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

It's like sure yea you can access the Internet and tinker around or whatever, and with some old LLM model you can have it do fun things, but on a scale of absolute usefulness and if we include what people actually pay money for and what is highly adopted, your laptop and model are severely outdated and by and large irrelevant. That's why the iPhone sells like hotcakes all day every day and twice on Sunday and Apple is a $5 trillion company. Society disagrees with your measure of usefulness.

Sorry I'm rate limited since Dang thinks I'm arguing to much on political topics (he's probably right), but to answer a couple of questions regarding "my old technology does this one thing" you are conflating your personal and nostalgic uses for old hardware/software with what is useful for society or business. If the old hardware was still just as useful as the new hardware it would be used instead of the new hardware.

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jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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stickfigure 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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

For now it is exactly the same with the models.

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stickfigure an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jacquesm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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KellyCriterion 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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WD-42 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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hypfer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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