FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time.
But this means that before they blindly trusted
some stats without actually testing how their
game performed with and without it?
Maybe they didn't test it with their game because their game didn't exist yet, because this was a decision made fairly early in the development process. In hindsight, yeah... it was the wrong call.
I'm just a little baffled by people harping on this decision and deciding that the developers must be stupid or lazy.
I mean, seriously, I do not understand. Like what do you get out of that? That would make you happy or satisfied somehow?
Go figure: people are downvoting me but I never once said developers must be stupid or lazy. This is a very common kind of mistake developers often make: premature optimization without considering the actual bottlenecks, and without testing theoretical optimizations actually make any difference. I know I'm guilty of this!
I never called anyone lazy or stupid, I just wondered whether they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing them.
> FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time
Wouldn't this mean their optimization mattered even less back then?
One of those absolutely true statements that can obscure a bigger reality.
It's certainly true that a lot of optimization can and should be done after a software project is largely complete. You can see where the hotspots are, optimize the most common SQL queries, whatever. This is especially true for CRUD apps where you're not even really making fundamental architecture decisions at all, because those have already been made by your framework of choice.
Other sorts of projects (like games or "big data" processing) can be a different beast. You do have to make some of those big, architecture-level performance decisions up front.
Remember, for a game... you are trying to process player inputs, do physics, and render a complex graphical scene in 16.7 milliseconds or less. You need to make some big decisions early on; performance can't entirely just be sprinkled on at the end. Some of those decisions don't pan out.
> FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time
Wouldn't this mean their optimization mattered even less back then?
I don't see a reason to think this. What are you thinking?
> One of those absolutely true statements that can obscure a bigger reality.
To be clear, I'm not misquoting Knuth if that's what you mean. I'm arguing that in this case, specifically, this optimization was premature, as evidenced by the fact it didn't really have an impact (they explain other processes that run in parallel dominated the load times) and it caused trouble down the line.
> Some of those decisions don't pan out.
Indeed, some premature optimizations will and some won't. I'm not arguing otherwise! In this case, it was a bad call. It happens to all of us.
> I don't see a reason to think this. What are you thinking?
You're right, I got this backwards. While the time savings would have been minimal, the data duplication wasn't that big so the cost (for something that didn't pan out) wasn't that bad either.
I'm sure that whatever project you're assigned to has a lot of optimization stuff in the backlog that you'd love to work on but haven't had a chance to visit because bugfixes, new features, etc. I'm sure the process at Arrowhead is not much different.
For sure, duplicating those assets on PC installs turned out to be the wrong call.
But install sizes were still pretty reasonable for the first 12+ months or so. I think it was ~40-60GB at launch. Not great but not a huge deal and they had mountains of other stuff to focus on.
I’m a working software developer, and if they prove they cannot do better, I get people who make statements like GP quoted demoted from the decision making process because they aren’t trustworthy and they’re embarrassing the entire team with their lack of critical thinking skills.
When the documented worst case is 5x you prepare for the potential bad news that you will hit 2.5x to 5x in your own code. Not assume it will be 10x and preemptively act, keeping your users from installing three other games.
I would classify my work as “shouting into the tempest” about 70% of the time.
People are more likely to thank me after the fact than cheer me on. My point, if I have one, is that gaming has generally been better about this but I don’t really want to work on games. Not the way the industry is. But since we are in fact discussing a game, I’m doing a lot of head scratching on this one.
I expect better from HN, where most of us are engineers or engineer-adjacent. It's fair to question Arrowhead's priorities but...
too lazy
Really? I think the PC install size probably should have been addressed sooner too, but... which do you think is more likely?
Arrowhead is a whole company full of "lazy" developers who just don't like to work very hard?
Or do you think they had their hands full with other optimizations, bug fixes, and a large amount of new content while running a complex multiplatform live service game for millions of players? (Also consider that management was probably deciding priorities there and not the developers)
I put hundreds of hours into HD2 and had a tremendous amount of fun. It's not the product of "lazy" people...
An 85% disk size reduction at minimal performance impact is negligent by the standard of professional excellence.
But that's also par for the course with AA+ games these days, where shoving content into an engine is paramount and everything else is 'as long as it works.' Thanks, Bethesda.
Evidenced by the litany of quality of life bug fixes and performance improvements modders hack into EOL games.
The only sane way to judge "professional excellence" would be holistically, not by asking "has this person or team ever shipped a bug?" If you disagree, then I hope you are judged the same way during your next review.
In the case of HD2 I'd say the team has done well enough. The game has maintained player base after nearly two years, including on PC. This is rare in the world of live service games, and we should ask ourselves what this tells us about the overall technical quality of the game - is the game so amazing that people keep playing despite abysmal technical quality?
