With these old games sometimes the source is just lost. I used to work with a guy who wrote Brian the Lion(the Amiga game) and he always says he wishes he still had the source code for it. We've also looked briefly at the source code of Driver, and the only one in company archives was not the final version. There were 2 revisions after that one but no one has a copy of those. And then we pulled a bunch of old CDs with assets and code burnt back in 1990s and about 50% were unreadable already, god knows what exactly was on them.
So I can comment on this as someone who has worked in video games for 15 years now, for 3 of the biggest publishers.
To start with, I've been at Ubisoft for 10 years - and the pay was famously abysmal. Like you could go and work at a supermarket and earn more, without joking. And every time I tried to argue about it the counter argument was
1) we pay low but you get to work on cool stuff
2) there is an infinite number of people interested in working here
3) if you don't like it, then leave
And you know what....as much as I absolutely hate to admit it, there was a nugget of truth to that. I was paid like shit, but I got to work on games which sold 30-40 million copies and were enjoyed by a lot of people. Nothing makes me happier than meeting people saying they played one of the games I worked on and they loved or they have fond memories of it. I don't think that justifies the poor pay, but all of my friends in IT were paid a lot more but worked on some software they hated and no one remembers it. I mean there are exceptions to this, but in general, I really enjoyed my time at Ubisoft, the problems were interesting and everyone who worked there really wanted to be there. Incredibly skilled and passionate people.
BUT I've since moved to one of the other largest publishers in video games and basically had the same position but doubled my salary. Then couple years later I moved to another big publisher and I got a crazy pay bump, basically in line with what people I know at "big tech" are being paid. And I took a step down from a tech lead to senior engineer to be here.
So I think some parts of the industry are definitely paying top money for people to work for them. When I was looking for jobs I had several offers from big companies in video games at similar pay too, so they weren't alone in this.
I think the industry has just changed from what it used to be. At least afaik programmers are being paid much better than they used to be. But that's just my personal experience.
I mean, 90% of employees on the UK(I imagine it's probably 99%) don't ever have to file any taxes - it's all done automatically through PAYE. Only in certain specific circumstances you need to file a self assessment. So yes, I sympathise with the administrative burden for UK businesses, but for employees the system is basically better than almost anywhere else in the world.
It's generally correct: If you're self-employed / sole trader and operating outside IR-35, there's no way the HMRC can know how much you were paid as they don't have the info, so they can't know how much tax you owe.
In other situations for payrole / salary (like PAYE for example) they do have the info, as companies have to submit it, so generally people in those situations don't have to submit tax returns (unless they have significant capital gains).
I do think it's a bit annoying you have to declare tax on interest since 2016 if it's over £1000 - previously banks would take it out automatically, and this is still done in other countries (NZ for example).
These sort of calculations are always missing a simple fact that no company on earth, not even Apple or Google shrugs off a 200M fine, no matter how little it is of their entire operating budget. It's the kind of money that gets people fired, even if it made no difference to the bottom line.
2. Who cares if somebody gets fired for PR purposes? Especially with a severance that will make sure that their great-grandchildren will never have to work and your great-grandchildren will be paying them rent?
Everybody doing tens of billions of $ of business shrugs off a $200M fine. They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
By your logic you could argue that if anybody on this planet starves to death then Americans can be blamed and ‘engineered it’, since they had the economic means to prevent it. You’re essentially trying to argue that inaction is a positive act, which it is not as a matter of logic and law universally.
Your logic is laughable on its face, obviously.
Americans have no more duty to look after non-Americans than anybody else.
If I provide cancer drugs to someone, and then suddenly stop, am I to blame for them dying of cancer? That doesn't imply that I have a moral duty to provide the drugs. But if I am providing them and then withdraw them, then there is some responsibility on my part?
>>You’re essentially trying to argue that inaction is a positive act
You've assumed I have a certain position then argue against it, not against what I actually said.
Unilateral voluntary foreign aid is not in any way analogous to medical care that creates strict legal obligations when the doctor-patient relationship commences.
I think that's kinda different - these repair shops could repair anything because things were repairable and because people had the skill to do so, and because the financial reality meant that repairing something almost always made more sense than buying new. I still know these people who are happy to do soldering on modern TV motherboards to fix them, but it's just very hard to justify financially in Western economies. I once shipped an entire HiFi system to a repair shop in Poland because a guy there could fix it for equivalent of €50, even with shipping the thing there and back it was worth it. Meanwhile my local repair shop wanted €100 just to diagnose the issue.
