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> I don't think your 10-year-old laptop is very useful either.

Technology never was about the tech an sich but about what you do with the tech. For one person that 10 year old laptop is useless, for another it is a source of $500K / year in income. You, the user are the biggest factor in how much value you can extract from the technology at your command. I'm not sure how much longer that will be true but it definitely is still true today.

by stickfigure17 hours ago|

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The laptops generating income are the relevant metric here; most software developers would struggle with a 4GB Pentium these days. It matters to your company and your economy if your engineers can work.

Compared to laptop quality, I suspect model quality will be a much bigger competitive advantage in the tournament of the marketplace. High-quality laptops are still limited by the quality of the software developer.

by jacquesm16 hours ago|

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> High-quality laptops are still limited by the quality of the software developer.

For now it is exactly the same with the models.

by stickfigure16 hours ago|

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You're not wrong but the amount of leverage you get out of a better model dwarfs the leverage you get out of a better laptop. Almost to the point that these are different categories of thing.

Also... employment in some parts of the stack is genuinely going away. I don't even look at CSS anymore.

by jacquesm15 hours ago|

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> the amount of leverage you get out of a better model dwarfs the leverage you get out of a better laptop

To some degree, yes. But 'dwarfs' isn't really the term I would use. It is a bit slower, but the upsides are >> than the downsides for me. Not having Sam, Dario or Xi's minions looking over my shoulder matters to me more than any technological edge.

> Also... employment in some parts of the stack is genuinely going away. I don't even look at CSS anymore.

Yes, that's a fact, but that's orthogonal. I haven't touched either HTML or CSS in a long time now and yet I've cobbled together (I wouldn't claim ownership) a lot of stuff that 'just works'. I also would not expose that stuff to the world at large because I suspect it isn't nearly as secure as it looks.

by stickfigure14 hours ago|

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There is almost nothing you can do in CSS that has security implications. Not zero, but the footprint is small enough that I blindly trust the robots.

I pay attention to frontend code just to keep code quality up. Frontend work is relatively low stakes from a security perspective and I've never seen the robots do anything problematic. I don't vibe code React but I think you could get away with it today.

Backend is a totally different story.

That's still a lot of engineering getting displaced.

by KellyCriterion17 hours ago|

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Im developing at home a fairly large data app on a 4x3GHz Athlon with 16GB RAM and a SSD disk with VS.NET + full Microsoft backend tooling.

The machine was bought in 2011 and it runs Windows Server.

I can do whatever I need with the device, apart from Gaming. Even YT works in 4k.

So, tell me now please why my 15 year old computer is not useful here?

by WD-4218 hours ago|

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My daily driver is a 10 year old laptop. Any computer built since Moores law plateaued is plenty capable.

by ee3aa7 hours ago|

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Man you are pushing so hard to the point of cringe.

My macbook is 5 yrs old and Im a big tech guy. Tech matures. It doesn't grow forever. You live in delululand bro.

by hypfer18 hours ago|

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