> As is the case with Elon's companies (and a bit of the market itself), it feels like any logical valuation has no impact on the actual stock price.
Has this type of phenomenon been studied or formalized in any way by economists? I mean specifically how a cult of personality develops around a single individual causing the market to lose its shit. Or the increasing meme-ification of financial instruments.
These are both uniquely 21st century phenomena. But I'm not familiar enough with finance / economics to know what to read up on to understand what is going on.
The GPD devices seem like they've cornered this whole niche in terms of ideal form factor but they are all ridiculously overpriced and that was before RAMpocalypse. I'm actually unsure how they will weather this storm because they are a small company and likely don't have any economies of scale to rely on.
I had no idea other vendors like Chuwi were providing netbook like devices. I will be doing more research tonight. Great post by OP!
It looks like the current iteration of the MiniBook will be discontinued soon; their official stores (on chuwi.com and AliExpress) are not selling them anymore. I've had my eye on this laptop for a while and still haven't bit the bullet, so I really hope it's not going away.
I love this quote too. But it had the opposite effect on me when I first heard it. More than anything it reinforced how much software engineering was a joke of a discipline.
Perhaps my views are an artifact of 2010s ZIRP era software culture. Cheap money poisoned the well and incentivized 'artisans' to build Rube Goldberg-esque towers of abstractions without a care for their cost impact or conceptual integrity.
Possibility of death as a result of negligence, CapEx and actual physics are an amazing forcing function for a group of professionals to take themselves and their work seriously.
Software engineering as a discipline will need to go through an upheaval before it can join the big boy club.
AI seems to be making the problem worse. Now just about anybody with Internet access and a credit card can use Claude to add to the pile of questionable code that runs the global economy.
if there was a market for crappy bridges that collapse, "real" engineering standards would be lower
idk maybe it's because all my software in my career has been about "real stuff" (and i write Haskell), but this "software engineering is a joke" take has been going on since before I can remember and it doesn't speak for me. Maybe I just do a good job.
Software is just fundamentally different. But one nice thing (and why I bailed on "real" engineering) is how portable the skills are. I can easily use my skills to benefit myself in so many small and big ways. I couldn't do much with, say, chemical engineering hahah.
I agree that AI is accelerating all the worst of the worst garbage practices.
If you come from a pure FP or embedded systems background you are exposed to a much better version of "sofware engineering" than your average React dev out there. The bar created by webdev is so low it made the whole industry look like a joke.
> Wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion.
Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path.
Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous.
Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.
> This is a game released in 1999. It's silly that source code isn't released for games this old.
Completely agreed. But even if the will was there, how do we know the source code even exists? 1999 was a long time ago. Source code is company IP. Generally it's the devs who write it and care enough to want to release it to the masses or archive it properly. But they are not the decision makers. There are too many stories of source code quite literally disappearing despite the devs best efforts. A lot of the times when we do get access to source code it comes from rogue behavior aka a former dev putting their ass on the line for the community (see the recent MGS leak on 4chan).
Also like a sibling comment has stated there is no guarantee that the code would be a in a usable format. With the crazy crunch culture in game dev, I doubt most of these studios from the 90s were pumping out clean code. Like an archaeology dig, you'd have to budget a non-trivial amount of time getting what you find in a state that is useable by modern standards.
All to say, I think reversing these older games is a worthy endeavor that is not going away anytime soon. I for one, am excited by the productivity benefits that AI tools have brought with them.
Mark is a technocrat. He started his political career after a long, successful stint as an economist and central bank governor. Nobody is perfect but he is about the best leader Canada can hope for to lead it out of the current funk it is in. Pivoting away from a long-term trading partner is not an easy process.
Frankly, the issues that Canada faces now stem from a long history of questionable policies, starting from when Diefenbaker shuttered the Arrow and stripped the talent and parts to be scooped up by Boeing, Lockheed et al all the way to when Mulroney & Reagan signed the FTA dooming Canada's private sector. None of this has been good for Canada's sovereignty and long term independence/success. A non-trivial amount of the SV luminaries that have started companies which showcase American inventiveness have a Canadian passport even though they don't advertise it.
The strained relationship with the US right now is actually providing ample opportunity for Canada to make some strategic long term bets without the "US foreign policy alignment" overhang. I'm optimistic.
Don't forget that this is all intentional and by design. If the tech oligarchs have their way we will all have no choice but to rent compute by the token within the next 3-5 years. The era of the personal computer is over. Current supply chains & production capacity can't accomodate both the AI hyperscalers and regular consumers.
