81–90 of 842 posts
Just throw in Slack chat, vscode editor in Electron, Next.js stack, 1-2 docker containers, one browser and you need top notch hardware to run it fluid (Apple Silicon is amazing though). I'm doing no fancy stuff.
Chat, editor in a browser and docker don't seem the most efficient thing if put all together.
The world DOES run on older hardware. How new do you think the CPU in your bank ATM or car's ECU is?
Well I know the CPU in my laptop is already over 10 years old and still works good enough for everything I do.
I'm a sysadmin, so I only really need to log into other computers, but I can watch videos, browse the web, and do some programming on them just fine. Best ROI ever.
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IBM PowerPC 750X apparently, which was the CPU the Power Mac G3 used back in the day. Since it's going into space it'll be one of the fancy radiation-hardened versions which probably still costs more than your car though, and they run four of them in lockstep to guard against errors. https://www.eetimes.com/comparing-tech-used-for-apollo-artem...
I'm not sure what artemis or orion are, but you can blame defense contractors for this. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or Lockheed, even if they deliver unimpressive results at massive cost.
One of the tradeoffs of radiation hardening is increased transistor size.
Cost-wise it also makes sense - it’s a specialized, certified and low-volume part.
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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 tha…
Edit: and probably writing backends in Python or Ruby or JavaScript.
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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…
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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…
What is frustrating though that until relatively recently these devices would work fine with JS heavy apps and work really well with anything that is using a native toolkit.
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I'm not sure what artemis or orion are, but you can blame defense contractors for this. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or Lockheed, even if they deliver unimpressive results at massive cost.
Put a 4 nm CPU into something that goes to space and see how long it would take to fail. One of the tradeoffs of radiation hardening is increased transistor size. Cost-wise it also makes sense - it’s a specialized, certified and low-volume part.
And to be clear, I love power chips. I remain very bullish about the architecture. But as a taxpayer reading this shit just pisses me off. Pork-fat designed to look pro-humanity.
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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.
A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday afternoon. Instead of going into the office, I pulled out a first generation raspberry pi and got everything set up on that. Needless to say, our nodejs app started pretty slowly. Not for any good reason - there were a couple modules which pulled in huge amounts of code which we didn’t use anyway. A couple hours work made the whole app start 5x faster and use half the ram. I would never have noticed that was a problem with my snappy desktop.
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I don’t think abundance vs speed is the right lens. No user actually wants abundance. They use few programs and would benwfit if those programs were optimized. Established apps could be optimized to the hilt. But they seldom are.
>No user actually wants abundance. No, all users just want the few programs which they themselves need. The market is not one user, though. It's all of them.
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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…
I don’t think abundance vs speed is the right lens. No user actually wants abundance. They use few programs and would benwfit if those programs were optimized. Established apps could be optimized to the hilt. But they seldom are.
Yes but it's a different 'few programs' than 99% of all other users, so we're back to square one.