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Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

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Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#71

Post by Gud »

badpun wrote: post #66
not_the_fda wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues. We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book o…

Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.

Uhm, seems to me the companies that are spearheading the rollout of electric vehicles will be still existing in the future.

BYD will dominate, not GM.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#72

Post by smcg »

s_dev wrote: post #64
munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once m…

If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc).

Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#73

Post by izacus »

fzeroracer wrote: post #69
s_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once m…

In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways. This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shr…

That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas?

Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#74

Post by wil421 »

badpun wrote: post #66
not_the_fda wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues. We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book o…

Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.

Toyota made un-Toyota like mistakes on the new v6 twin turbo. They are not immune anymore.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#75

Post by markerz »

smcg wrote: post #72
s_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once m…

If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc). Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.

Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.

Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#76

Post by bryanlarsen »

dibujaron wrote: post #25
hax0ron3 wrote: post #22

>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor? The buying without a job part isn…

"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI" I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.

Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#77

Post by vkou »

newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?

They've never been well-ran, but the laws of physics and economics put hard limits on the amount of stupid bullshit that they could produce.

Now that those limits have been largely removed, an exec at the head of a company in the post-AI age is a chimp with a machinegun.

Anything they ask for can and will be built.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#78

Post by wil421 »

noduerme wrote: post #58
newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essential…

A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#79

Post by martythemaniak »

mschuster91 wrote: post #57
martythemaniak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actual…

> Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. The overhire during ZIRP was insane though - in total it was a good nine years of zero interest rates, and between the first period (2008-2015) and the second period (2020-2022) interest rates weren't that high either. Companies battled each other hard even for people who just went through a few…

I'm not disagreeing with you exactly - there are obviously reasons for doing all those things and on the surface they may seem sensible as well. But there are also good reasons why you'd do the exact opposite and my point is that in a group of independent thinkers you'd see greater diversity of opinions and outcomes. I was a middle manager involved in some of those layoffs (on both sides!) and saw the sausage made up close. Thing is, yes it's a shitty thing to do to someone personally, but nothing of what I saw could be justified in objective terms.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#80

Post by teamonkey »

square_usual wrote: post #48

In the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as ba…

Revenues overall are rising, but the only real growth right now is in China + East Asia, and in Roblox.

https://www.matthewball.co/all/presentation-the-state-of-vid...

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