The technical quality of the game itself has been somewhat inconsistent, but I put hundreds of hours into it (over 1K, I think) and most of the time it was trouble-free (and fun).
I would also note that the PC install size issue has only become egregious somewhat recently. The issue was always there, but initially the PC install size was small enough that it wasn't a major issue for most players. I actually never noticed the install size bug because I have a $75 1TB drive for games and even at its worst, HD2 consumed only a bit over 10% of that.
It certainly must have been challenging for the developers. There has been a constant stream of new content, and an entirely new platform (Xbox) added since release. Perhaps more frustratingly for the development team, there has also been a neverending parade of rebalancing work which has consumed a lot of cycles. Some of this rebalancing work was unavoidable (in a complex game, millions of players will find bugs and meta strategies that could never be uncovered by testing alone) and some was the result of perhaps-avoidable internal discord regarding the game's creative direction.
The game is also somewhat difficult to balance and test by design. There are 10 difficulty levels and 3 enemy factions. It's almost like 30 separate games. This is an excellent feature of the game, but it would be fair to Arrowhead for perhaps biting off more than any team can chew.
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in
enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly
seems strange from the outside for this optimisation
to be both possible and acceptable.
From a technical perspective, the key thing to know is that the console install size for HD2 was always that small -- their build process assumed SSD on console so it didn't duplicate stuff.
154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :)
How did it get so bad on PC?
Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly.
This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely.
the optimal amount to spend on software optimization
is at least a substantial fraction of your hardware budget.
This has been a banging-head-against-wall sort of struggle every place I've worked on software, without AI even coming into the picture.
At one startup they were spending millions of dollars on AWS and complaining loudly to us about AWS spend and yet... god forbid the engineering team devote any resources to optimization passes instead of rolling out more poorly considered features, and hiring more engineers, because the existing engineers are struggling to be productive because everything is so unoptimized, and also because they have to spend a bunch of their time interviewing and training new hires.
You can spend $100B on a assets but it doesn't mean you'll turn a profit.
Capitalism certainly favors those with the most... capital, but there are quite a few other factors. Market fit, efficiency, etc. The Dutch East India Company had the most assets, yes, but also the best ships and a killer (literally) business model.
The notion of a sector where success is determined almost entirely by who can stockpile the most assets (GPUs in this case) is a somewhat unique situation and probably merits its own term
videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing
a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions
of views.
Anecdata: even if they're wearing bras and not dressed in a revealing way and it's a still photo... the views will pour in.
I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why.
The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests.
I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event.
Interesting and amusing.
There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
(I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...)
It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
Go to any photography subreddit that's not already focused on nudity or sex. Any photo with naked women will get more upvotes than most other submissions. It can be an objectively bad photo, that doesn't really matter.
For e.g. there's a trend where painters post a painting of them while standing next to it. I do not subscribe to any subreddits but as some of these become popular, they pop into my homepage. 9 out of 10 of these are painted by a pretty woman.
Wait until you learn that some people abuse this to funnel potential subscribers to their OF. And I don't mean the kind that's about the artwork they show off (which would usually be on Patreon these days, I guess?).
Most woman don't run an OF of course. And wether they do or don't, anyone should be free to socialize over their hobbies on the internet, and/or present their art work for other to appreciate (and get validation with hundreds or thousands of up votes). But those on the intersection that choose to run thinly disguised ads ruin it for me :(
It feels very UNsurprising to me that nudity, or revealing photos, would get more views. There's various ways we can feel about it. But "surprised" would, erm, certainly not be one of them for me!
However, I was still surprised that extremely tame photos of slightly curvy women would get relatively large numbers of views, in a world where most people can easily find all the lewd, nude, and explicit images and videos they want.
I was an avid viewer of r/analog. I don't know if this was 'recent' or not, but every time someone post a naked picture, either good or not, it goes rapidly to Top posts.
Even though it used to had many comments like "This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman", the upvotes arrived anyway.
I think nowadays they mostly block the comments in those posts, but what used to be an inspiring subreddit that would pop from time to time in my feed, is not longer that interesting to me.
> “This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman”
My first instinct is to agree with this sentiment. There’s a lot of pretty mediocre photography that gets attention because “naked woman”.
At the same time, you could equally say “that landscape photo is not interesting if you take away the lake”. If you take away the interesting piece of a photo, yeah, it’s not interesting anymore. The fact is that people (but especially men) enjoy looking at naked and near-naked women. It’s a consistently compelling subject. It might be “easy” but it’s still compelling.
My dad was an amateur photographer for a while, and even got one of his photos published in the newspaper.
