The reasulting reality of the managerless approach hasn’t been good. As the they say, “if you don’t have any managers you have politics”.
I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”
Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!
For anyone who seeks to emulate Valves internal structure you have to ask yourself one question - do you already have a core product with a near-unimpeachable monopoly which consistently brings in enough money to keep the entire company afloat, with enough left over to bankroll moonshot R&D projects on top? If not, you can't afford to operate like Valve. They cancel 10 projects for every one they ship, if not for Steam bringing in endless billions of dollars they would have gone out of business a decade ago.
I disagree, many of the competitors do what is necessary just fine.
There is a strong sentiment with many gamers of just not wanting to use an alternative and it is basically a non starter for many other stores. Many complain about the very idea of not all of their games being in the same place.
This isn't necessarily anything monopolistic done on Valve's side. But it would be very hard for another store to make any meaningful impact regardless of how they are.
But that's the issue. The competitors are fine. They aren't significantly better though. The only one with a compelling USP is GOG with their "no drm, download the installer, own the game even after we go under" pitch. Everyone else is just a steam clone with some exclusives and freebies. Without a compelling advantage network effect makes Steam the clear winner. It's where your other games are and it's where your friends are.
But that only holds true while Valve doesn't screw up. Their competitors can't be much better than Steam, but Steam could absolutely make horrible decisions that cause people to leave. But they don't. Their organizational inability to make decisive action without wider support has lead to an incredibly stable, predictable platform.
Many of these alternatives failed because they were forced onto users who had already paid over $60 for a game, and they were incredibly slow and clunky. They might have improved over time, but people still remember how bad these stores were at launch.
You're replying to a chain about how valve got steam started, are you suggesting that the market was existing in a state of monopoly prior to their actual existence of the product you say held that monopoly?
Not really. When Steam was the only digital distribution marketplace in existence, it didn't have to be better than any other digital distribution marketplace to convince users to switch to it, by virtue of being first. The followers who look at Steam's profits and want to capture that for themselves have to do so. It just happens that it seems every marketplace since has attempted to compete for developers (particularly in the vein of trying to achieve exclusive games) and generally ignored competition for users except as a byproduct of developer competition.
And the result is that users overwhelmingly prefer to use Steam, with alternatives largely relegated to at best grudging acceptance for those games that require alternative launchers. Since companies are reluctant to post numbers, it's hard to tell what the exact situation other than "Steam is well over 50% of the market", but the next largest is probably GoG, especially if you exclude self-publishing from statistics (if you include it, the popularity of Fortnite might push Epic Game Store into second place). And note that GoG is pretty much the only store that offers users a specific value proposition to use them over Steam: GoG is DRM-free (better publisher/distributor split is a value proposition for developers, not users).
> Many of these alternatives failed because they were forced onto users who had already paid over $60 for a game
I really doubt that hurt their adoption. Yes, it pissed people off, but that doesn't mean it suppressed adoption. Being slow and clunky, sure, but you're probably not going to get anywhere without some high value exclusives.
That only explains a couple of the stores but not all of them.
Xbox and Epic don't fall in that category. I don't believe EA does either, but not 100% sure.
To be clear here. I am referring to the being forced after buying a game. None of these, to my knowledge, you were forced to use after buying the game on Steam. Unlike Ubisoft.
XBox and Epic absolutely do fall in that category. People, myself included, detest using either of those stores, because of their poor implementations. They're slow and unwieldy. The Xbox store on PC is actually so bad. I bought Forza as a chill on the couch and relax kind of game and it is one of the most regrettable purchasing experiences I've ever had. The Epic store is just outright unpleasant software.
The Epic store will only show me prices in Rubles. Never tried to debug it -- who needs it, anyway? -- but always thought that was somewhere between bizarre and hilarious. (US computer, US IP address, no VPN, en-us locale.)
The Epic store might not've been slow, but it was missing so much. It was launched with almost no features, not even reviews. They also didn't have any communities/forums/groups.
About Epic, they're 35% owned by Tencent (with its inevitable unseen CCP entanglements) and 8% by Disney. That's plenty to put people off.
GOG's great but they're not big enough to move any needles.
