Nah. They are killing it because of amazing exclusives. That's all.
Aha, color me confused. Which would be those?
The Last of Us, Uncharted, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn
Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
201–210 of 284 posts
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#202So why do most of the PS4s I find on ebay all say "Made in China"? Are the parts made in China and then assembled in Japan at the Kisarazu plant? Or are they only making PS4 units in Japan for the domestic Japanese market...and making the rest of the world's units in China?
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff. Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive. Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one cont…
> If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. Minor point on this great post, it would actually be 0.01% instead of 0.05%, because the amount in each country is divided by 5x, but the GDP is also increased 5x, for a 25x percentage decrease.
> but the GDP is also increased 5x
Not really. You went from negotiating with one country to negotiating with one country of the same size (just 5 times). In an individual negotiation you are still facing a single equivalent country (with no GDP increase).
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was this little game I played on Linux years ago where you played an AI trying to reach singularity status while evading detection by humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
Haha just a few years ahead of its time! Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty
I actually utilized an API that did just that in some automated software I wrote with a friend a few years ago. Was actually sort of interesting how it all worked with sending the captcha then checking for the solution string after the person had solved and inserting that back into the page before carrying on.
Pretty sure at the time the cost was something like .013 cents per solve. I always wondered who the people sitting there doing that were or what their situation was.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every discussion of highly-automated factories brings to mind this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.
Fascinating, then the component shooting game moved to 200 000 cph (which is well over 9000) https://www.yamaha-motor-im.com/mounters/ysm40r
The top tier "chipshooter" style pick and place machines are going our of favour these days.
Their golden days were during the first cellphone boom. Back then, the level of integration was lesser, and you had more discrete components on more smaller boards, and volumes were of course very high during the boom time.
Now, you can have a "dumphone" made with just 30 parts on the pcb, and very few passives.
From my experience over the decade, people running factories came to love having multiple, cheaper mounters, and more lines.
The "superboard" concept is also seem to be waning, as you see more, and more individual boards in products like smartphones. It makes for less manufacturable designs, but additional labour expense is not dramatic.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had invested in a semiconductor factory early last decade, and it had started making bitcoin miners, it had reminding me of Zion from the Matrix because it seemed like the first time that a machine could make another machine which could immediately start earning a negotiable asset and then transacting for resources. Very surreal to think about.
There was this little game I played on Linux years ago where you played an AI trying to reach singularity status while evading detection by humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
If you try to download the Windows version from http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ Chrome blocks the download, saying that the .rar contains a virus.
Downloading singularity-1.00-win.zip from https://github.com/singularity/singularity/releases/tag/v1.0... also fails.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#207I wonder if this speaker to its nature of being a Japanese article but the tone is largely awe and pride of the accomplishment lacking the usual fear of automation and jobs lost I see in other such articles.
>“If you keep watching them long enough, they will start to look like humans,” said one engineer. The look in his eye is gentle like a father watching over his children. Unlike large robots that lift heavy items, the delicate movements of compact robots resemble those of human arms and have surprising warmth.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#208So why do most of the PS4s I find on ebay all say "Made in China"? Are the parts made in China and then assembled in Japan at the Kisarazu plant? Or are they only making PS4 units in Japan for the domestic Japanese market...and making the rest of the world's units in China?
I guess only a certain fraction of it is made in this factory and possibly just to Japan's domestic market.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#209Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.
I had invested in a semiconductor factory early last decade, and it had started making bitcoin miners, it had reminding me of Zion from the Matrix because it seemed like the first time that a machine could make another machine which could immediately start earning a negotiable asset and then transacting for resources. Very surreal to think about.
If the field of impact investing has an opposite, I'm sure that automated production of bitcoin miners is a part of it...
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#210> Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but, especially the first task, seems rather trivial compared to what they achieved with their robots? Even the second one, If I remember correctly Amazon does/did this manually because every single package is different and no robot flexible enough, but I assume in Sonys case packages are all exactly the same. Doesn't sound a whole lot harder than plugging in the cables.
So why wouldn't they automatize those steps as well?