They used to, but this generation has been hit by at least 4 independant crises that have made them more expensive over time:
1. Moore's law dying means that older nodes are still very useful, so there's still lots of people bidding for capacity on these 8 or whatever year old foundry nodes who are willing to pay lots of money, meaning that base costs of the CPU and GPU haven't fallen as quickly as one would expect even in the absence of 2-4.
2. The Pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine screwed with supply chains quite a bit, and caused an inflationary spike.
3. Trump's tariffs affected the profitability of these consoles, and inserted a lot of uncertainty into them because nobody knows how the tariffs situation will evolve over time, or if Sony will get reimbursed or not for the illegal tariffs that were levied against them. The uncertainty and general animosity towards the USA has also caused the US Dollar to slump in value relative to a lot of currencies, which then pressures Sony to raise prices.
4. The current RAM, SSD, and GPU shortages caused by LLM hyperscalers is again spiking the costs of their components
I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.
What's boring to me is how abstract many of the "AI success stories" tend to be, even on here. A whole blog post about some new way to use LLMs, or a best practice, or whatever, and no link to the code or dotfiles. I understand that how you prompt is a big part of things but all the major providers have a lot of configuration options. There are whole ecosystems of plugins.
It's just not very interesting or useful to me to read about how you got AI to output better quality code or how you can program from your phone now without going into detail. And so many of the conversations are showing off the wins without talking about the tools, configurations, or other parts of the setup that made it possible.
It's still around and up to 6th edition! Catalyst Game hasn't been the best steward of the IP, with the rules still being internally inconsistent and usually needing a lot of house rules to fix.
> Countries across the world will have to treat US as unpredictable from now on
Anyone who has studied American history knows the US has been unreliable. Just look at how they made and then broke treaties with Native Americans. It's part of the foundation of the country.
Within Geopolitical commentaries that I used to watch, A famous quote by Henry Kissinger is often repeated.
"to be an enemy of america can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal"
So yeah, America has never been trustworthy in a way but it still had its upsides and it still had some laws and checks and people still believed in some aspects of the American dream somewhat, Not anymore.
But now?,it has never been this less trustworthy either in a way to the whole world.
In some recent recruiter calls for hybrid positions in New York, I asked if the employer would pay for roundtrip Amtrak tickets 3x/week from where I live (a ~1.5 hour train ride). Of course the answer was no and I knew that already, but if the company policy is that all employees must live within 50 miles of the office, surely they know that a 50 mile commute by car could be as long or longer than an 85 mile train ride.
That's so weird. Employers have always paid for employees' commuting expenses here in Japan [0]. It's not even mandated by law and there's a legal limit of 150k yen / month, roughly $1000 though most companies limit it to 25k (~$200). Still it's enough that commuting by bullet train is a thing [1].
> The theory is that if we close the gap in regulatory burden between public companies and large private companies, then maybe we'll see more IPOs like back in the 90's, before Sarbanes-Oxley and other new laws.
Yes, maybe. The optimal number of scandals is sadly not zero, and any given piece of legislation tends to overreact, fighting the last battle without seeing all the potential second-order consequences. Even the most carefully-crafted laws are worth giving another look, periodically.
Note that FTX, for example, was privately held. If it had been born in the nineties, the norm would be for it to go public, and have at least a modicum of disclosure; staying private would have been weird, a red flag. Instead, "our generation's Enron" had no public markets oversight whatsoever, SOX or otherwise.
So yeah, it's necessary to find a balance. You are choosing between a little regulation on a lot of companies, or a lot of regulation on a smaller and smaller chunk of the economy each year.
> fighting the last battle without seeing all the potential second-order consequences. Even the most carefully-crafted laws are worth giving another look, periodically.
Dare I say the special interests that ghost write the bulk of the text of any given legislation are specifically banking on those second and Nth order consequences.
Not directly related to FTX, but to the public vs. private discourse, if I'm not mistaken there are now a lot of pension funds and related financial institutions which have redirected a big part of their funds towards privately-owned unicorns/big companies through indirect means, and if those privately-owned unicorns/big companies were to do some shady things those pension funds would be much less in the know compared to if they'd invested their money in public companies.
One could make the valid point that those pension funds shouldn't have been (indirectly) invested in those privately-owned unicorns to begin with, but doing that would have most probably come with opportunity costs for those pension funds (as for some reason or another private big companies have been seen as bringing in more money for each dollar spent compared to big public companies, at least when it comes to the last 8-10 years).
As the OP implies, there needs to be some sort of balance between public and private companies, each of them need to be, in effect, more like the other in the eyes of the State/taxman, State-run regulators and the like.
Not quite, but only because the FTX case was weird. Many individuals from around the world were users. They didn't sign up to be investors, or even to be depositors in a banking sense, and so not all of them were qualified/accredited investors. However, SBF unilaterally and secretly treated them like investors, borrowing from them to finance various schemes. So no, FTX's fallout was not limited in that way.
The people and venture funds that officially owned FTX were a narrower group, and I assume they were all qualified investors. But the thing about our disclosure regime is that protecting the official owners of the company is only one goal, the one that serves as the pretext. Informally, various regs on public companies are designed to bring sunlight more generally, and to prevent a wider array of crimes and shenanigans than just defrauding the company's owners. Public companies also have rules and norms around governance which, had FTX been been subject to them, would have made a difference.
> It seems the private/public split along the lines of "public companies should be more scrutinized" worked as intended.
Only if the intention was also, "...and public companies should be an ever-shrinking share of the economy". There are a number of reasons why one might not have intended that. Ordinary investors miss out on early growth, and the good side-effect of general sunshine and governance norms only covers a sliver of the economy, missing many of the most dynamic firms that could use some scrutiny.
Was Larry Ellison a trendsetter? He bought the Hawaiian island of Lāna'i about 15 years ago from the owners of Dole, a continuation of American empire.
Helix is my default, as it's a more mature/stable editor. I fire up Flow Control from time to time to follow how it's developing and for more casual editing. They both do an excellent job overall, but my muscle memory binds me to Helix for now.
(I know Flow Control provides Helix keybindings, but I haven't tried that yet and I generally like to retain the default behavior of an editor so that my user experience is more "portable" across machines.)
reply