to make this decision? The CEO?
No it isn't lol. Have you worked on any real systems with customers? Good luck telling your boss at AWS that a poison pill message stopped the payment queue from processing so they lost $100 million in sales but hey, it's an implementation detail, no big deal.
Right, companies won't need software engineers. They'll just need someone who can use tools to produce source code and maintain the generated artifacts, plus make domain-specific technical decisions like "what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time" or "how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed".
We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.