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Comment by canpan | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse: Customer says I want X!

One or more of the following can be true:

  - Customer really wants X
  - Customer doesnt actually need X at all
  - Customer wants Y not X but couldnt express himself
  - Customer B and C do NOT want X at all
  - Customer is just messing with you for no reason

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Also quite common for me is like someone says X is good (usually a PM) but common sense says it's crap, and when you actually ask the user they also say it's crap. If only LLMs could email a bunch of people for second opinions.

Or fire the PM?

PM = politics maestro

They will out-corporate you. Better to be friends with them, or failing that, move from under them

Or fuck them, fuck the managers, fuck the c-suites (intentionally decapitalized), go for a flat organizational structure like Valve where you have no one to report to (well maybe Gabe Newell or the team leader for that project occasionally), but the culture is that everyone can manage themselves organically rather than having hierarchies and forced, useless reportings

Valve ships almost nothing, and the engineering quality is mediocre. Their game design is good, but subsidized by a unique early mover monopoly market owner position.

There is almost nothing that can be generalized, and people who hold up their organization as an example to strive for are utterly clueless

> early mover monopoly

Well, while I do agree it is an early mover (I believe Steam is not the first to do online game platform, but it should indeed be the first one to use a CDN for the solution), I'm sorry that you have Ubisoft Connect, EA Origin, Epic Games Store, itch.io, GOG, Humble Bundle.

So you do have a choice. That renders the statement of it being a monopoly impossible. It's simply because every other platforms sucks.

In other words, it's like Nvidia. You choose Nvidia because AMD and Intel sucks, not because you don't have a choice.

> engineering quality is mediocre

You should see how CS2's smoke system works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryB8hT5TMSg

tl;dw: it is a voxel ray marching plus flood fill with Mie scattering. I'd like to point this out that is not only a really good game design, but it also requires ingenious engineering quality. I tried to improve upon it by adding octrees (or in other word, making it sparse voxel octree) but it doesn't seems to add much.

Oh and plus their new bomb shock wave system. I tried to reverse engineer it with vector field, but I couldn't come up with the ODE equations to recreate it. I believe it has to be some kind of field, because in a high energy explosion, it scatter through air into fluid-like structure and hence we can use some aerodynamics for simluation

Steam predates all those platforms by years. The only platforms that I can think of predating it are long dead and didn’t have the same concept of ownership (gamespy, gamestorm, AOL, heat.net, etc). Indeed, part of why those platforms struggle or failed is exactly steams early mover advantage.

Eight years before Origin. Six years for Ubisoft’s. Fifteen for Epic Games Store. Ten years for itch.io. Five years for GOG. Seven years for humble bundle (though their early offerings were literally steam keys).

Hierarchies are burned deep into our DNA little boy, u ever read Utopia?

I’ve outlived many PMs and helped get at least one fired. If they were omnipotent they’d be better at product design.

ask Ed Zitron how well that statistically pans out

https://xyproblem.info/

Why deliver one solution? You're thinking small. If LLMs were fast enough, they could build A,B,C,...,Z in parallel. So that's what will end up happening. The operator will just have to make sure there's no combinatorial explosion of the possible requirements.

Right. Because If I want feature A and it is available in configuration among features A through Z I will always perfectly pick the right letter of the alphabet and I will not at all be irritated by having 26 options that I have no idea about what is the difference between them.

But I think there's anyway a point there. I watched a talk once and it was humorously said that the amount of time spent discussing whether solution A is better than B is more than implementing both A and B and seeing in practice. It's funny because it's true.

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