Not trying to pick on your comment but I'm always frustrated when someone points out "obligations to shareholders". I wish people would push back on this more. Sony's obligation when building and selling the PlayStation is to the end user customer. Not the shareholder. Because if Sony has only the shareholder in mind then a gaming console is probably the wrong market to be in from a pure profit perspective. Sony's obligation is to the gamer who wants a competitive, performant console. If they put out a next-gen console that has no games to play nobody will buy it and end up with no profits. Organizations have it backwards if they think they should be catering to their shareholders. Shareholders expectations should be that Sony has expertise in the field of consoles and I'm investing in Sony with the understanding that I want to invest in that. When I buy Sony stock I don't think Sony has bringing me a few more points in profits first over doing the right thing and building the best product for the end user. I hope that my investing in them allows them to better continue to innovate and bring compelling products to the market.

Milton Friedman's doctrine was a failed turning point in business thinking [0] and unfortunately pervasive in people's perspective today. Prominent shareholders often have different motives than that of delighting the customer. Motives that are very short term profit driven. Such a toxic way to purport value.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

Thanks. There should be such a comment every time someone mentions “but they have to maximise profit” and “think of the shareholder”. This point of view is not rooted in any law or legal principle and is just the Wall Street version of “might makes right”.

Yeah I think people are growing tired of this attitude. If you want to be a part of society and be a "person" in the eyes of the law you have to be a good citizen as well. Doctors have to follow a credo in addition to making $$ as do lawyers, engineers, etc. Thus it's time that if company's want to be legal "persons" they need to accept some responsibility for long term viability of their place in society beyond "shareholder value". I really hope that is a philosophy that more people take to heart.

I think I see what you mean, but natural law is something else entirely. Under that framework, maximising profit for the few at the expense of the rest of society is unjust.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

Ah didn‘t know that, thanks! (was translating literally from german)

There’s a bit more here, also interesting: https://acoup.blog/2019/12/12/collections-a-trip-through-cic...

We could use a revival of these ideas (which were the foundation of the enlightenment) in our era of blasé cynicism.

Then, if I understood, your point goes back to “might makes right”, as in, we have the power, we might as well take the money, and to hell with long term prospects or society. It is unfortunate that these people have so much influence over the rest of us. It is also a demonstration that optimising private interests does not result in public good, that is, the invisible hand of the market is utter bollocks.

I read this "Motives that are very short term profit driven." everywhere but never came to an explanation why that would be the case (something above anecdotal level). In my understanding DCF is just the natural way to put it. Maybe the discounting rate can depend a bit on the shareholder, but in large the investment horizon of most players should be quite far, given the current "risk-free" return.

I don't think you need to look much further than the ridiculous analysis of quarterly earnings to support that idea.

"Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna’s project, and it used to process images from surveillance drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world."*

Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them.

* https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...

Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer

Sure, but this still only consumed a tiny fraction of the Playstations in production at the time, rather than ~all of them. There are only so many HPC labs in the world (and an HPC lab using PS3s is a font of good press coverage for Sony!) while there are as many crypto-miners as the market will bear (and they generate only negative press coverage on top.)

Sony disabled this functionality later on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

They are obligated to shareholders. But i am not a shareholder. I am a gamer who wants to buy a new graphics card. So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a little closer to those of thier consumers. Free speech is a necessary part of a free market.

Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products. Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets? When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.

> So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a little closer to those of thier consumers

This line of thinking scares me. It’s basically saying “they aren’t doing what I want so let’s use the government to make them do what I want!” How is this freedom? Forcing people to bend to your will though government is the opposite of freedom, and should be used very sparingly

Unlike certain politicians, i do not consider publicly traded corporations to be "people". I dont really care about thier feelings, even thier rights. Corporations are a legal fiction created for a specific purpose, not persons with emotions.

> i do not consider publicly traded corporations to be "people". I dont really care about thier feelings, even thier rights.

Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

The fact is that corporations are made up of many people, so at a basic level you’re still compelling people who want to do what _they_, to do what _you_ want, through government.

But it’s pretty clear that you and I are never going to agree on this. So probably not worth discussing too much further.

Why is Free Speech necessary to a Free Market? I thought a consumer choosing to spend their dollars was the "speech" in a Free Market environment. And when you lobby the government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market paradigm.