Steam puts some of that 30% to work making wonderful things like the SteamDeck, and as a game dev I get a big audience and amazing things like free access to the Steam Datagram Network. So when I want to buy or sell a game, they're overwhelmingly my first choice.
I never really understood this mentality, especially when on the console side people seem just fine with the idea of buying multiple consoles for exclusives. (not that I am agreeing with that either).
There isn't a cost to having multiple stores, you don't even need to keep them running at all time. I get the concerns over the Epic app, but Heroic exists.
Personally I have games on Steam, Xbox (cross buy between xbox and PC), Epic, and EA. Plus Game Pass.
The only annoying part is when I go to install or buy a game, finding where I have it or making sure I don't already own it somewhere. But there are launchers like Playnite to address that.
But it does feel like I am in the minority with this opinion.
For me, I don’t like launchers constantly updating and running at startup. Inevitably, they end up breaking something or popping up a modal when I’m trying to do something else.
I tolerate steam on my laptop because they were the first. I hate Epic and other launchers when I just want a game.
I will wait until it gets to steam. And have even skipped free games because I don’t want the mental load.
When you say "people do this" and "people also do that contradictory thing" you're making the mistake assuming that the word refers to the same people.
But it is interesting that we have 2 groups of gamers.
One that is so used to and accepting of a practice to not only sometimes buy 2 nearly identical boxes to play exclusive games but also complain when one of them does the right thing and is ending the practice (see drama about Xbox).
One that complains about installing another piece of software with no cost.
Why do these 2 groups of gamers have very different opinions on this.
Software, especially if installed on my Windows PC, always has a risk of causing security problems, running spyware, agents that slow things down, taking up HD space, weird new DRM, screwing with the registry, etc.
> One reason I’ve heard is the stats and Achievements consolidation.
I have not seen that referenced much so I am curious how many people that is the reason vs just some weird loyalty to Steam.
But, as someone who is mostly a couch gamer so my console of choice is Xbox. I can see that, I have a PS5 but all of my cross platform games is Xbox.
I have my PC for a lot of games that I would prefer that setup (for me its a game by game decision), but with game pass and cross buy it already didn't make sense for me to go all in on steam, but some games are only on steam.
So what was the harm in adding other stores when it made sense.
> I wouldn’t buy a PS5 for an exclusive. TBH exclusivity is annoying and I don’t want to reward it.
I don't want to reward it. But I also view myself as a gamer first before any platform loyalties. If I want to play something, that takes priority. So annoyingly I have both under my TV.
rant I am so annoyed at the people complaining about Xbox going Multiplatform as if it isn't a good thing for consumers to not have to buy nearly identical hardware. I don't care that it is how the industry has ran for so long, it's still anti-consumer. end rant
>I have not seen that referenced much so I am curious how many people that is the reason vs just some weird loyalty to Steam.
Yeah, probably a healthy mix. The achievement and stats consolidation is via word of mouth and conversation I have had over the years. I don’t have data to back that up. I’m sure the /r/pcmasterrace folk would have something to say about it though.
I totally agree with your rant. It’s ridiculous that folk want to complain about this.
At this point, sunken cost into a Steam library aside, I won't buy a game if it isn't on Steam and at least SteamDeck supported.
Valve alone has made it possible to game full-time on Linux as a first class citizen and has greatly improved a lot of the Linux desktop experience which is more than enough for me to be willing to continue to only buy games from them.
In my opinion, GOG is phenomenal and hands down the best digital game storefront now, but it's not what consumers care most about. Many people already have extensive libraries on Steam, too.
Both of these can be true, and it’s far more likely to be self reinforcing. Because it’s such an unimpeachable monopoly, the competition that doesn’t put forth billions are doomed to fail.
People talk about feature parity, but that’s irrelevant when slashing Valves cut by 1% is enough to get the vast majority of publishers and developers to stay on board.
They are such an unimpeachable monopoly that Microsoft, makers of the OS that Steam predominantly relies on for consumer spend, also bows to them. After all they’re large enough to get a new cut from the normal distribution terms.
The failures of other companies trying to emulate or capture that market do not a monopoly make. There is no real moat for Steam beyond customer loyalty and the fact that nearly every competitor sought to gain market through anti-consumer moves (exclusivity) rather than value-adds, and almost universally with shittier software to boot. There are a few notable counterexamples (GoG is a good store, value add, respectful of customers; but just didn't have the juice to establish itself beyond indie/abandonware games; Itch.io is doing fine in its niche).
