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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#71

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

SilverSlash wrote: post #21

The title made me think Carmack was criticizing poorly optimized software and advocating for improving performance on old hardware. When in fact, the tweet is absolutely not about either of the two. He's talking about a thought experiment where hardware stopped advancing and concludes with "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

This is exactly the point. People ignore that "bloat" is not (just) "waste", it is developer productivity increase motivated by economics.

The ability to hire and have people be productive in a less complicated language expands the market for workers and lowers cost.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#72

Post by high_na_euv »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

Yup, people run software on shitty computers and blame all the software.

The only slow (local) software I know is llvm and cpp compilers

Other are pretty fast

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#73

Post by ffsm8 »

pydry wrote: post #39
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Most of it was exchanged for abstractions which traded runtime speed for the ability to create apps quickly and cheaply. The market mostly didn't want 50% faster code as much as it wanted an app that didn't exist before. If I look at the apps I use on a day to day basis that are dog slow and should have been optimized (e.g. slack, jira), it's not really a lack of the industry's engineering capability to speed things…

> Most of it was exchanged for abstractions which traded runtime speed for the ability to create apps quickly and cheaply.

Really? Because while abstractions like that exist (i.e. a webserver frameworks, reactivity, SQL and ORMs etc), I would argue that these aren't the abstractions that cause the most maintenance and performance issues. These are usually in the domain/business application and often not something that made anything quicker to develop or anything, but instead created by a developer that just couldn't help themselves

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#74

Post by flohofwoe »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

I guess you don't need to wrestle with Xcode?

Somehow the Xcode team managed to make startup and some features in newer Xcode versions slower than older Xcode versions running on old Intel Macs.

E.g. the ARM Macs are a perfect illustration that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

After a very short 'free lunch' right after the Intel => ARM transition we're now back to the same old software performance regression spiral (e.g. new software will only be optimized until it feels 'fast enough', and that 'fast enough' duration is the same no matter how fast the hardware is).

Another excellent example is the recent release of the Oblivion Remaster on Steam (which uses the brand new UE5 engine):

On my somewhat medium-level PC I have to reduce the graphics quality in the Oblivion Remaster so much that the result looks worse than 14-year old Skyrim (especially outdoor environments), and that doesn't even result in a stable 60Hz frame rate, while Skyrim runs at a rock-solid 60Hz and looks objectively better in the outdoors.

E.g. even though the old Skyrim engine isn't by far as technologically advanced as UE5 and had plenty of performance issues at launch on a ca. 2010 PC, the Oblivion Remaster (which uses a "state of the art" engine) looks and performs worse than its own 14 years old predecessor.

I'm sure the UE5-based Oblivion remaster can be properly optimized to beat Skyrim both in looks and performance, but apparently nobody cared about that during development.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#75

Post by ngangaga »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #48
ngangaga wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that deep. We are just stuck with browsers now, for better and worse. Everything else trails.

We're stuck with browsers now until the primary touch with the internet is assistants / agent UIs / chat consoles. That could end up being Electron (VS Code), though that would be a bit sad.

I think it'd be pretty funny if to book travel in 2035 you need to use a travel agent that's objectively dumber than a human. We'd be stuck in the eighties again, but this time without each other to rely on.

Of course, that would be suicide for the industry. But I'm not sure investors see that.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#76

Post by mschild »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

A mix of both. There are large number of websites that are inefficiently written using up unnecessary amounts of resources. Semi-modern devices make up for that by just having a massive amount of computing power.

However, you also need to consider 2 additional factors. Macbooks and iPhones, even 4 year old ones, have usually been at the upper end of the scale for processing power. (When compared to the general mass-market of private end-consumer devices)

Try doing the same on a 4 year old 400 Euro laptop and it might look a bit different. Also consider your connection speed and latency. I usually have no loading issue either. But I have a 1G fiber connection. My parents don't.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#77

Post by _aavaa_ »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

I'd wager that a 2021 MacBook, like the one I have, is stronger than the laptop used by majority of people in the world.

Life on an entry or even mid level windows laptop is a very different world.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#78

Post by tjader »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#79

Post by ngangaga »

SilverSlash wrote: post #21

The title made me think Carmack was criticizing poorly optimized software and advocating for improving performance on old hardware. When in fact, the tweet is absolutely not about either of the two. He's talking about a thought experiment where hardware stopped advancing and concludes with "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

> "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

Interesting conclusion—I'd argue we haven't seen much innovation since the smartphone (18 years ago now), and it's entirely because capital is relying on the advances of hardware to sell what is to consumers essentially the same product that they already have.

Of course, I can't read anything past the first tweet.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#80

Post by pron »

vrighter wrote: post #52
pron wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not free for the taking. The point is that we'd get more than that 5%'s worth in exchange. So sure, we'll get significant value "if software optimization was truly a priority", but we get even more value by making other things a priority. Saying "if we did X we'd get a lot in return" is similar to the fallacy of inverting logical implication. The question isn't, will doing something have significant value, b…

depends on whether the fact that software can be finished will ever be accepted. If you're constantly redeveloping the same thing to "optimize and streamline my experience" (please don't) then yes, the advantage is dubious. But if not, then the saved value in operating costs keeps increasing as time goes on. It won't make much difference in my homelab, but at datacenter scale it does

Even the fact that value keeps increasing doesn't mean it's a good idea. It's a good idea if it keeps increasing more than other value. If a piece of software is more robust against attacks then the value in that also keeps increasing over time, possibly more than the cost in hardware. If a piece of software is easier to add features to, then that value also keeps increasing over time.

If what we're asking is whether value => X, i.e. to get the most value we should do X, you cannot answer that in the positive by proving X => value. If optimising something is worth a gazillion dollars, you still should not do it if doing something else is worth two gazillion dollars.

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