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EZ-E

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I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform

That is exactly what the big LLM providers are trying to prevent. Them being only commodity providers might lead them to be easily replaced, and will likely lead to lower margins compared to "full feature" enterprise solutions. Switching LLM API provider is next to no work the moment a competitor is slightly cheaper/better.

Full solutions are more "sticky", harder to replace, and can be sold at higher prices.

Sure a most of these apps are "slop" and will never achieve any kind of success. However a small percentage will eventually flourish into businesses which will eventually starts hiring developers and other roles.

Increased enablement and higher productivity leads to greater output which will eventually lead to greater need for (some types) of tech workers in the end.

I work on a platform that a lot of customers "hate", or at least get frustrating experiences from. With many vocal on reddit, or in the reviews.

As software engineers, we are nowadays actually expected to handle customer service escalations (ie: when customer service cannot resolve a given situation, and the client is persistent enough, or borderline threatens legal action).

Strangely, I found dealing with those these customer escalations some of the most rewarding work. It feels very real as I read the long winded customer support ticket, feeling the user frustration, and finding the root cause and resolving the issue, or at least being able to understand and explain. Afterwards, internally trying and pushing for changes that would prevent the frustrations and escalations is also very rewarding.

I found this more rewarding than some other initiatives we have internally as they sometimes feel less connected to actual problems that are happening and that nearly everyone ignores.

Indeed. I tried once with a particularly shady company that required phone calls to unsubscribe. The service after 1 month unpaid, but the money was still owed and ultimately they sold the "debt" to one of those companies that will try to scare you into paying via threatening emails.

Layoffs at Block 5 months ago

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus

Being in a company that has done the gradual cuts, instead of one big cut, I unironically agree. I must have dodged like 15 staff reductions at this point. Company would be in a better state if the decision was taken to go for it big time. Still, it must be hard and shocking - but only once.

GPT-5.3-Codex 6 months ago

Can someone explain the difference between this and VSCode agent chat? Except the fact that it's a separate app?

Businesses don’t do promotions at senior levels because you “deserve” it. They promote those who have the highest potential to deliver outsized impact and value.

What I've seen more of is: people get promoted because they already do the job at the higher level, or close to it

• half of 1 cup rolled oats • 1 banana • 1 scoop soy or pea protein powder • 2 tablespoon flax seeds (make sure to buy whole and grind them, in my case I don't need to grind them separately the blender chops them while doing the shake) • 2 tablespoon peanut butter (100% peanut no added oil) • 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil • unsweetened oat or soy milk • I add some water if it's too thick

I blend the oats and the flax seeds first, then add the rest, blend again for 10 secs, boom - easy. You may want to adjust peanut butter quantity depending on whether you’re trying to lose, maintain or gain weight. 2 tbsp is me trying to maintain weight as I easily lose weight.

I fixed my high cholesterol problem with oats... Months ago I replaced my daily dinner with a mix of oats + banana + protein powder + 1 tbsp olive oil + peanut butter + flaxseeds + oat milk - all mixed in a blender. My bad cholesterol (LDL levels) tanked from 160 mg/dL to 91 mg/dL. My daily dinners before that were not even that unhealthy. Dropping sat fat intake had nowhere near that much effect for me. For me and I assume for many others, lack soluble fibers are the root cause of high LDL levels.

In the end, with the current market prices, chips factories and data centers are being built all over with the assumption of exponential demand growth. When the excitement and demand for AI cools, we will enjoy the additional capacity and better prices. Also see: fiber bandwidth post 2000. Capital poured in, overbuilding happened, prices collapsed after the crash.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world - I noticed in SEA businesses are more like "just contact us" with a phone number directly available / facebook page. Like, they don't want you to do anything with the website, they expect you to chat with them directly.

"translate your designs into a scalable system

To be fair telling customers to f** off when they want to reach out for help scales infinitely

Youtube is squeezing more and more to push subscribing to premium. Youtube is where "everything" is - they know they can squeeze hard, where else are you going to go?

Ironically it looks more and more like TV with the non stop ads and sponsors.

Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled

Can you explain the shadow banking / conversion angle? All I found was that selling knives was used to get a discount on steam balance thanks to price arbitrage.

"Selling Knives" (挂刀) refers to the technique of buying in-game items from 3rd-party (Chinese) trading sites like NetEase BUFF, C5, IGXE, and UUYP, and then selling them on the Steam Market to obtain a discounted Steam Wallet balance by capitalizing on price differences.

I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.

Source https://github.com/EricZhu-42/SteamTradingSiteTracker/wiki

Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?

You could make the same claim to make a case for the usage of any technology that simplifies the coding work, ie: using Java instead of assembly, usage of AWS instead of implementing your own infra, etc. With higher level languages, by freeing up developers from having to worry about specifics of memory management or syscalls, they could become more productive and focus more on the actual problems to solve. Some still understand the underlying because they work on that low level layer, but this is not needed anymore for most.

I think LLMs are another step in that direction, although with caveats.

Believe it or not there is talent even in countries where salaries are lower. For 3000 - 4000 USD month you can get good english speaking senior engineers in Vietnam used to work in international environments. Not FAANG tier but strong fit for most $CRUD companies. This is cheaper than US by far, although the gap with Europe is unironically closing.