Just because customers prefer a product does not mean it's got an unimpeachable moat.
The platform it runs on (Windows) is open, unlike the App Store. Competitors exist on said platform, including a store & game pass run by the platform owner.
The fact that Steam still runs the show is a testament to their ability to just do things better than anyone else. Sure, there is a sort of network effect at play, but there is no other “moat” here - let alone a monopolistic one.
I'd describe Steam as a monolith, not a monopoly. There are several competing storefronts, and many games have been successful without releasing on Steam.
That said, the PC gaming landscape has completely warped around Steam. Epic had to offer huge incentives to get EGS exclusivity deals. Smaller games struggle without a Steam release, and even big companies with their own storefronts have decided the sales boost from Steam overrides the 30% cut Valve takes. And Steam is so entrenched at this point that it's difficult to see how a competitor could make a meaningful dent in Steam's market share.
Despite this, if we're going to have one dominant PC gaming storefront, Steam is probably the best we could hope for. Despite my many misgivings with Valve and Steam, it's difficult to imaging the situation improving if the dominant platform was run by a company like Microsoft or Epic. And it's fair to say that PC gaming wouldn't be nearly as big as it is today without the success of Steam.
Steam could “easily” be dethroned by a competitor that cares about the customers.
- Duplicate all the Steam shop features
- Integrate your social framework with Discord
- Add a proper overlay browser
- Make game ownership ephemeral until first play (meaning you can give away games in your library, or duplicate games in a bundle)
- Shim with Steam Input
- Better looking “Big Picture”-style mode
- Built-in game streaming, paid either with subscription or per-minute via wallet
There’s probably tonnes other that I’m forgetting. The above would take a ridiculous amount of dev hours though.
The big mistake Epic made (is making) is that their store is more beneficial for developers, mostly by taking a lower percentage. But those savings are barely passed on to the consumer, and even then, consumers don’t care about that. They’ll happily pay 10-20% more to have their game on the superior platform.
They are saying "Steam is a monopoly because they're so big", you are saying "Steam is not a monopoly because they're not anti-competitive", you're not disagreeing
I am saying it’s not a monopoly at all because it’s a) not the only player in the PC games store market and b) has no mechanism in place to be able to enforce such a position even if it was.
You can go back in history and apply that logic to any company and claim they weren't monopolies as a result. Standard oil and AT&T had plenty of competitors, none were able to grow beyond extremely small scale.
The key question is whether an antitrust target is engaging in uncompetitive practices. I haven't noticed any claims of Steam/Valve using uncompetitive practices (but I could have simply missed them.)
Whether something is a monopoly and whether they've abused it in such a way that they should be struck with an antitrust suit are two different things. I don't think many would argue that Steam abused its monopoly.
Early Valve coasted on the money Gabe Newell personally made as a senior Microsoft executive, so if you want to emulate that Valve then you'll need to find 8 or 9 figures in your bank account without taking any outside investments, in order to keep the company completely untainted by shareholder influence. That's not a template most founders can follow either.
There's a timeline where startup Valve went through the standard publisher funding model instead and got pressured into releasing the "finished but not very fun" 1997 cut of Half Life, rather than taking an entire extra year (an eternity in game development cycles of that era) to overhaul the whole game at their leisure. Things could have gone very differently right from the start.
Steam isn't a monopoly. I, and everyone I know who uses steam is familiar with GOG or Epic games or Battle.net or some other service. You can even distribute your game independently (e.g. in the case of minecraft and some of the most successful PC games of all time) or just distribute it as a web game (increasingly feasible as WebGL, WebGPU, WASM etc. continue to advance).
Steam is successful because it has good user experience compared to alternatives, and has a lot of major titles.
If you measure success by how happy your most disgruntled employees are, maybe it doesn't look good. But if you measure success by revenue, profit, or quality of products, it looks incredible. Valve has succeeded in a very competitive industry and consistently released top quality products over a period of almost three decades.
