Yeah I see that kind of stuff too and I do find it rather amazing. I as more looking at it from a final options package perspective.

I don't know about the market for the guy going to PC Parts Picker and assembling things from individual components. I am more thinking thinking about what Apple/Dell/HP/[Whatever is on the shelf at Walmart] is going to offer in pre-boxed, or per-selectable packages.

Think if it like with trim level in Ford trucks. If you want leather seats you are also getting the fancy infotainment system, and bunch of other things because again at that price - why not. How could you justify spending $1000+ on upholstery only to get a stereo you can barely hear over the road noise.

The auto industry may prove to be a lot like the PC industry in this regard, and I'd offer it as a counter point to my original thoughts. Which is there is a huge market for base model parts because of fleet vehicles, companies/states/school districts/cities buying 100 trucks do care about saving $1500 a unit even on $45000 assets. A large corp looking to put 500 PCs on desktops, might very well want to save $35-100 a unit knowing, that nobody will ever need that extra TB of storage, extra 8GB or ram, or elevated clock speed, because the tasks that will be performed don't actually require it and are unlikely to change over the assets life cycle.

It may be that market is large enough that OEMs chose to offer lower end combinations even if they don't make any real economic sense to consumer just so they can offer some eye catching $599 deals in web ads, that turn into $899 by the time you get thru the configurator.

I wonder what this does to the fortunes of other budget component makers, and even binning as far as chips makers goes for parts like CPUs.

At some point it becomes rather non-nonsensical to pair expensive memory with some budget CPU, or GPU to constrained to also support AI inference well or play the latest games. Why would try to save $15 on 1Gbps Ethernet PHY vs a 2.5Gbps in a $1000+ computer?

Sure it all adds up and if you an save $15, here and $5 there, and $10 over here pretty soon you have a number that might matter to a consumer but the flip side of that is you're trying to sell a still expensive machine that barely runs better then the box they are replacing. PCs have not for the most part been CPU bound for most consumer tasks for a while. How are you going to convince someone to drop $1000 on machine with the same 8GB of memory as the one they're replacing. Consumers are not totally ignorant anymore, they may not know what the bottlenecks on their workloads are but they mostly do understand there is more to 'how fast' the computer is than than how big the numbers are on the CPU.

I don't agree. A lot of people feel awkward asking for anything just about anything.

I don't think it is at all incorrect for a person working in hospitality to respond to a request with "No problem, that's why I am here" or just "No problem."

Nobody is waiting tables, standing behind the bell desk finding you local cab company, or checking in the back to see if they have an alternator in stock for a different year Chevy that should mount on your block for the sure joy of it. Its really the corporation/proprietor/house that is extending/affording your the customer service. Employees pleasantly and politely communicating that your request fell within that level of service is perfectly reasonable and probably desirable from the business perspective.

Nice to see there are still a few people here that get it.

The average CEO makes something on the order of 281 times the typical employee.

I would hope as we explore genAI and the possibilities white collar work, boards of directors would take a hard look how much payroll it might save to get rid of some of these under performers.

That is both true and also never stopped anyone in the world of frameworks/libraries/languages and stuff that is for programmers by programmers for the most part.

Its widely applied to American's who live in the North East and upper midwest.

Its frequently used for people with Winter residences in more rural or touristy portions of Arizona, New Mexico, as well, less often for Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Places that comfortable in September - March, but cheap because they are not comfortable the rest of year and there is little in the way of employment, unless its handyman, grocery store clerk, audiologist, or physician. That is fine because snowbirding is mostly a retirees thing.

for something like Next.js on Node.js I don't think that is the case at all.

Honestly 94% is probably as good as 100% for quality projects that have good unit tests. It should be as simple as deploying to the new environment changing a handful of lines or [ctrl]-[r]'ing your way to using stuff from the new name space, and running your tests. If all the tests come up green because you don't use that 6% missing - off to QA testing..

If some tests do fail you probably are not looking at a huge effort to replace what is missing or has a real implementation difference that matters to you with roll-your-own, or let Claude vibe code your own..

Now if you don't have tests. Well that missing 6% is "here there be dragons" for you, and for a large project you'd never be able to confidently migrate. You might as well be COBOL mainframe land where the problem isnt just the COBOL is also the hidden logic of SYNCSORT's applied after every job step..

I think we are going to see the pace of software churn speed up a lot thanks to AI, the projects that survive are going to be the ones that can deal with the sand shifting below them because they have followed good practice around testability, and coupling.

