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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

#191

Post by 3036e4 »

inetknght wrote: post #103
tgv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kind of economics that shifts the financial debt to accumulating waste, and technical debt, which is paid for by someone else. It's basically stealing. There are --of course-- many cases in which thorough optimizing doesn't make much sense, but the idea of just adding servers instead of rewriting is a sad state of affairs.

> It's basically stealing. This is exactly right. Why should the company pay an extra $250k in salary to "optimize" when they can just offload that salary to their customers' devices instead? The extra couple of seconds, extra megabytes of bandwidth, and shittery of the whole ecosystem has been externalized to customers in search of ill-gotten profits.

It's like ignoring backwards compatibility. That is really cheap since all the cost is pushed to end-users (that have to relearn the UI) or second/third-party developers (that have to rewrite their client code to work with a new API). But it's OK since everyone is doing it and also without all those pointless rewrites many of us would not have a job.

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

#192

Post by HappMacDonald »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #26
tgv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kind of economics that shifts the financial debt to accumulating waste, and technical debt, which is paid for by someone else. It's basically stealing. There are --of course-- many cases in which thorough optimizing doesn't make much sense, but the idea of just adding servers instead of rewriting is a sad state of affairs.

It doesn't seem like stealing to me? Highly optimised software generally takes more effort to create and maintain. The tradeoff is that we get more software in general, and more features in that software, i.e. software developers are more productive. I guess on some level we can feel that it's morally bad that adding more servers or using more memory on the client is cheaper than spending developer time but I'm not s…

I feel like the argument is similar to that of all corporate externality pushes.

For example "polluting the air/water, requiring end-users to fill landfills with packaging and planned obscolescence" allows a company to more cheaply offer more products to you as a consumer.. but now everyone collectively has to live in a more polluted world with climate change and wasted source material converted to expensive and/or dangerous landfills and environmental damage from fracking and strip mining.

But that's still not different from theft. A company that sells you things that "Fell off the back of a truck" is in a position to offer you lower costs and greater variety, as well. Aren't they?

Our shared resources need to be properly managed: neither siphoned wastefully nor ruined via polution. That proper management is a cost, and it either has to be borne by those using the resources and creating the waste, or it is theft of a shared resource and tragedy of the commons.

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

#193

Post by inetknght »

I was working as a janitor, moonlighting as an IT director, in 2010. Back then I told the business that laptops for the past five years (roughly since Nehalem) have plenty of horsepower to run spreadsheets (which is basically all they do) with two cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SATA SSD. A couple of users in marketing did need something a little (not much) beefier. Saved a bunch of money by not buying the latest-and-greatest laptops.

I don't work there any more. Today I am convinced that's true today: those computers should still be great for spreadsheets. Their workflow hasn't seriously changed. It's the software that has. If they've continued with updates (can it even "run" MS Windows 10 or 11 today? No idea, I've since moved on to Linux) then there's a solid chance that the amount of bloat and especially move to online-only spreadsheets would tank their productivity.

Further, the internet at that place was terrible. The only offerings were ~16Mbit asynchronous DSL (for $300/mo just because it's a "business", when I could get the same speed for $80/mo at home), or Comcast cable 120Mbit for $500/mo. 120Mbit is barely enough to get by with an online-only spreadsheet, and 16Mbit definitely not. But worse: if internet goes down, then the business ceases to function.

This is the real theft that another commenter [0] mentioned that I wholeheartedly agree with. There's no reason whatsoever that a laptop running spreadsheets in an office environment should require internet to edit and update spreadsheets, or crazy amounts of compute/storage, or even huge amounts of bandwidth.

Computers today have zero excuse for terrible performance except only to offload costs onto customers - private persons and businesses alike.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971960

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

#194

Post by Xelbair »

caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

the thing is - countries have set down legal rules preventing selling of food that actively harms the consumer(expired, known poisonous, addition of addictive substances(opiates) etc) to continue your food analogy.

in software the regulations can be boiled down to 'lol lmao' in pre-GDPR era. and even now i see GDPR violations daily.

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

#195

Post by franktankbank »

inetknght wrote: post #103
tgv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kind of economics that shifts the financial debt to accumulating waste, and technical debt, which is paid for by someone else. It's basically stealing. There are --of course-- many cases in which thorough optimizing doesn't make much sense, but the idea of just adding servers instead of rewriting is a sad state of affairs.

> It's basically stealing. This is exactly right. Why should the company pay an extra $250k in salary to "optimize" when they can just offload that salary to their customers' devices instead? The extra couple of seconds, extra megabytes of bandwidth, and shittery of the whole ecosystem has been externalized to customers in search of ill-gotten profits.

Also offloaded to the miserable devs maintaining the system.

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

#196

Post by bluGill »

scotty79 wrote: post #186
bluGill wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you want then not talking to a human is faster. However if you are not sure a human can figure out. I'm not sure I'd trust a voice assistant - the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program, but it is easy to program a recommendation for whatever makes the most profit. Of course humans often don't have an informed opinion either, but at least sometimes they do, and they will a…

> the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program I don't think I ever used a human for that. They are usually very uninformed about everything that's not their standard operational procedure or some current promotional materials.

20 years ago when I was at McDonalds there would be several customers per shift (so many 1 in 500?) who didn't know what they wanted and asked for a recommendation. Since I worked there I ate there often enough to know if the special was something I liked or not.

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

#197

Post by mbac32768 »

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…

In Carmack's Lex Fridman interview he says he knows C++ devs who still insist on using some ancient version of MSVC because it's *so fast* compared to the latest, on the latest hardware.

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

#198

Post by sorcerer-mar »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #177
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a very theoretical argument: we could of course theoretically make everything even faster. It's nowhere near the most optimal use of the available hardware. All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity."

> All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity." Would we? Really? I don't think giving up performance needs to be a compromise for the number of features or speed of delivering them.

People make higher-order abstractions for funzies?

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #189
dmos62 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad software is not cheaper to make (or maintain) in the long-term.

What does "make in the long-term" even mean? How do you make a sandwich in the long-term? Bad things are cheaper and easier to make. If they weren't, people would always make good things. You might say "work smarter," but smarter people cost more money. If smarter people didn't cost more money, everyone would always have the smartest people.

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by 0_____0 »

caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

I have that washing machine btw. I saw the AI branding and had a chuckle. I bought it anyway because it was reasonably priced (the washer was $750 at Costco).
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