I don't buy people's excuses about them just exploiting a monopoly. Epic was gunning for them, Microsoft was gunning for them, all the big publishers tried to compete on PC game distribution, consoles try to take market share from PC, GoG and others exist. The failure of their competitors to unseat them doesn't mean Valve had it easy.
Google, on the other hand, is what you get when you try to optimize for employee happiness across the board. Their business has been successful (the monopoly argument seems more applicable in this case, at least in the last decade), but product quality is in the toilet and employee happiness ultimately couldn't be maintained in the face of bureaucracy and layoffs.
It's important to recognize however that Valve has a history of being very slow to ship product, and financially is supported by the existence of Steam alongside lootbox bonanzas like CS:Go and DOTA 2. Those are successful products, so by no measure is Valve a failed company, but compared to most other successful game studios their ability to ship a completed product is very poor - if you look at their track record, they release a few full-size games per decade and then some of them end up failing. Comparable studios with their staffing and budget can typically release double their number of games without whiffing on quality - look at From Software, for example, which delivers hit after hit with ~equivalent staffing on smaller timelines and smaller budgets.
It's true that a product shipped early is bad forever, but a product never shipped is certainly not a success by any metric either.
My suspicion is that the way the studio runs means that the stuff they eventually ship is high quality, but a lot of potential smash hits wither and die because of process dysfunction and staff attrition.
On the other hand, if you're a successful middleman taking 30% of everyone else's revenue, you don't really need to be good at making games anymore. You can leave that business if you want.
Unlike most other middlemen that take revenue though, people legitimately are willing to choose to pay Valve on both sides of the transaction, despite a relatively level playing field. I choose Steam when I don't have to, even if it costs more, because the service is simply the best. I like what I get from Steam. Pending the lawsuit about anti-competitive behavior, which I think would definitely harm the argument that people simply prefer Steam a great deal, I honestly do generally just believe Steam actually does bring enough value to justify the relatively high price tag.
I actually also believe that Google Play and Apple App Store as marketplaces also provide "enough value" to potentially justify a fairly high price tag, but in their case it's not actually fair because the problem is that nobody else is even allowed to try to provide similar value at any cost. For example, both Google and Apple provide "free" push notification infrastructure, which is sort of necessary: if everyone was running push notification infrastructure, it would be pretty bad for battery life. However, the net effect is that you're being forced to price all of the value that they provide as platforms, into their marketplace, whether or not your app needs or wants their "value", and that's the problem. This doesn't quite compare to the situation with Steam, and I think that warrants more recognition.
Frankly, Steam sucked ass when it first came around. It was relentlessly mocked, and the only reason people tolerated it was because you needed it to play Half Life 2. But... they never stopped improving it. And frankly, even if this makes Valve a "worse" company from a position of investors and onlookers, it has made Valve a better company for consumers to be able to trust. It's pretty obvious that not every product or service Valve puts out is fantastic, but in the same token that things which are easy at "normal" companies are impossible at Valve, things that are impossible at normal companies appear to be possible at Valve.
I hate to romanticize it too much, but I'm not even a huge gamer, and I still feel like Valve has done very well by most of their consumers and developers. If anything, the biggest trouble they seem to have is deciding how exactly to moderate/censor the Steam store, given all of the different external pressures. Now that is a tough problem and they've had a tough time figuring it out.
You always have politics. Managers tend to be political ninjas, so they make it worse. I've been programming professionally for over 25 years at this point, worked at many places, and I couldn't tell you what value a manager brings. I know what they do - which is hold meetings that take time away from real work, and ask people "is it done yet". But I've never seen anything get done faster or better as a result of something a manager did.
I'm genuinely curious to hear from people who have had what they consider effective management, what did the manager do to make your work better?
Exactly - they are political ninjas, yes, but they ethically view themselves as the feudal lord super-samurai whose job it is to defend and develop all the young paduan samurai under his watch. Nothing wrong with politics if done in a kind, ethical, "win friends and influence people" kind of way
Some of the most important work that a good manager does goes unseen by their team. I've been a manager and now I'm an IC so I've seen both sides. There is a lot of shielding and pushing back that managers do to protect their teams. Unless the manager tells their team about everything they've been doing behind the scenes, the team has no idea.
You say that you've never seen anything get done faster or better as a result of something a manager did but you've probably had managers that were working preventing interference, saying no to last minute requirement changes, pushing back on deadline changes, etc.