I also think they leave so much money on the table by not having the simplest of features - why can't I gift someone kindle books? I'd be buying so many for friends and family, but there is literally no way to do that on kindle. It's money they aren't getting.
Like someone else said - there doesn't exist any situation, in any plane in any conditions, where holding the stick back the entire time would be an appropriate input. Literally doesn't exist. So if you're doing that.....what exactly are you hoping to achieve? Is a fundamental lack of understanding of how planes work.
The plane was actively telling them to pitch up. Every training they had received from Air France and Airbus told them that in normal law, the plane will not stall.
Because a court said it does not make it true. The captain made the correct choices. The first officer made inexplicably incorrect choices continuously; choices which nobody would ever make regardless of training, unless perhaps you had literally never flown a plane before.
At no point in time would the correct response to a stall warning be to pull the nose up. This is something taught well before you enter the cockpit of a commercial airliner. If you continue to pitch the nose up excessively, you will stall the aircraft. This is also something you learn on day 2 or 3 of flight school.
If the first officer had done literally nothing at all, 228 people would be alive.
The first officer wasn’t solo-flying a 172 with a six-pack cluster. They were flying an airplane that will refuse to stall in normal law. The plane had switched to alternate law 2, but the indication to the pilots was an autopilot disengage. That is bad design.
I also fault Airbus’s philosophy on countermanding inputs, though that warning is unambiguous and the pilots should have communicated about that. But when the damn “un-stallable” aircraft is yelling at you for putting the nose down, while also yelling at you for opposing inputs, you can’t not fault the plane.
I'd think we'd have outgrown things like claims of "unstallibility" given prior experience with ships claimed to be "unsinkable". There's what the marketing says, and then there's reality. You will never build a technical system incapable of being coaxed into an error state. Period.
Too many years as Quality Assurance grinds into you that when engineers claim perfection, you start questioning their assumptions, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down shortly thereafter.
Says you, while sitting comfortably on a couch sipping coffee, with zero risk of death, able to take as much time as you'd like to analyze the situation, with perfect information available and a fresh, unstressed mind.
Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Bravado and macho mindset are explicitly frowned upon in aviation for a reason.
Reminds me of "aviation experts" claiming Sulley didn't have to ditch in the Hudson at all, since some pilots in the simulator were later able to turn around and land back at the airport.
Sure they were! I'd be able to do so too, and I'm no pilot — I'm safe in a simulator, I already know I'm going to have a double engine failure x seconds after takeoff, and I get to try to land an infinite amount of times until I get it right. Easy peasy.
Things look a bit different when it's your ass in the seat and you lose both engines on a random takeoff.
They also look different when you're subjected to massive G forces, your plane isn't listening to your inputs, the computer is shouting erratic warnings at you, you're rapidly losing altitude, and your training didn't cover this scenario.
GP claimed “there doesn't exist any situation, in any plane in any conditions, where holding the stick back the entire time would be an appropriate input. Literally doesn't exist.” That's what I was replying to.
Yes, because in video games there is always a chance to win so you can optimize your strategy around that chance. If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. With agentic coding there is no such guaranteed chance - in a way it's worse than a slot machine that is guaranteed to pay out eventually. You could spend hundreds of millions of tokens and still not get what you asked for.
> If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time.
Sidenote but I hope everyone realizes that 100 is kind of arbitrary here and does not mean the total chance to to get something is 100%.
You’re right, the arpg analogy isnt great, it’s too simplistic. I was trying to come up with something heavily stochastic where people are coming up with strategies to get the odds in their favor. Maybe closer to speculating on the real estate market? But even that feels too simplistic compared to LLMs. Even the definition of a win isn’t well defined.
Actually it’s really its own thing, I don’t think the slot machine analogy works too well, you also have fixed odds (and you know they aren’t in your favor), and a binary output
The analogy to slot machine is that you're spending your own resources in hope of a reward. So you're ultimately bound by your resources and your strategy doesn't count for much in the grand scheme of things.
With employees, there's a lot of punishments in place for people to not want to mess up. Loss of wages and reputation, prison time,... Startup do not fail because they have a bug-ridden product, they fail because of the market.
With AI, all bets are off. They're not aligned with your goals and it's very hard to discern when they go off unless you're an expert. And if you are one, at best it's just a slight boost in typing especially with all the works involved in software development.
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