> Memory used to be worth more than gold by weight, and still every stick was sold.
And right before that, was it dirt cheap? No? Slightly different scenario then.
> GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today.
They're even more now...
> Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage.
Nowhere near as expensive as they are now, nowhere near as high a jump in price in a short period of time as now. Plus, there was a defined end point of "flood over, back to normal." There is no "AI data center build out over, back to normal" in sight.
I'm so unsure why someone was working so hard to wedge such doubt amid such clearness. Yes, well said, very core clear differences you raise, my thanks.
Tulips just look pretty. That's a mania. I think we recognize the mental agility that having compute fan give people, that we acknowledge this bicycle of the mind as potentially freeing liberating and virtually travelling.
Have things gotten this much more expensive at the same time that massive datacenters are harmonically distorting power delivery [0] to the point that it degrades the lifetime of your existing devices?
The AI datacenters are making things more expensive and at the same time destroying existing electronics. All this is happening at the same time that the major OS vendors are locking down their operating systems and creating device attestation frameworks.
Whether it is a coordinated effort behind the scenes is irrelevant, the real outcome of all of this is that the average home tech prosumer will not be able to afford to maintain personal hardware that remains compatible with mainstream services.
In light of the consumer market RAM shortages, all the consumer devices will transition to thin client architectures that offload all their real compute to the centralized cloud. You will not be allowed to modify these devices, and there will be nothing you can modify them to do. They will have no ports, using wireless charging and wireless connectivity, and likely even any UART will be left off the board, if you can get them open at all. Like the Apple Watch or Airpods, they will not be built to be openable, and opening them will be an irreversibly destructive act.
You will not be able to buy these devices, they will only be available on a subscription basis. You will own nothing and be told you should be happy.
Online major digital services will only be compatible with these devices, offering no endpoints for third party devices to connect.
It's always been a good idea to have a UPS in front of any digital electronics anyway.
Brown-outs are arguably more dangerous to your electronics, and those are more common now with more frequent heat waves during the summer, stressing the electric grid and triggering public safety shutoffs on the US west coast.
I also think the concerns in the article are overblown. I grew up in the mountains where the electric grid was notoriously poor quality, especially when buildings would fail over to (often poor-quality) generators. It would make computer monitors misbehave, but rarely did it actually damage anything.
Again, good luck affording a UPS when price hikes really kick off. If there is no workstation market, even for small businesses, what happens to the UPS market?
You're acting like Apple wouldn't simply make hay in a world of thin client device subscriptions, where they can charge a subscription for the thin client device and the services that make it usable.
Trillion dollar companies like Apple will still be able to get their hands on whatever they need, albeit at worse prices. Individual consumers trying to buy those components directly probably won't.
Splinter Cell is definitely on a class of its own. I'm also eager to hear if there are any stealth games that have been released in the past 10 years that AREN'T some vibe coded hot mess on Steam ...
As an aficionado of the genre, it is a real shame that stealth games have fallen out of favor with the current crop of gamers.
90s and early to mid 2000s seems like was the peak for 3D games with deep storylines and pure stealth mechanics (MGS, Splinter Cell). By the time the late 2000s rolled around we started getting the watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer.
Finally in the 2010s seems like even these hybrid stealth games were on their way out for the most part. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can count the number of releases on one hand.
My pet theory is that these types of games are simply too high brow for casuals who have become a larger segment of the target audience.
And don't forget Thief, the king of medieval stealth punk fantasy loot games.
Self promo: I wrote a tiny post about an interesting technical detail of Thief's game engine - the world is actually solid, and gameplay areas are carved out of it like caves.
> I wrote a tiny post about an interesting technical detail of Thief's game engine - the world is actually solid, and gameplay areas are carved out of it like caves.
This is true of Unreal Tournament too. How unusual is it?
>> Because Quake levels started empty, Quake had invisible "exterior" surfaces that required a separate process to detect and eliminate. If the level wasn't watertight, then the exterior could be reachable and the automated tools couldn't eliminate it. In contrast, because the Thief level started solid, this was never necessary. (I think Unreal's CSG may have started as solid as well.)
It's just unusual. I think C&C: Renegade should be 'solid by default' too.
One of the benefits is what you don't have a problem with the edge cases with an escaped ray casts and view points - you simply don't have casts and views into the infinity.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a flash in the pan (although the asymmetric horror genre continues basically dominated by dead by daylight).
