> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.
I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year.
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
You know, it is easy to find this kind of nitpicking and seemingly eternal discussion over details exhausting and meaningless, but I do think it is actually a good sign and a consequence of "openness".
In politics, authoritarianism tend to show a pretty façade where everyone mostly agrees (the reality be damned), and discussion and dissenting voice are only allowed to a certain extent as a communication tool. This is usually what we see in corporate development.
Free software are much more like democracy, everyone can voice their opinion freely, and it tends to be messy, confrontational, nitpicky. It does often lead to slowing down changes, but it also avoids the common pitfall of authoritarian regime of going head first into a wall at the speed of light.
Opensource software doesn't have 1 governance model and most of it starts out as basically a pure authoritarian run.
It's only as the software ages, grows, and becomes more integral that it switches to more democratic forms of maintenance.
Even then, the most important OS code on the planet, the kernel, is basically a monarchy with King Linus holding absolute authority to veto the decision of any of the Lords. Most stuff is maintained by the Lords but if Linus says "no" or "yes" then there's no parliament which can override his decision (beyond forking the kernel).
While it seems unlikely, I wouldn't find it impossible (edit: learning more about IQ score, yeah 276 is definitly BS). You can be "intelligent" as in very good at solving logic puzzle and math problem, and the most obtuse and subjectively dumb person when it comes to anything else. It might be less likely but definitely happened.
I have met people working in very advanced field having the perspective and reflection of a middle schooler on politics, social challenges, etc. Somewhere also clearly blinded by their own capacity in own field and thought that it would absolutely transfer to other field and were talking with authority while anybody in the room with knowledge could smell the BS from miles away.
I'm not saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because it's impossible for someone who says that stuff to be smart, I'm saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because people who say that stuff tend to also lie about their IQ.
Well, it is mathematically impossible. Traditional IQ tests have a mean/median of 100, and follow a normal distribution with standard-deviation of 15 points.
So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.
It's possible in the same way its possible that you will spontaneously phase through the floor due to a particular outcome of atomic resonance. Possible, but so unlikely it almost certainly has not, nor ever will happen.
Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.
The probability is exactly zero by definition. The maximum score on a test is a raw score of 100%. Tests are normalized to have the reported scores fit a normal distribution. An out-of-distribution score indicates an error in normalizing the test.
In other words, the highest IQ of every living person has a defined upper bound that is dependent on the number of living people and it is definitionally impossible to exceed this value. Reports of higher values are mistakes or informal exaggerations, similar to a school saying a student is one that you would only encounter in a million years. By definition it is not possible to have evidence to support such a statement.
The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd in itself), the maximum IQ achievable would be between 190-197. In practice, I'd guess the maximum is somewhere between 170 and 185 (millions to tens of millions of IQ test results which were recorded).
Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.
So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.
Between 8 and 9 billion. But "impossible" means a chance of zero, and 8 billion / 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 > 0, so it's not impossible. The chances that he's lying or delusional are vastly higher of course, but that's no reason to use "impossible" incorrectly.
Impossible is almost always a colloquialism, almost everything is possible is you accept a low enough probability of success. We are talking about something less likely than almost anything else ever called impossible.
No, I think you are misunderstanding. IQ does not describe the likelihood of someone being that smart. It just means you order a number of people by their „intelligence“, the one in the middle is defined as 100 and then it depends on how many other people are in that line which IQ number the person at the end of the line gets. So it’s impossible because the definition of IQ is such that a certain number doesn’t come up without a certain number of measurements.
It‘s as if you would say 150% of all people are female. That is impossible, not just unlikely.
Depends on the exact "IQ" test but many do not have an upper bound. The thing to understand about IQ tests is that they were designed and are primarily used as a diagnosis tool by psychologists to identify learning deficiencies. There really isn't much evidence that having a 180 vs a 140 IQ means a whole lot of anything beyond one's ability to take that specific test. If anything, having an extremely high score outside of the normal range may indicate neuro-divergence and likely savant syndrome. Some people are savants in specific ways - working memory, pattern recognition, language skills, etc. IQ tests certainly test several different categories of intelligence, but also certainly leaves out a few other known forms of intelligence.
Funnily enough, I am preparing a simple presentation at work to speak about exactly that. The idea of separating "logic" from I/O and side effects is an old one and can be found in many architectures (like hexagonal architecture). There is plenty of benefit doing this, but testing is a big one.
It should be obvious, but this is not something that seem to be thought in school or in most workplaces, and when it is, it's often through the lens of functional programming, which most just treat as a curiosity and not a practical thing to use at work. So I started to teach this simple design principle to all my junior dev because this is something that is actually quite easy to implement, does not need a complete shift of architecture/big refactor when working on existing code, and is actually practical and useful.
> Valve isn't likely to make SteamOS the kind of platform that facilitates intrusive* anti-cheat* or which is locked down in a way to prevent cheating at the client side. This means that a number of competitive multiplayer games will never run on it. I think in this regard, consoles still have an advantage** if you're into those kinds of games.
Depends on just how successful SteamOS gets. If it start to have a significant market share, competitive multiplayer games might start to find it hard to ignore it. Though how they decide to deal with that, I have no idea.
I think Valve see a future for anti-cheat where most of it is behavioral analysis. Client-side anti-cheat is a big game of cat and mouse. It does make cheat harder to develop, but to a point where the customer is impacted. Post game analysis cannot be countered "technically". Cheat would need to mimic a real player behavior, which at the end is a success. If you can't tell if a player is cheating or not, does it matter that they are ? Although for things like wallhacks, it might be harder to detect.
"you can't tell if a player is cheating or not, does it matter that they are"
This is basically effectively where KLA has gotten to. There are still plenty of cheaters, people just don't realize.
I think it does matter in a strictly moral sense, and if people were more aware of how bad the problem is, they would likely be outraged. Alas, since they can't see it, they are not aware of it, so there is no outrage and the games companies are satisfied.
Well, Genshin Impact is at the forefront of predatory B2C business practice. It is a gacha game, engineered to extract as much money from its prey as possible.
On the other end, most AI company can afford to be generous with their user/consumer right now because they are being bankrolled by magic money.
The real test will be when they have to start the enshitification. Will the product still be enough to convince consumer to spend an amount of money guarantying a huge margin for the service provider ? Will they have to rely on whale desperately needing to talk to their IA girlfriend ? Or company and people who went deep into the whole vibe coding thing, and can't work without an agent ?
I think it is hard to say right now. But considering the price of the hardware and running it, I don't think they will have to price the service insanely to at least be profitable. To be as profitable as the market seems to believe, that's another story.
Regardless of your feelings on Genshin/gacha (which I agree is predatory), the point is that the revenue of a single game developed by a few hundred people is currently making more money than an entire industry which is "worth" trillions of dollars, according to the stock market, and is, according to Sam Altman, so fundamentally important to the US economy that the US government is an insurer of last resort who will bail out AI companies if their stock price falls too much.
Isn't AI just as bad if not worse here? I'd bet there are far more people who have been duped by ChatGPT (and others) to think it's their friend, lover, or therapist than people who are addicted to Genshin Impact.
> The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evangelism but the creators where usually much more chill.
I must have been living in a different world then. I mean maybe in the 80's and 90's but I feel like people acting weirdly obsessive about a piece of tech and going about evangelizing it every where, usually in a detached from reality kind of way, goes back to at least newsgroup, when suddenly you could have an audience outside of physical event (with their limitation and all). I mean there was the text editor flame wars, and I am sure you can find post like "why are you not using language/database/tool X instead of Y???!!" in the most ancient of mailing list and forums.
I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
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