I've had good managers make decisions to steer the effort efficiently. Also, they can act as tie breakers in disputes so that reasonableness can previal.
In government, good managers ensure the myriad roadblocks that inevitably surface are properly dealt with before their direct reports even know it existed.
One of the best roles of a good manager is insulating their employees from the political bullshit that goes on above them. One example that happened to a coworker of mine is that something happened in an open source project they were the maintainer of that caused VP-level executives to blow up at him, so the manager told them to take they day off and let him deal with angry executives instead.
Valve's approach to managerless is closer to anarchy. You can add more accountability/structure with better results while still being managerless, such as in a holacracy.
Politics exist in any corporate structure. I'm not sure what's worse though, Valve's tribe-based politics or your traditional corporate game of thrones politics.
It's hard - I'd say impossible for most people - to be simultaneously excellent at the organization and (yes,) politics that go into managing the output of a company, and the execution that goes into developing and operating the systems of a company. They both take effort because they are both real jobs.
Add a bit of arrogance in the mix and you get devs thinking their managers are worthless and managers thinking their teams are useless.
> things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve.
By "things" do you mean "build an even moderately successful PC game distribution platform"? Because no one else has managed to do that. Epic, EA, Xbox, Ubisoft, and a dozen others have tried, none of them reached 10% the popularity of Steam, and if they still exist today its because they have one keystone game keeping them alive.
Or, by "things" do they mean "make successful games"? Because Valve does that too; they produce games that have far more and longer success than most publishers. They've had failed projects, sure; its funny how when projects fail in hierarchically structured companies, as they do every day, we just put our hands up, retro it, and move on; but when they fail at Valve it has to be because they don't have managers, right?
Do your friends mean "be profitable"? Couldn't be that; Valve is tremendously profitable by any account. Highly productive? No... they're also that. Loved by customers? Strike three, Valve also checks that box.
I guess you could argue that "things" means "build twenty different directly competing messaging apps". Got me there, Google's army of managers did manage to do that when Valve couldn't.
Valve's largest game, CS2, is still full of bugs and almost unplayable on valve servers due to lack of a working anti-cheat. They even removed existing anti-cheat features such as the overwatch system that allowed players to review games for potential cheating. They also removed a lot of the game modes and maps. Coasting on being a marketplace (where they also had first mover advantage) shouldn't score valve any points for the topic at hand, which is about their ability to get things done. CS2 is "successful" in that they run a gambling site and marketplace within the game that brings them a lot of money.[0] But they are also slowly killing their game and have ignored it for over a year. The best thing Valve has done in recent years is the steam deck. Their games are not getting better and my guess is Deadlock will end up closer to Artifact in reception than CS or Dota.
Deadlock is already within 10k of Artifact's all time peak player count; and it "legally" doesn't exist and is closed invite only [1] [2]. So, you can guess whatever you want; no one in their right mind would assert that a hero-based shooter MOBA will achieve similar levels of success as a card game. But maybe you're not in your right mind.
As for Counterstrike 2; I'll believe anything you're rambling about actually matters when it spends just 24 hours outside of the top 5 most played games on Steam. Its #2 right now. Dota is #3. You're welcome to channel Trump and argue that they're cooking the books on their player-counts, but that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right.
>I'll believe anything you're rambling about actually matters
Why do you think long time players of CS use FaceIt to play? That should immediately strike you as odd that the most dedicated demographic of the game is not even using Valve's servers. And do you really think people would still play at the rates they are if there were no skins?
>they're cooking the books on their player-counts
They are not, however some non-zero amount of the player base is bots farming free weapon case drops.[0][1] At one point these were making hundreds of thousands a week. No other game has this issue.
>that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right.
Do you even play this game? It seems strange to make a claim about a game you have never played. Everyone who plays this game agrees that Valve has failed to make the game better and after almost a year people still agree that cs:go was better, although Valve deleted cs:go from steam so nobody can play it anymore.
I imagine what is impossible at Valve is keeping people working on projects that the employees have lost interest in. I suspect this is what is happening in CS2. As a player, I can feel the lack of interest in the well-being of the game, the lack of skilled talent working on the fundamentals. Even though this game has made Valve more money than any other game on its platform, they just don't support it enough probably because it just doesn't excite the employees much anymore.