Yet, the sheer exhilaration I felt the first time one of the "killers" walked past me as I kneeled in a bush was quite spectacular.
It's not the same as splinter cell (it's much more chaotic, you don't get to totally dominate the enemies, it definitely doesn't have that mindful quite as you systematically work your way through a level you know we'
ll).
But the key, I can stand in the right spot and human can't see me really is its own kind of feeling.
Ah commandos I remember people not believing me that I cracked the last mission. Ah I would play this again. (An)using bear trap to kill every German soldier and all the backup was fun
> watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer.
This allows players to pick their style so hybrid games target a much larger audience. A game which allows you to go full stealth if you choose to, but also go gung-ho on your enemies makes more players happy. It's a good compromise if designed well.
I was replaying Dishonored and realized that I no longer have the same amount of "disposable time" to go all stealth. But still wanted to go through the game so I put on my Rambo bandana and went to work.
Realism was never a real trait of stealth games, or any game. At best we aimed at visual realism but everything else about every game is unrealistic. The health system, or enemy alert levels, even the save game system, etc. I don't see why the technical implementation of the stealth should be more realistic than "if you sit in this predetermined area you are invisible". In Splinter Cell you'd sit in unrealistically dark shadows. In The Last of Us Part II you can completely hide in grass that's not even knee high. In Mark of the Ninja you can hide behind a barrel from the player's point of view but on the side of a barrel from the enemy's point of view. Screw realism, make the game fun and it's enough.
This is exactly the point OP is making, fans of pure stealth games don’t want you to be able to muscle your way through, that cheapens the experience.
It doesn’t matter that you think you only have time to mindlessly mash buttons, and it’s not about being realistic, it’s about a game doing one thing very well and not making it optional, it’s a particular type of puzzle to figure out.
> fans of pure stealth games don’t want you to be able to muscle your way through
Those fans don't want me to be able to muscle through, or don't want themselves to be able? The former is questionable logic at best so I'll assume the latter. The fan of stealth who plays a game that gives them the option to muscle through and chooses to muscle through is responsible for their choice. Don't blame games for giving you a choice, especially when they usually support and motivate one style or another with achievements, specialization trees, or meaningful choice-based narrative.
Stealth fans aren't upset the game gives them the option of violence, as most stealth games involve quite a bit of killing and disabling. So this is a pretentious distinction and arbitrary line coming from a very small but vocal minority, like complaining you can lower the difficulty in a game.
> It doesn’t matter that you think
See this here? This is the problem. You insist that it doesn't matter what I think in the same breath as telling me it matters what you think. The market is telling us both which opinion mattered. People overwhelmingly chose the games that are fun and give freedom of choice, not the ones that "do one thing very well". There's room for these too but there's a reason they're not super popular or common.
Dishonoured is the king of games like this, and it more works on builds rather than moment-by-moment choices. You can't go full stealth abilities and suddenly start fighting. You have to choose. The OP is talking about "stealth" games that just have very viable fighting options as backup when you fail to stealth.
>Finally in the 2010s seems like even these hybrid stealth games were on their way out for the most part. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can count the number of releases on one hand.
Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, Deathloop, Deus Ex, Starfield immediately come to mind. I think a lot of the open-world Ubisoft games also allow you to pick your poison too.
I've been having fun playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (2016).
In it the player controls a team of stealthy assassins in real time who coordinate to infiltrate heavily guarded Shogunate fortresses. The characters and voice acting are quite well done.
The gameplay is very tricky and fickle but I guess it's fun because yesterday I downloaded the expansion with a bunch of new level to sneak around in.
Both Hitman and Splinter Cell both gained one of those limited-use mechanics to walk by someone and you could press a button and they wouldn't spot you.
Completely ruined the immersion for me.
Edit: In Hitman it was called Blend In, and in Splinter Cell it was called Mark and Execute.
I like it that you can play the way you want. And some are definitely not easier than the classics. Try Kingdom Come Deliverance (1 or 2) with the "do not kill anyone" achievement
Has this type of phenomenon been studied or formalized in any way by economists? I mean specifically how a cult of personality develops around a single individual causing the market to lose its shit. Or the increasing meme-ification of financial instruments.
These are both uniquely 21st century phenomena. But I'm not familiar enough with finance / economics to know what to read up on to understand what is going on.
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