In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.
So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.
Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.
Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.
There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.
That’s quite the conclusion to derive from a Gitlab issue. Do you mind sharing your thought process or was that just a knee jerk reaction without any reasoning behind it?
Cost has always been a major factor in publishing fiction. 25% fewer words per line may boost comprehension by $x% but definitely increases cost by 25%. When markets are as price sensitive as leisure, cost is a big factor in the decision. Books don’t sell on a price per printed page basis. Mainstream publishers with existing distribution contracts are especially sensitive because of print runs.
When we published a print magazine we optimized heavily to save 1% on printing costs. 25% would have been suicide. And indie magazine buyers are traditionally a lot more price flexible than mainstream book buyers.
I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles.
There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
After looking at the 3D relief of the guy with his pecker in his hand I feel like this was carved in the period immediately preceding the abandonment of the site in pre-history. I base that on the definition of the outlines of the leopards. It appears that initial work had started on giving each of them a 3D view as they are cut in along the margins of the belly and back. Maybe the entire panel would've been a 3D relief had the people been around to complete it.
Something came along and compelled these people to abandon the site or they were killed off by a different group. Very interesting anyway why a group would put so much effort into constructing these sites without the sites being places where they lived. I think I read somewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever lived there. They were places where people gathered. I could be wrong though.
I don't think it is necessarily a sign of any tragic upheaval but to me that decline in carving quality indicates that the man wasn't meant to be part of a scene initially.
Perhaps an image of a God or a King.
The leopard-obsessed bunch showed up later and started drawing leopard graffiti around putting in far less effort.
That in itself could represent an invasion but it could also represent young people these days or even aligned additions to the King’s biography for reference.
I have thought about this and I have to disagree since the figure of the man is centered between the two leopards and is scaled similarly to them. I feel like the work here was incomplete. Perhaps all the wives followed them to the site, were appalled when they stormed inside, and drug their husbands home by the ears while banishing them from the site forever. Or, maybe a stronger rival group they were looking to join in order to strengthen their community sent members to a gathering of their clans. During the rival group's visit, there was a big show-and-tell session where stories were told and libations passed around for all to enjoy before the closing presentation unveiled all the cat and weenie stuff. Upon being optically blessed with the wondrousness of the new group, those new guys returned to their villages and described what they had seen. After reporting back to other members of their group it was unanimously agreed that those guys were perverts and no one wanted to associate with them.
A few years later, before the cat/pecker group could complete their service yourself station, the stronger group herded them out of the area forcing them on the road to new lands, new experiences and opportunities for personal growth - of the whole body instead of just parts.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
You’re underestimating the difficulty - actually downloading, parsing and updating the system with billions of pages was a very hard thing in the 1990s.
It's not an algorithmic issue, though, that's a systems issue. GGP was talking about the cyclic link nature which isn't an issue of size, it's an issue of convergence.
In 1997, there were only a hundred thousand web pages. Not even millions.
The one billion mark would not be breached until 2016 according to the results of a quick search.
You can make the other argument that China subsidizes the price and that they can't be profitable at this pricing level. From an industrial strategy standpoint, they already do this for many other industries with huge subsidized state loans.
So we can go round and round on this, each with our made-up objections about how it's temporary or unrealistic or impossible or whatever, or we can just accept the prices as listed and use that to guide our economic decisions.
Just look at the prices that inference providers charge for small models. The argument that these unit economics are negative is trivial to disprove.
DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.
Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.
I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.
That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.
There's a difference between the Deepseek.com provider lunch pricing and the pricing every other provider is doing now.
Right now DS4-Pro-0813 is available from multiple providers for $1.32/million input tokens[1].
It's pretty easy to work backwards from B200 and electricity prices and see this is profitable even without the heavy serving optimization these providers are doing[1.5].
The OpenCode CEO said: "inference is very profitable and probably a good opportunity to understand some basic business math"[2] and "the inference we do is already profitable and that's with some middlemen involved"[3]
If at this point people don't believe inference can be profitable, and providers can turn the prices up and down to choose exactly how profitable they make it I don't know what to say.
So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.
Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.
Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.
There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.
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