European consumer focused businesses do not scale easily the same way US ones do, which is a major contributor to their problems developing tech businesses generally.
OTOH such things can be quite defensible, they just rarely become anything like as profitable.
For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive.
I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists.
GPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level performance concerns.
My experience of it, which is quite substantial both as dev and overseeing whole teams at it, is people do not pay for GPU programming, they do pay for integrating it into their framework, optimizing what the artists did already, and developing profiling tools, but the only part of that remotely competitive with ops related roles is "We didn't think we needed developers so our art team made an inefficient mess in Unreal and we're desperate to release the game on time and are throwing money around to make sure it actually runs on remotely normal hardware", after which they will sit around complaining about how expensive it was and the amount of damage that was done to their artistic vision in the process.
These bots are going to arrive suddenly and in huge volume. I’m not sure when it will happen, but when it does, it will be extremely fast. The software is basically ready, and the hardware isn’t too far off. The processing latency will be problematic but with local inference improving quickly, this will all come together into the perfect storm for the arrival of the bot army. I don’t think any of us are prepared for it.
No, neither the hardware nor software is anywhere even remotely ready, where by "ready" we mean "safe to share living spaces with unsupervised children and pets without EVER accidentally reducing your toddler to a fine paste, literally a 0% chance". That's the minimum that people will accept, and that's more than ten years away, if it ever happens.
Both of the preceding comments are true. These things are about to arrive in vast volume, because the factories to build them are already starting to run. And they're nowhere near ready for that.
It took over a decade for Waymo to get from "able to drive around SF for demos" to "3x safer than humans, with thousands of vehicles on the roads".
A lot of these things may end up in closets, next to the VR headset and the 3D TV.
You'd be surprised. I think Waymo have already proven this; not perfectly safe, but below the care threshold. And the demand for childcare is huge. Of course, what then happens is how the ensuing child neglect case falls out.
We're probably going to end up with the situation where the burden "it is considered criminal child endangerment to leave your child alone with the robot" falls on the parents, not on the robot manufacturers.
That's not how product liability laws work in the U.S. or in the E.U.
The first time a child gets harmed by a robot, the company making that robot will go spectacularly bankrupt. If a child gets killed by a robot, it would likely end the consumer robotics industry for a decade or more.
Good news, the current apocalyptic memory prices will mean that only apocalyptically rich people will be able to afford them at the toddler-pasting stage if they come out any time soon!
Robot vacuums have been around for a decade now. Some are apparently decent.
Nobody really cares. Robot vacuums are still a single digit % of the vacuum market.
It turns out that saving a few minutes on housework isn't something people are willing to spend thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars on when the cheaper options are more versatile and more robust.
I would pay $10k for a robot that wakes up when I leave for work, does all the household chores, then goes to sleep before I return home to a house with dishes cleaned and put away, clothes washed and folded, clutter organized, surfaces cleaned, floors vacuumed and climate exactly how I want it…
I absolutely hate doing these chores to the point I rarely do them and go through cycles of two weeks of gradually disorganized living space until I finally crack and spend two hours gritting my teeth to poorly execute the chores.
I should hire a cleaner to come every two weeks, but that’s a chore too. I’d rather order a robot from Amazon, take it out of the box and have my problems solved.
Most people don't have thousands of dollars lying around to purchase a robot. The market of people who have that sort of money to spend on a discretionary purchase of that magnitude is in the low 6 figures globally.
That tech bros glibly assume that a freakishly expensive appliance is everybody's must-buy is part of why most people now have extremely strong negative feelings toward tech.
The future of SRE will be the company putting some amount of money on a prediction market against the site going down and you get to take home the winnings as long as the site stays up.
As others have pointed out at the time she absolutely did get attention. What the modern UK has memory holed is just how bonkersly pro-Russian it was in the 90s; everything from Tetris, Newton handwriting recognition, software generally, rockets, materials, nanotech, new gas supplies, having Abramovich buy Chelsea and the result being practically all the upper middle class exploring Russian (and ex Soviet) connections for investment. The former USSR was then what Qatar etc. are today. It does seem plausible that she fell into that hole along with everything else.
I wouldn't call the UK pro-Russian exactly. A lot of people were relieved the Cold War was over and many people did feel things would get better. There has been an attempt to reverse that, to the point that Tchaikovsky concerts were getting cancelled a few years ago which is ridiculous. Then you had Louise Mensch claiming Russia had produced nothing of cultural worth... A pretty outrageous statement whatever you think of their governments. In retrospect, Yeltsin's government was very corrupt and Russia's economy was demolished, which I think led us to where we are today. Soviet space achievements have definitely been airbrushed out.
Back in the seventies and eighties, there was definitely a pro-Soviet element in play as well as a pro-American one. It was often low key, but you could see it in the BBC sometimes, and definitely in the Labour Party. Yuri Gagarin did a successful tour of the UK which has been largely forgotten about, including visiting mining towns etc. Even someone as right wing as Patrick Moore was friendly with people from both the eastern and western space programmes, and helped the USSR with lunar mapping
It's entirely plausible Google won't tell Railway without an NDA to prevent them disclosing exactly what set it all off.
The bigger point though is Google really need to flag any business account as not subject to these suspensions until checked into by several humans. Back when I had a team that used a lot of App Engine they would even call us when we caused all their pagers to go off, and then conspire to keep the lights on while things got fixed. It's sad they have ended up like this.
> It's entirely plausible Google won't tell Railway without an NDA to prevent them disclosing exactly what set it all off.
That case is called:
> or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them.
I'm not paying you (which let's face it, that's what an NDA is) just to find out why you messed up about as severely as one can imagine. In theory, there was a contract here: $ for cloud services, and the rug got pulled. One should get a very clear, and very apologetic explanation as to why, with no strings attached, or one should be voting with their wallet.
Now, whether Railway will do any of that, who knows.
From the point of view of the RISC-V architects the "users" are the chip designers who are engaged in a sort of build-your-own-instruction-set situation, and this kind of makes sense, but does contribute to it being a mess.
They are absolutely in denial as to the downstream effects of this on the software ecosystem. Android, for example, for native support had enough fun dealing with relatively few ARM variants (and x86/MIPS etc), and identifying chip features at run time was reliant on the board support software getting it right (hint: it didn't).
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