It wasn't "Google", it was Larry, apparently on a whim of the moment. It wasn't managers in general, it was project managers. And as I understand it, the project managers were called right back in, so Google was actually never run without them.
That happened in 2001, and is arguably the reason Eric stepped up to take the reins from him.
> Just as "magic spells" use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.
This is definitely the case. I've modified NDAs (from our lawyers or other parties') and have written plenty of business contracts and I find some people are uncomfortable with them unless you wrap them in a "whereas" preamble and put some pointless nonsense like "The parties agree that time is of the essence in this agreement". What a pointless waste of time.
"time is of the essence" is more of an example of jargon, which is something different from the drafting style. It's true that it's not particularly accessible, but it's useful because it captures a specific technical meaning in a short phrase. (Specifically, 'time is of the essence' means that any timelines specified in the contract are strict: missing by even a few seconds is a breach even if the delay is not material).
Exactly, contracts are rife with this for no good reason.
I was filing some old leases and realized they were headered with "WITNESSETH" (in all caps because you cannot properly invoke its power otherwise), and thought "huh, is that a real word or Ye Olde Faux Englishe?" and it was a real word, but a different part of speech. It's not a command, it's a third-person singular verb floating around as a remnant of something like "this document witnesseth that...".
no, that example shows a complete lack of understanding of an important phrase.. there are lots of examples of language in contracts that are verbose or purposefully confusing, but that is not one of them.. IANAL usa
Normally: no agenda, no need to attend. But since our team is currently small, we have a deliberately agendaless meeting every morning. We talk about anything: somebody's daughter got engage, an upcoming vacation, that gnarly engineering problem that never got resolved yesterday. It's an anti-standup, and it's designed to take the place of those transient "water cooler" convos.
> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves.
One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with.
They’d have deep technical knowledge of their domain and we had the same in ours, and there was just enough shared knowledge at the interface between the two that we could have fun and useful discussions. Lots of mutual respect. I’ve always enjoyed working with smart people even when I don’t really understand what they do.
Of course there were also idiots, but generally they weren’t interested in paying what we charged, so that was OK.
> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves.
So I feel a lot of sympathy for the author — that would be terribly soul sucking.
I guess generative grammars have increased the number of “I have a great idea for a technical business, I just need a technical co founder” who think that an idea is 90% of it and have no idea what technical work actually is.
This is honestly something I'm grateful for a lot of the time. I'm presently running a tech start-up in a highly technical domain (housebuilding, in a word) which also happens to be pretty hostile to businesses. People look at a planning application like "Why are there hundreds of documents here?" and it's because yeah, it is hard - there are huge numbers of variables to take into account, and the real "art" of urban design is solving for all of them at once. Then you send it to planning and basically no-one is happy, why haven't you done this and what are you going to do about that. You have to be pretty creative to survive.
Before that, I worked in a digital print organisation with a factory site. This factory did huge volumes on a daily basis. It was full of machines. They had built up a tech base over years, decades, and it was hyper-optimised - woe betide any dev who walked into the factory thinking they could see an inefficiency that could be refactored out. It happened multiple times - quite a few devs, myself included, learned this lesson the hard way - on rare occasion thousands of lines of code had to be thrown out because the devs hadn't run it past the factory first.
It's an experience I'd recommend to any dev - build software for people who are not just "users" of technology but builders themselves. It's not as "sexy" as building consumer-facing tech, but it is so much more rewarding.
Yeah, I moved the paragraphs around and pasted the quote in where it belonged, forgetting that it had been pasted at the top. Too late to edit, though.
NATO is learning a lot from the AFU. When Ukraine eventually joins NATO (or even just after the war ends) their veterans will be eagerly sought out so the AF of other states can learn from them!
Note: I am not Ukranian, or even in any way European, though I have lived in western Europe.
Every war zone is a testing/advertising zone for weapons manufacturers. Think of the infamous (and hilarious, if it hadn’t meant loss of life) Exocet ad in Jane’s after the Falklands War.
And NATO’s role in the war is crucial, of course, as a supplier of materiel, but not as deep as the conspiracy theorists like to think. They did not launch this war and do not direct it.