He said nothing improves a landscape picture more than having a person in the picture. I didn't believe him.
Later, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and took maybe 300 landscape pictures of its beauty. Upon looking at them at home, I realized he was right. The ones with people in them, even random strangers, were always more interesting.
Amazing photographers can shoot landscapes that are deeply compelling in their own right. Good photographers really can’t. There aren’t a lot of Ansel Adamses out there.
Weeelll, I don't find Ansel Adams's work very interesting. I have several coffee table art books, some of which have old west landscape pictures, and it's the people in them that make it work.
Something I do with my friends is look at Annie Liebovitz portraits and try to recreate the ones we like.
That’s totally fair if Adams’s doesn’t do much for you. Regardless, I’m in agreement with you that most landscapes are not actually that interesting without people in them. Humans are naturally drawn to images of other humans.
It’s like throwing bacon into an otherwise average recipe. Is it a cheap way to make it good? Yeah. But is it good? Probably. And very plausibly it tastes better than the more difficult recipe that lacks the bacon.
I think the t-shirt with the wolf howling at the moon is a bit of a stereotype. If you have watched the Simpsons, something the comic book store owner would wear.
Overweight, unkempt, awkward around women, and guaranteed zero attention from women.
I have a pet theory that the reason certain men are homophobic is because they're terrified that another man is looking at them the same way they look at women.
No it has more to do with rigid gender roles. Women expect men to be strong, independent and (sexually) dominant. Being dominated by another man is a sign of weakness. A lot of women also do not leave any room for nuance. There is zero tolerance. Anything with a penis is bad, even transwomen. You could be bisexual with a strong preference for women, but you will still be put in the "100% gay exclusively for men" box.
Homophobia arises from seeing homosexuality as a threat to your heterosexuality. The LGBT people are coming after your coveted "straight" status and try to infect you with the "gay" virus which makes it harder to attract a woman.
Basically it's the male equivalent of being "deflowered".
Perhaps but I think it's just a normal ick response. People instinctively steer clear of "weird" or "perceived to be dirty" things even if it's illogical. (No matter how much some try to gaslight, homosexuality is abnormal. Note that abnormal != wrong. The former is a factual statement and the latter is a subjective/moral one, though for better or worse most of the globe does still treat it negatively and it's only in the social bubbles that we're in where it's accepted)
If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
Very few people would agree that red hair is "abnormal". Why do you think that people in general are more likely to describe homosexuality as "abnormal" when the prevalence of homosexuality is roughly on par with that of red hair?
> If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
I mean why do people even post something like that? It takes 2 seconds to look up the definition of abnormal. It's it really not knowing, it's is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed "neutrality"?
> Abnormal - deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.
> "[...] is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed 'neutrality'?"
Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").
What’s the normal distribution here? If attraction to men forms a normal distribution, it makes the argument weaker. If you are making things up, at least make them up well.
Yes, the analogy to the bell curve doesn't fit this use case very well, I didn't noticed it before. But the point still stands: non heterosexual behaviour is a tiny minority compared to the norm. So, abnormal is a perfectly good word to describe non-heterosexual behaviour. Once again, it doesn't make it bad per se. I just can't stand word police, which is just another facet of thought police.
"Abnormal" has a very specific meaning. It is not used for everything that is just uncommon. It is used for behaviours that are non-normative. If you have an idiosyncratic way you use this word, ok, but communication is supposed to require and assume a common understanding of a language. So there is no point to discuss if abnormal refers to frequency of a behaviour in a population or in a normativity-related judgement of it, because in common usage it refers to the latter, because either we do not speak a common language or I have to assume disingenuity here (and leaning towards the latter in this case).
If the topic is about whether homosexuality is non-normative and heterosexuality is normative (with the actual, common meanings of the words), we can have a philosophical discussion on that.
Abnormal = non normal / non normative. Words have meaning. If for you it causes a bad reaction to it, you are the one that needs to deal with it. That's excatly the problem, normal people are tired of being called bad for seeing the world through normal, reasonable lenses. When a behavior does not follow the norm, it's abnormal.
Abnormal is a completely unscientific and immoral word to use in the context of consentual sexual behaviors for it is factually wrong (see the distribution of homosexual or bisexual behaviors in mammal species including humans), and also invoking a moral presciptive by declaration "what should be normal" via telling other people what "is not normal".
You fall into the same trap ("non-standard", "atypical"); you just stepped on the euphemism treadmill.
It's not abnormal. Statistically, you don't call anything "abnormal". Neither biologically, nor "naturalistically", there are a million things we all do, that are not "normal" in that sense and we don't call it abnormal.
