Huh?

If your aim is to truly 'get started' with ML then hardware is absolutely not a bottleneck (either local or cloud).

Remember that ML is much more than LLMs. Even modern day LLMs can be quantized to a point where they can run on local hardware although their capabilities won't be as impressive.

I would recommend looking into some of Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want a grasp of the basics.

(1) You call your local representatives to start working on AI legislation.

(2) Legislators seek advisors from frontier labs (specifically Anthropic) because there is a lack of in-house expertise in government.

(3) Advisors set up a regulatory body that scrutinizes new innovations in the AI space. Causes a chilling effect in the industry effectively knee-capping OAI and Chinese model providers who don't have a direct line into Washington.

(4) Profit (for Anthropic)

It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.

But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.

Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.

Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.

Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.

Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.

[1] https://youtu.be/dKYT6NzsUZQ?si=wzf5e5iBP3MEEJEn

I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.

It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.

If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.

Sony's hubris around the PS3 was very risky. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered) hardware.

Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patlabor:_The_Movie

The last one I enjoyed watching was Arise but I lost track after that. I think the series has been done to death and I would love to see some completely new IP from Masamune that is more reflective of the AI and economic upheavals we are experiencing in the 20s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?

- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.

- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.

Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.

I've been on a retro gaming binge lately because I strongly believe the constraints & limitations of older platforms yielded a better product imo.