Story of my life the last 5-10 years haha. Hard to take such a big risk without having a very solid position.
I'm taking an AI-first approach with a project I wouldn't have accepted otherwise, to get a better understanding of how much I can delegate and how quickly I can get it done. Could open up a lot of doors if successful. There are many more projects I'd be willing to pitch/accept if I didn't have to do all the grunt work. Quality still needs to be there though.
On the flop side, maybe there wouldn't be as many garbage papers printed if there were any actual negative consequences. It's not so simple as you make it out to be.
A national "War on Data", a Data enforcement agency (DEA), and a Data Abuse Resistence Education (DARE) program and we should have this problem wrapped up in no time.
So I, as a software engineer, have to deal with the impacts of this administration both making my employment harder as well as terrorizing the city I live in. Where do you suggest I would go to share these issues other than the site that is specifically for hackers and tech workers?
I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
No. It means "sick to death of hearing about politics everywhere I go and I am desperate for the occasional respite from that madness". Your interpretation is extremely bad faith.
This is what the biggest names in the VC class want you to think as they continue to enrich themselves, while (in the USA at least) they support a regime that is growing in its authoritarian output.
Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
> Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
These guys all benefit when the No-Politics Purity Brigade drives by and flag-kills every article pointing out their wrongdoing as "political." By flagging this stuff, they're actually making HN more political: They are defending billionaires, their agendas, and their status-quo politics.
Claude definitely has some API token security baked in, it saw some API keys in a log file of mine the other day and called them out to me as a security issue very clearly. In this case it was a false positive but it handled the situation well and even gave links to reset each token.
Those games have 100x to 500x smaller budgets than the AAA-games. Yes, they often have cute ideas, but, like a blockbuster movie, 99 times out of 100 you need a solid budget to make a solid movie/game.
If you want AAA games, you are going to have a safe game. You get the same with movies - Bigger budgets cause safer behavior with less risk taking. You wind up with a pretty game, a somewhat safe story (that they think will sell) and gameplay they think is just good enough to keep you going.
It isn't that the other games are bad, though. It isn't like we are talking "handheld camcorder student-written movie" vs "polished hollywood blockbuster" but more.... Beautiful painting by a mostly unknown artist vs beautiful large, publically displayed and privatly funded artist. Big budgets get you more assistance and more/better tools and more space and more human help and more connections.
It is probably important to remember that a large portion of a blockbuster's budget is advertising. Advertising is often 50-100% of the production budget and I'm guessing AAA games have similar advertising budgets. I'm not sure how a large advertising budget gives you better products, though it might get you more folks if your game is online.
Of course, I'm guessing if you limit your search to FPS games, your experience might be a different.
The top of the list is Genshin Impact, although it'll probably be displaced by GTA6 soon - that one's estimated to come in at $1.5-2 million. There's multiple FPS games on there but there's some pretty expensive open-world games too.
> 99 times out of 100 you need a solid budget to make a solid movie/game.
Sure, but 1 in 100 still gets you dozens of games a year now. There's plenty of genres where the top titles are nowhere near an AAA budget: Hades 2, Silksong, and Claire Obscura all being popular examples from this year, and Factorio being another well known example around here. Even simpler games like Balatro and Vampire Survivor are plenty of fun for some people.
The biggest studios have rarely been the ones producing the best work - budget gets you fancy cinematics and a beautifully rendered 3D world, but it doesn't make level design go any faster. It could plausibly buy better writing, but that requires all the executives to back off and trust the creatives.
And for what it's worth, the big studios are all happy raking in money on mindless remakes - it keeps working for them.
If 1% of indie games are solid, and all AAA game are solid, and there are 100 times more indie games than AAA games, then there would still be the same amount of solid indies as there are solid AAA games. As it is, I think for every good AAA game, there are somewhere between 50 and 500 great indie games.
Finding them is slightly harder, but absolutely worth it.
In any case, complaining about how many games there are out there that are not your thing is a waste of time. Much better to define what you like and look for recommendations from people who like similar games. Who care how many FPSs are released if you don't like FPSs? If you like RPGs, find RPG gamers and ask them what's good. Substitute for any genre; there is no genre out there that's not getting more releases than you could possibly play.
I think he is saying where is the creativity in the AA+ space. Which still might be a lack of depth / breadth of search, or platform exclusive content. Not everyone can own all the consoles.
Story of my life the last 5-10 years haha. Hard to take such a big risk without having a very solid position.
I'm taking an AI-first approach with a project I wouldn't have accepted otherwise, to get a better understanding of how much I can delegate and how quickly I can get it done. Could open up a lot of doors if successful. There are many more projects I'd be willing to pitch/accept if I didn't have to do all the grunt work. Quality still needs to be there though.
reply