Free speech is also product review, such as LTTs recent video on this subject.

Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. Regulation is an essential part of sustaining a free market. Totally non-regulated markets quickly devolve into monopoly and other anti-consumer evils such as devices, like this, designed to kill secondary markets.

> Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets.

"Regulation" in the old sense of "making regular", perhaps. Establishing fair weights and measures, preventing fraud, etc. Ensuring that individuals are free to trade and that all transactions are in fact voluntary (including, most importantly, transactions with the government itself). But when your "regulation" consists of applying force to micromanage how people—shareholders in this case—employ their capital for the benefit of some other group, you've moved well outside the realm of the free market.

>"And when you lobby the government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market paradigm"

"Lobby the government" that's what bigger corps do to the point of buying some. So it is only fair game.

>Pretty sure their obligations to any shareholders would be to limit it so more gamers can play and buy games for it.

It's not really the same because playstations are sold at break-even or at a loss with the expectation that follow-up revenue would make up for it. On the other hand no such dynamic exists for nvidia. For them, sale to a miner is the same as a sale to gamer.

This may look true from the perspective of a single sale, but in the long term this just doesn't hold up. NVIDIA builds a strong and long-held reputation with gamers, and are a well renowned name in the field. If they made cards for miners at the detriment of gamers, they risk losing that valuable market position.

This is a common sentiment I see on discussion forums, but I think it's wishful thinking at best. Most consumers aren't enthusiasts that follow these types of news, and even the ones who do probably won't care/remember a few years down the line. After all, nvidia seems to be doing just fine despite their long history of anti-consumer practices over the years.

I think they run the risk of people giving up on pc gaming completely or never getting into it in the first place. A market that has and should be growing will shrink instead.

This is already happening. I have friends who would, in other circumstances, be building gaming PCs right now, so we could play games together, but–

It's simply not possible.

Which anti-consumer practices? That is, given that we're talking about gamers.

There's Nvidia's longstanding allergy to open source, but that only affects the tiny fraction of gamers who use Linux.

There's this hash rate thing, but from a gamer's perspective that's pro-consumer.

I suppose you can count their price increases for recent GPU generations. But I don't know if that rises to the level of "anti-consumer". Especially when they've been delivering performance to match.

The best example I can think of is their policy of requiring servers to use their more-expensive 'professional' line of GPUs. This does hurt gamers, since it forces game streaming services using Nvidia cards to charge higher prices. That said, among the major streaming services, Stadia, xCloud, and PlayStation Now all use AMD GPUs, while GeForce Now can skirt the policy since it belongs to Nvidia itself. The remaining services are relatively obscure – though perhaps they'd be less obscure if Nvidia didn't have that policy.

Would be true if there is healthy competition. And if a significant percentage of potential buyers would know about it and thus avoid NVIDIA. However in reality most customers wont know and they still get the GPU its just expensive which they most likely see as a result of the pandemic.

I thought this was long ago disproven. That at very early stages yes breakeven or small loss happens. But rapidly becomes mildly profitable per unit

Is this as a result of how the r&d expenses are deducted against revenue, or manufacturing process improvements?

Mostly software subscriptions, actually.. things like PS Plus, etc. On consoles, you need to pay money (subscription) to be able to play multi-player for instance (whereas on PC it's free), and games in general are more expensive compared to PC (last time I checked).

They literally did that with the PS3 for clusters (though not for crypto mining) and shut down the ability to do it.

And were sued for doing so. Removing functionality from an existing product is not acceptable.

which is why they've announced this limitation before the 3060's release

No, they famously shut down the ability to use PS3s for this and got sued for it.[1]

Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

This example makes no sense to me.

I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed ecosystem in the first place.

You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles) general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed.

I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it doesn't necessarily inform my ethos.

This is being received well by people who are practically triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.

One alternative could be for Sony to launch a new line of PS that is optimised for crypto mining but way less cost-effective for gaming.

They'd be competing for the same production resources.

At least some consoles are sold at a loss to keep the entry cost within an acceptable range and expect to recoup that from game sales. One PlayStation generation came with a somewhat crippled other OS feature. By the time Sony killed the feature people already build quite a few PlayStation powered compute clusters.

"See, the truth is, they can do whatever they want with them. They bought them motherf**ers." Eazy-E