I would not characterize a fully patched Windows 10 thru last October; as 'very vulnerable' to being hacked. At least not when third party software, specifically Chrome is still get updated thru at least 2028.

In fact in the home PC context I'd say there is probably very little real difference in posture vs that same PC running Windows 11. Yes I know Win 11 has some additional memory protection but again for home users they are not exposing native code binaries to truly untrusted inputs, with the main exception of the aforementioned Chrome.

Finally given MS is still selling extended support for Windows 10, we know they are still producing fixes, given past experiences with serious wormable/drive-by exploits - if something like that comes up they will give away the patch.

So not getting updates is basically FUD, to sell new PCs and new Windows licenses.

LLMs seems simple to use / integrate, but the reality is they are massive foot gun opportunities.

1) single channel for control/data, and the almost inevitable injections attacks that represents.
2) gotchas around context size, that are often hidden or abstracted away at first
3) Lots of other tuneables nobody can explain to you what do, if your not maths major.
4)attack surface around things like context integrity
5) multiple incomplete standards for tool calling, mixed authorization strategies / conventions / and impedance problems with existing systems.

All being shoved into the hands of end users, with only vague mentions of dangers like hallucination. Its like watering CCW courses down to 'aim away from face'

Future text book:

In the late post war era, wealthy societies around the globe became obsessed with the idea they could create true artificial intelligence. They directed massive resources to this AI god they believed could be brought forth at a time when there need to invest these resources and wealth into addressing critical structural and sustainability issues. Hollowed out and weakened by cancerous spending, and poor energy allocation choices the great empires of the early 21st century entered a period of accelerated decline and collapse as household food and energy prices began to rise.

Business are perhaps their own case but do consumers even need new PCs?

Other than AI and games what does a 10 year old box NOT do just as well as new machine. OK it compiles stuff faster, and renders video quicker if you are editing, anything else "consumers" might actually do with a PC?

PCs seem to have become like cars. The average mid market family sedan or small-suv, from 5+ years ago comfortably seats five, has a decent sound system, navigation of some variety of smart phone integration, is loaded with safety features - airbags, abs, stability control- and boasts a 0-60 time of 6 seconds. You might *want* a new Giulia Quadrifoglio, but you don't *need it*.

We have been kinda predicting the death of PC market for years now, because as I have been saying you can do your taxes, and junior can do their homework on a box from 2016 just fine. Maybe memory prices will finally break the upgrade / planned obsolesce cycle and leave people treating them more like cars, where the average age of the fleet is 11 years and they get a new one when it become to expensive to fix their current one.

BAHAHA LOL

The DOD has never completed and audit. The have a budget of trillions. You think they can't just hire Anthropic's best people away, rips off and patents and IP they do have, hide behind national-security/government immunity/whatever and make their own stuff?

That is even if they could not find a near peer competitor in Microsoft-OpenAI or IBM that will smell the money and reply "how wide would you like us to spread our buns when bend over sirs?"

If Anthropic prevails, here that will be your proof Hegseth really is incapable, because by all accounts he should win this one.

Except this is not that...

More like:

Hey this is a nice contract we have here, but as a client we are not happy with the terms, be a shame if we had to cancel it.

Which is wait for it....Perfectly ordinary business practice.

VB was a fine tool, the reason it got a lot of hate was because like a lot of software tools, it was to easy to take places it was never built go and to often was.

Slogging thru creating front end Windows apps with VC++ was dumb. What was even more dumb though was that kid who built the nightly shipping batch process thingy in VB, and oh it had to run on a logged in deskop because it needed a main window, to host some timer event. So the next thing you know you had to have a server in the rack with a super insecure auto-login configuration...or to make damn sure every operator knew that if they needed to restart that thing for any reason they'd better go login in and make sure 'SuperShip97' fires up..

Oh and SuperShip97 would cause the box to run out of swap and fall over every three days because VB was made for writing desktop software where leaking a few bytes of memory here and there because something was self-referenced and could never be garbage collected, did not matter much since the process would not be long lived; but when turned into a batch processing solution meant the problem would just compound until the box crashed.

VB was hated not because it was bad, it was hated because it let people who did not understand the problems of various software domains rush in start building stuff that needed to be architect-ed. It was often like they guy who used a few bags of sackcreet to put pad down for his BBQ jumpting to 'hell I'll just rent a backhoe, buy some forms, get me one of them mixers and harbor freight and pour the foundation for the new addition on the house, how hard could it be!' Next spring everyone is standing around wondering why the joists are pulling away from the ledger board....