What they're doing is dropping the amount of ram in the budget models to crazy-low levels. My laptop died due to a motherboard problem (ram test was fine), so I just bought a new laptop of the same series, which has a better processor and GPU but only 12GB of RAM : So I'm going to try taking the 32GB of ram out of my old laptop and putting it in the new one. It *should* be compatible.

I bet there's a good market right now for people buying up "broken - for parts" computers to strip the ram out of them.

ED: Forgot to post this when I wrote it. Installed the old ram, and at least thusfar (fingers crossed) it seems to be working well...

Of course, Gemini is far from being the most appropriate one to even think about it, so the sales person was *especially* off their rocker.

But for a more credible one, I asked Claude Opus 4.6 to rewrite a particular function to port it to a new library, a request that to its credit had worked *moderately* well for a few files before it, it decided to replace the currently working function with a 'TODO: implement function' and just delete the function body entirely... So rejected the codegen output and proceeded to make the very blatantly obvious correct change to two lines of code by hand...

Anyway, no idea how much this is *really* about Block being aggressively techy or about Block having trouble due to general flailing around and having bit off a lot of ambition that no one cares about. They keep acquiring and screwing up companies in pursuit of horizontal growth, and generally apart from the initial 'make your phone a payment terminal' success has had a reverse-midas touch, turning everything they touch to crap.

Well, at least we can say for sure what it isn't: Letting an AI do your homework.

Not saying an AI can't have a place in learning. Using it like an advanced search machine to gather data, etc. that's pretty cool. AI is going to replace search soon - until the SEO dudes figure out how to fuck it all over again.

The main problem is that school never teaches you the meta-skills. It never tells you WHAT FOR you are learning all this shit. That nobody really gives a shit in 10 years if you remember the date of that battle or the name of that king. But the ability to put together a number of events in history into a whole story, that will come in handy.

I hated every hour of Latin in school. It took 20 years before I realized that thanks to it I can understand bits and pieces in Italian, Spanish and half a dozen other languages despite never having had a single lesson in them.

We are in such deep shit, "trouble" wouldn't even BEGIN to describe it.

Gross profits are low right now, and net profits are negative.

After a huge drop in customers, we are slowly gaining a few back, and while profitability is still negative, last quarter was slightly better then the one before.

How come that lawmakers behave as if they were never kids or can't remember how they themselves considered any and all "stay out, you're not old enough" measures a challenge to overcome?

Especially if it's a machine, which lacks the common sense of, you know, the dumbest door bitch who would take one look at you and say "I don't give a fuck what your fake ID here says, you're at most 15 and you're not going in".

Yep, have seen this repeatedly, "we are a software company that writes software for other people, we can just codegen it now!"

In the most extreme, when Gemini 3 came out, a sales manager sent an email to his sales team saying that if a customer asks for software that we don't already have, the salesguy can just put the customer prompt into Gemini to get the requested software, then sell it to the customer, without having to know how to write or review code. Of all things he thought Gemini 3 was up to the task of just a simple prompt to make software to sell and yet somehow the customers wouldn't be able to try that same thing.

A lot of these AI plans seem to be directed toward failure either way, the AI fails and your product fails, or the AI can succeed and the would-be customer does it for themselves.

I've not used it in a while so I don't know if it is still the case, but *generally* the more flexible desktop platforms are frequently considered "less secure" because of how relatively more open ended interaction is between files and applications.

Mobile platforms started in a very isolated mode and implemented very precise, limited application permission model.

Desktop platforms, well, the cat is way out of the bag and attempts to add mobile-style permissions have been happening, but broadly speaking not nearly so far for fear of breaking existing application expectations.

Yes, everyone fixated on this blog post, except that Friday had seen a increase with the Supreme Court ruling against Trump tariffs, and then over the weekend Trump doubled down on imposing tariffs, erasing the gains.

There's a *lot* going on that could by itself explain issues, plenty of room for false correlations.

It's not just "cheap labor", it's also quality, which is absolutely still a problem with "India IT" (both abroad and domestically).

You absolutely can replace H1B-quality work with an AI - at less cost, time, and effort.

The common theme is: they have one competent developer who's a complete slave driver and he instructs an army of incompetents what to do. The incompetents are paid laborer wages and the competent guy (who may be a $300k/year prior SV employee who wants to live in India) is making a comparable ransom vs his local compatriots.

This pattern is ubiquitous with small development shops. "We have a team in India who does great work!" The work isn't great, it isn't fast, but it mostly works, and cheaper than a US team.

However, 1 midlevel US worker can exceed the quality and velocity with agentic development - and the result is maintainable.

Though I think AI proponents would claim that, *largely* that's not the idea, that they would hang their hat on the codegen, where a probabilistic engine is used to direct code changes that when done are determenistic.

That companies that outsource to offshore coding outfits, no *matter* the rationalization (despite what they say) will see the new hype is insourcing to random local dev guys that can LLM themselves to '10x engineers'. A few low end local devs will be cheaper than a lot of the remote devs and the overhead, and be under your business control and physical location too.

The issue is that this has already been the case, so LLM is a rationalization for a lot of these companies to try a strategy that would have worked out either way.

The portion of India IT that stems from offshoring is at a big risk, though domestic independent India IT is probably in fair shape, except the flood of low-quality offshore workers trying harder for those domestic jobs.

Suppose the counter argument would be that Indian developers are not *solely* providing outsource work to American companies.

Absolutely concur that nearly all offshore, outsourcing outfits are basically there to grift American companies with dubious credentials and work.

Based on experienced, occasionally in that stupid setup, you'll have a really useful and effective person for a while, but ultimately they go 'poof' to get higher pay at a more proper software development shop. So presumably those jobs that aren't outsourcing are the ones alluded to.

"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.

The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.

...laura

Usually they at least have a concept of a different interface, either more flexibility because the thing they are 'ripping off' hard codes some expectations, or more usability by simplifying an overly complex interface provided by a framework or language.

Here we are talking about creating verbatim, exactly the same calls/arguments/syntax as an existing implementation. Which is a pretty rare occurrence for specific reasons. Off hand things like FreeDOS, Dosbox, Wine, a popular scenario of making open source clones of proprietary implementations. Here the desire was different underpinnings for something they found otherwise useful. But most "why the hell did they bother" projects that were already solved at *least* can offer some illustration of what they thought needed changing.

Yes, but an LLM is only kind of useful for that sort of switch. It can do a bit, but it screws up a fair amount still (currently going through exactly that scenario now, it is much faster with LLM as it is kind of in its wheelhouse, but it's still a slog). Codegen maybe has a success rate of 75% for that sort of chore.

Making a knockoff implementation of an existing open source project with a very good existing suite of test cases... Well codegen goes over 90%, between likely having been trained on the prior codebase verbatim and having the entire codebase to work with in context and test cases to automatically run and auto-retry when it fails.

They presumably didn't *want* next.js anymore, but wanted it because between porting their codebases to an alternative or making a knockoff of next.js, the latter is actually easier for LLM to pull off.

Porting a codebase to do the same functionality with a different dependency is also something LLMs are.... kind of useful for, but far less good at that than making knock-offs of an existing open source projects with some twists applied.