> No matter how much some try to gaslight, homosexuality is abnormal
This is an abjectly silly thing to say, and people who push back on it are not gaslighting. Homosexuality occurs naturally and it's not even rare - it's far more common than red hair, for example.
Calling something like that "abnormal" isn't in the domain of fact, it's purely a side-effect of what you label "normal".
The confusing ones in my account were sooooo much tamer though. The chests were not even remotely the focus of the photos. It was subtle enough that it took me a while to even figure out the trend.
>It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
You also can't escape being ugly and receiving the opposite reaction as a man.
There are so many things that you can't escape that it seems pretty suspect to focus on this one in particular. The most obvious aspect of being alive is that your body is mortal. You will never be able to escape that fact. You also cannot escape chronic diseases that negatively impact your life every single day.
The idea that men and women pair up to produce new life together is one of the more wholesome aspects of life. There are plenty of insects where one of the partners dies in the process and many species that don't care for the young.
I feel called out here :( I physically cannot resist on clicking on videos or photos with even mildly attractive women in the thumbnail. Same thing IRL. Which is strange because I don't even care about porn.
Naked woman is like endgame. Seems great, but it actually sucks (hehe). Attractive woman in a completely normal situation is like starting new game and knowing it's gonna be really good.
Flickr doesn't break down views, so, for all I know it could have been bots doing image recognition or a single guy in his bedroom clicking on certain pictures 100x a day.
But yeah.... "links shared on forums" was always my leading theory.
In some cases, I'm sure the thumbnails enticed extra clicks. But some of the pictures just had a bustier than average woman in the background or something. It's not clear to me that the thumbnails were enticing.
(99% of these people were my IRL friends as well, so I wasn't really trying to take salacious pictures....)
This was very insightful. It made me think about how "hacker culture" has changed.
I'm middle-aged. 30 years ago, hacker culture as I experienced it was about making cool stuff. It was also about the identity -- hackers were geeks. Intelligent, and a little (or a lot) different from the rest of society.
Generally speaking, hackers could not avoid writing code. Whether it was shell scripts or HTML or Javascript or full-blown 3D graphics engines. To a large extent, coding became the distinguishing feature of "hackers" in terms of identity.
Nearly anybody could install Linux or build a PC, but writing nontrivial code took a much larger level of commitment.
There are legitimate functional and ethical concerns about AI. But I think a lot of "hackers" are in HUGE amounts of denial about how much of their opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.
Well there are a lot of us very clear that our identities are being threatened and scared shitless we will lose the ability to pay our rent or buy food because of it.
As somebody currently navigating the brutal job market, I'm scared shitless about that too. I have to tell you though, that the historical success rate of railing against "technologies that make labor more efficient" is currently at 0.0000000%.
We've survived and thrived through inflection points like this before, though. So I'm doing my best to have an adapt-or-die mindset.
"computers are taking away human jobs"
"visual basic will eliminate the need for 'real coders'"
"nobody will think any more. they'll 'just google it' instead of actually understanding things"
"SQL is human readable. it's going to reduce the need for engineers" (before my time, admittedly)
"offshoring will larely eliminate US-based software development"
etc.
Ultimately (with the partial exception of offshoring) these became productivity-enhancers that increased the expectations placed on the shoulders of engineers and expanded the profession, not things that replaced the profession. Admittedly, AI feels like our biggest challenge yet. Maybe.
We exist inside of capitalism - particularly late-stage deeply unregulated capitalism.
You are always very close to losing the ability to pay your rent or buy food not because your identity is being threatened but because a bunch of people who don’t care about you and only care about making money will happily lay you off without a second thought if they think it will make the even richer people above them happy.
And they will do this whether there is an AI boom or not.
I have been paid to write software for almost 30 years now. And never seriously worried I wouldn’t be able to find another job writing software until now.
> opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.
I think there's definitely some truth to this. I saw similar pushback from the "learn to code" and coding bootcamp era, and you still frequently see it in Linux communities where anytime the prospect of more "normies" using Linux comes up, a not insignificant part of the community is actively hostile to that happening.
The attitude goes all the way back to eternal september.
And it's "the bootcamp era" rather than the new normal because it didn't work out as well as advertised. Because of the issues highlighted in that pushback.
I don't think any of us has enough data to judge this. The vast majority of code exists strictly behind closed doors in companies' various internal systems.
And for the commercial and open source code you do see, how do you know if it's being produced more quickly or not?
And finally, even if LLMs speed up coding by 10% or 50% or whatever... writing code is only a fraction of the job.
I'm just a little baffled by people harping on this decision and deciding that the developers must be stupid or lazy.
I mean, seriously, I do not understand. Like what do you get out of that? That would make you happy or satisfied somehow?