Also, despite my comment being voted down, it’s not a joke that NATO was shocked by how Ukraine has fough, not just how well. Its influence is openly discussed in the US and a European press and can be seen, for example, in the rush to embrace low cost disposable drones.
But it’s more than that: Ukraine has been more nimble and creative than the stogy western militaries who stopped taking Russia’s military that seriously in the early 1990s. Russia has underperformed, but not by a lot. But Ukraine has taken a weak hand and, without a navy, bottled up the Russians in the Black Sea. They demonstrated and used a flexibility far from the capabilities of any of the western militaries at scale. NATO needs not just to embrace that (which will likely take a generation) but also be ready to fight an adversary that has a similar attitude.
2. Not really. NATO mostly gave Ukraine stuff that's obsolete, or close. The cutting-edge stuff (drones, mostly) is Ukraine innovating out of resource constraints, not NATO testing stuff out.
But maybe, instead of "obsolete", I should have said "not state of the art". Is there anything that NATO has given Ukraine that is state of the art? HIMARS might be. Were the Abrams and Bradleys state of the art, or were they old revs?
Is Storm Shadow actually state of the art?
>Is there anything that NATO has given Ukraine that is state of the art?
AMRAAM-ER, for example.
>Is Storm Shadow actually state of the art?
"France, the UK, along with Italy are jointly developing the Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon to replace SCALP/Storm Shadow and each nation's respective anti-ship missiles by 2028 and 2034." [0]
What I miss is good filtering and search within the feeds. Some readers make "smart folders". But usually the searches are pretty primitive: not searching metadata (like starred or read/unread, in or out of another named search, etc), lacking regular expressions etc). Also no way to apply changes (e.g. read/unread) to multiple selections, etc.
I'll look in from time to time -- might be worth a switch.
My company actually does have a use case where a blockchain makes sense, and we are proceeding that with it. Unfortunately we have a buzzword trifecta of "blockchain", "AI", and "cloud" so we are careful about the words we use when we talk about it publicly.
We never utter the work blockchain because if you say "a blockchain" most people hear ** THE blockchain!! ** and either think we're a yet another bunch of scammers or worse, get tremendously excited thinking we're doing web3 or some other scam they want in on. Instead we say "we protect the data using Merkel trees."
We have the other buzzword problem too: we use some machine vision (for some safety matters) and use RNNs to determine some local operating parameters and to crunch data for some lab experiments. Even though we have two former AI research scientists on the team, none of us want to be lumped in with the big langage model folks, since that's not what we do (and the hype is insane).
The blockchain application: we have a shitload of sensors monitoring equipment we'll be deploying all over the world. Our revenue depends on the performance of this equipment. So every sensor is built into a little box that signs and timestamps its data. The data are aggregated by the equipment and streamed up to our servers (cough "the cloud"). Connectivity can be intermittent, so machines can offload data to topologically nearby installations.
It's actually pretty nice to be outside the hype bubbles. We just concentrate on our work instead, and mostly the prospective customers don't understand any of the tech, much less what those buzzwords mean.
If I understood your use case correctly, then you don’t actually have a decentralized deployment since there’s a central server, and you’re literally not employing the blockchain though?
Yeah, we only need a distributed chain at the edge, and even there there aren’t “competing” changes in the sense there could be in an implementation of a currency. But it’s a block chain like any other Merkel tree.
But it’s to prove chain of custody / lack of tampering since revenue ultimately depends on the data.
> A bit of a cynical take (on Hacker News no less) but after being in the industry for a while, my view is that the best definition of “level” is self-referential: it corresponds to the ability of a person to convince others that they are at that level.
This is of course not just in "the industry" -- for an extreme example there are a lot of elections arund the world in 2024 and almost all of them have at least one candidate trying to convince the hiring team (i.e. the voters) that they are qualified to do a job they've never done before.
> Interestingly, the date line wasn't always where it is now.
Different empires defined their own prime meridians (and thus implicitly their date line 180 degrees away) from the ~16th-19th century. Eventually in the late 1800s a conference was organized to pick one and since Britain was the center of commercial shipping (with all the concomitant infrastructure like Lloyds, project finance, Admiralty law etc) there was little dissent.
I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”
Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!