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0 pointsjosephg3y ago0 comments

Yep. Most things most users do on our computers could be done just fine on a computer from 10 years ago. I think we're on a performance treadmill like this:

- Developers get new, fast devices (yay). We make our software just fast enough to run smoothly (enough) on our own devices. Then we ship it.

- Users' computers are slower than the developers' computers. Users experience is bad because the software is slow.

- Users buy new computers too. Money is poured into R&D for even faster computers.

- Hardware companies release faster hardware

- Developers buy new, fast computers

And the cycle continues.

For general purpose computing, there's not really any meaningful difference between my computer today and my computer 15 years ago. But I can't use that old computer, because modern programs don't work well on it any more. I can't imagine how slow modern Discord or Microsoft Teams would run on my old 2012 macbook air - even though that machine is orders of magnitude faster than the computer I was using to chat on IRC in the late 90s.

I'm low key convinced that if computers and phones stopped getting faster tomorrow, the software industry would grumble but get on with things and adapt. Users wouldn't really notice anything change, except we'd all be richer because we would no longer need to buy new computers every few years.

There's a few notable exceptions of course: modern AI, video production & animation, and massive cloud services (like Google and Netflix) who actually optimize their code. I'm on the fence about compilers - do LLVM & rustc really need to be that slow? Netflix might never make it to 8k video (boo hoo). And ray traced video games might not happen. But the average consumer would probably be delighted. And the savings to the environment would be insane.

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chlorion3y ago· 1 in thread

This is interesting, but maybe our software is doing a lot more today than it was back then. I guess the question is whether those things are necessary. There is of course some software that is just slower because of negligence too.

I remember using a computer 20 years, and they would take multiple minutes to boot into something that was usable, and executing programs would take quite a few seconds because the HDD had to go searching for stuff the executable required.

My current desktop has a Samsung 970 NVME SSD, it boots up in like 20 seconds or something, and everything is extremely responsive as far as reading from the disk goes.

It's interesting that the one thing that hasn't been completely neutralized by the treadmill is SSDs!

Also the LLVM and Rustc thing is interesting. I imagine they are doing much more advanced optimizations than what compilers did 20 years ago so they probably have a good excuse, but I think these optimizations are also neutralized by the treadmill eventually.

redeeman3y ago

chromium 111 source is 1.7GB compressed with xz(lzma). google has completely lost whatever minds they may have had, and included more code than one would imagine exists in the whole damn world.

it is an absolute abomination, and these words does not even remotely do justice to just how horrible it is

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