This is such a bad take I don't even know where to start... Even if you think vibe coding _is_ the future, there are still so many things wrong about this article. It's like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding why we even create programming languages.
I actually think that they have a good handle on the motivation for programming languages design. Think about C. C has many features that serve programmer ergonomics. The use of "=" for assignment and the use of "++" for incrementing there to serve the developer by reducing keystrokes. Yes there are some languages that are developed to be more formal, but that isn't the mainstream.
I hate this “don’t worry about ads, we have strategically committed to ads, and we’ve hired a whole team, who are building the ad system, and they are now embedded in key areas of the business so we can’t change course without massive disruption, but the tests for the ads aren’t live yet, so why worry about ads?”.
The parent comment of course understands that. Nvidia views the gaming market as an entry threat, a vector from which a competitor can come after their AI GPU market. That's the reason Nvidia won't be looking to exit the gaming scene no matter how large their AI business gets. If done correctly, staying in the gaming GPU market helps to suppress competition.
Exiting the consumer market is likely a mistake by Micron. If China takes that market segment, they'll eventually take the rest, eliminating most of Micron's value. Holding consumer is about keeping entry attacks covered.
Exiting the consumer market is likely a mistake by Micron.
I actually think their move to shut down the Crucial channel will prove to be a good one. Why? Because we're heading toward a bimodal distribution of outcomes: either the AI bubble won't pop, and it will pay to prioritize the data center customers, or it will pop. In the latter case a consumer/business-facing RAM manufacturer will have to compete with its own surplus/unused product on scales never seen before.
Worst case scenario for Micron/Crucial, all those warehouses full of wafers that Altman has reserved are going to end up back in the normal RAM marketplace anyway. So why not let him foot the bill for fabbing and storing them in the meantime? Seems that the RAM manufacturers are just trying to make the best of a perilous situation.
But why not just keep the consumer brand until stockpiles empty and blame supply issues until things possibly cool down, or people have forgotten the brand at all.
I imagine the strategy would get out anyway as soon as retailers tried to place their next round of orders. Might as well get out in front of it with a public announcement. AI make line go up, at least for now.
Who made the decision? There are still so many of us wanting a compact phone, but the big tech companies (Google, Apple, etc.) said no, therefore we can't have it. Not only can we not have it, they also closed the door on everyone, now even if someone wants to service this section of the market, they can't. Because, yes, the supply chain has left us.
This is power - they are taking away our freedoms and anatomy. They are making decisions for us and we have absolutely no say.
</rant>
Compact phones is but one of examples. A more current example would be the rocketing DRAM price. We got do something to stop this, but I feel so powerless.
> We got do something to stop this, but I feel so powerless.
I avoid anything from Sam Altman, and share the news that this asshole is single-handedly screwing up the DRAM market. It isn't much, but it is the least I can do.
I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone.
And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capitalism is bullshit and that makes Valve stand out.
I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and I always dreamed of working there, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain. Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.
Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.
My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.
They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?
> acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone
I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.
Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.
Valve cuts 30% of your revenue no matter how much you earn. They also cut 15% of the transaction by being the middleman on the market.
They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).
They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.
I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.
It’s funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.
oh that's funny. do you have a link to where he had said that?
i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some basis. but then again, what an organization is internally and how the organization behave as a whole can be different.
They are wrong, though. Locks also stop people who would happily commit an opportunistic theft but who lack the necessary tools or skills, people who would trespass if they could retain some plausible deniability ("oops, I didn't see the signs" vs. "oops, I didn't realise I wasn't supposed to cut that padlock"), and so on.
The honest people are a larger group than the dishonest people.
And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness or self-preservation. Only a select few are truly committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their accounts on the line.
Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western countries).
