Timing *chains* are not universal, but they do help. Timing belts are quite common. Headgaskets still go and are still a massive labor cost. Within the last couple of years I've had to pay for timing belt change, a new radiator, new hoses due to leaks, a new evap canister, a new alternator. This is on a 2015. I'm told I'm "lucky" the turbo hasn't keeled over on me as this model is notorious for turbo issues. My colleague has had to pay for *two* headgaskets on a 2017 in the last few years. These aren't "solved" problems because it's pretty fundamental physics. Some things are more solved, e.g. I would have had to pay money probably for power steering problems, but the switch to electric power steering pumps greatly helps.

Because it's preventative maintenance and if you have one, you are expected to change it every 100,000 miles. Since we have interference engines, you don't want to push your luck since a failed timing belt will ruin the engine.

So my house has EV and gas vehicles, and by far taking the gas vehicle to a gas station is way more annoying than plugging it in at home. Not to mention the maintenance (oil change? nope air filter change? nope brakes? just like hybrids the brakes barely get used). No random surprises like "oh great, some fluid on the ground, smoke is coming out the exhaust.

The battery is the big one, and the tendency to be heavier means faster tire wear, but the plugging in for a lot of people is a *plus* not a minus. Meanwhile the gas car has a few hundred here, a couple thousand there, and by the time I might have to replace the battery, I am pretty sure I have racked up equivalent costs over a much more annoying series of repairs and maintenance.

Tip, as soon as you say "copilot says", no one will take you seriously.

Yes, an *engine* can last a while, but that's far from the full picture.

Headgasket will likely not last that long, and while *technically* the engine "lasts" through that repair, that was an expensive repair.

Timing belt won't last that long, and that's an expensive maintenance item.

The transmissions for ICE wear more than EV, and those tend to have a relatively shorter life than cited, and that also is pretty pricey.

Further ignores things like oil changes constantly incurring expenses. Brakes on EVs and hybrids last way longer. If you can charge at home, your fuel savings are huge (public charging, maybe not so much).

Yes, when the battery goes, it will be expensive, but in that same time you probably have otherwise accumulated a comparable cumulative maintenance and repair bill for petrol-exclusive issues.

As they said, 8x code output is a flawed metric. By volume they are getting in.

One could even reasonably argue that they tend to be good at catching critical little details that are difficult for humans, like the consequences of a shallow copy buried in a sea of code creating a security disaster. A "needle in a haystack" scenario, where AI does comparatively well with the relentless attention span.

But in other ways, they are verbose messes, and will toss a whole lot of pull requests. Each of those pull requests may be a lot more volume than needed. For example, I got a CodeGen pull request for "close a gap between two elements after updating the UI framework to new version". Yes, real issue, and.. well, the referenced gap *did* close, but with a lot of dubious side effects. The issue called for a single CSS rule to be tweaked. It instead was hundreds of lines of CSS, sometimes verbatim repeated 4 times (the originator said he had to ask the prompt multiple times because it failed the first few times, it seemed Claude thought maybe adding the same rules it already added might have helped). Others might have just run the code saw the gap closed and accepted it, despite the baggage of 99% of the lines changed having no particular intent behind it.

This is in a normal where a lot of developers think even simple things need to be complex. Hello world needs to run in Azure Pipelines using Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible spawning at least 6 microservices. They think they need all of that and yet it's unmanageably convoluted, so the AI kind of lets them have all that superfluous complexity without actually managing it.

Thanks to work, I'm using it all the time.

It is true that even opus 4.8 cannot always bring a mundane code to life credibly. It can depending on what we are taking about, but the sorts of things it fails at are well short of the complexity of what it would mean to rewrite itself in any credible way.

They are finding a plateau with where the LLMs can go and could use the narrative of a "pause" to explain why capabilities are going to iterate in a more 'evolutionary' way instead of the revolutionary way folks are expecting.

There isn't to my knowledge a mechanism for the models to "self-improve", whatever one may think, at least the output doesn't have access to change the model in any way. The narrative of "oops the AI started evolving itself on accident" doesn't have a way to happen.

Considering that even the vaunted Opus 4.8 can't always develop mundane traditional software beginning, it's hard to imagine it could rework the model itself even if it had such access.

So they know damned well that a huge facet of technology is consistent, deterministic interfaces and behavior. Sure, there's a demand for AI to also provide more flexible interaction in some scenarios which is desired, but many scenarios are benefitted by the dependable interaction of apps.

So on the face of it, the concept of a platform that is a strict subset of the capabilities of platforms already out there (the "app" devices are plenty capable of running the "AI" interfaces) is dumb. This has proven out with the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1, dumb devices that did nothing better and simply signaled affinity with AI.

But Microsoft isn't quite as stupid, so what's the real point... well...

That's really the goal, to reset expectations from having capable personal devices with generally perpetual entitlement to renting every single thing you do from Microsoft. You can have your 'PC' run those deterministic applications you are used to, but it's just going to be a virtual desktop to Azure now.

Well, not quite....

Time zone alone is enough to make them dislike that arrangement.

Another is that navigating foreign employment, or perhaps even worse dealing with a middle man to take care of that for you is a nightmare.

Now you *are* in competition with people who might be later career and are happy to take a more basic salary in exchange from being able to maintain their lifestyle while living wherever they like. I know a few people that said they decided to commit their last decade or so to some rural living and taking just whatever job that goes with that, to keep their benefits alive and mostly keep letting their passive income grow.

Note this observation is *very* specific to the tech industry. The silicon valley phenomenon. Further, significantly specific to the west coast.

Basically, the tech industry from 90s to today in that area has experienced generally robust economic results and quite a few booms, so folks in that neck of the woods have gotten a bit pampered. But I would say it crosses generations, plenty of Gen Xers get caught up in it despite the money faucets turning on a bit later for them.

Most people know that outsourcing can be pretty expensive, but maybe less expensive than hiring local talent. The actual talent is cheap and may be easy to cheat out of an appropriate wage, but the middlemen are no fools and are experienced at making sure they get their cut and a decent rate for their minimal contribution. Also the middlemen are experienced at recognizing *any* opportunity to declare a request beyond the existing statement of work and demand more money before a fairly reasonable request can be serviced, incurring both budget and schedule increases.

Remote work opens up the best of both worlds, shopping around for cheap talent but still having direct control over the worker and not having to pay a middle man. That labor that doesn't know their worth and will never push back can now directly benefit the company. Maybe navigating foreign employment is still a bit much, but they can probably get plenty cheap labor by accepting folks from wherever within their own nation/province/state/whatever with the work from home benefit.

I guess so, looks like it is up to 950 now though, so guess it was a sale...

It was a yoga 7, but maybe it was a special deal for memorial Day. it is now 950...

I mean I just bought a Lenovo laptop with 16G of ram for $700 with touchscreen, a pen, and OLED screen...

It's probably going to be pretty credible, though they are thinking more 'openclaw' and less 'gaming'.

Though I despise everyone playing around with nVidia's "Superchip" terminology.

I tossed that number out as my experience, and it varies wildly task to task and language to language.

For C development, I'd imagine it's super accelerating, as there's so much boilerplate micro managing.

For python, less so as it's a bit less boilerplatey.

If wanting to make a variation on a fairly common pattern, really accelerated. If trying to work in a niche context, frequently more annoying than helpful if you try to prompt, but maybe decent at AI augmented code completion.