281–290 of 842 posts
Also HN: Check this new AI tool that consumes 1000x more energy to do the exact same thing we could already do, but worse and with no reproducibility
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> "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.
We have self driving cars, amazing advancement in computer graphics, dead reckoning of camera position from visual input... In the meantime, hardware has had to go wide on threads as single core performance has not improved. You could argue that's been a software gain and a hardware failure.
Single core performance has improved, but at a much slower rate than I experienced as a kid.
Over the last 10 years, we are something like 120% improvement in single core performance.
And, not for nothing, efficiency has become much more important. More CPU performance hasn't been a major driving factor vs having a laptop that runs for 12 hours. It's simply easier to add a bunch of cores and turn them all off (or slow them down) to gain power efficiency.
Not to say the performance story would be vastly different with more focus on performance over efficiency. But I'd say it does have an effect on design choices.
Well, yes. It's an economic problem (which is to say, it's a resource allocation problem). Do you have someone spend extra time optimising your software or do you have them produce more functionality. If the latter generates more cash then that's what you'll get them to do. If the former becomes important to your cashflow then you'll get them to do that.
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.
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 worked for large corporations that have foisted awful HR, expense reporting, time tracking and insurance "portals" that were so awful I had to wonder if anyone writing the checks had ever seen the product. I brought up the point several times that if my team tried to tell a customer that we had their project all done but it was full of as many bugs and UI nightmares as these back office platforms, I would be c…
You might not think about this as “quality” but it does have the quality of meeting the perverse functional requirements of the situation.
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From what I’m seeing people do on their computers, it barely changed from what they’ve been doing on their pentium 4 one. But now, with Electron-based software and the generals state of Windows, you can’t recommend something older than 4 years. It’s hard to not see it as stealing when you have to buy a 1000+ laptop, when a 400 one could easily do the job if the software were a bit better.
Most people today could be using excel '98 and be no less productive.
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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…
A lot of other native Mac stuff is also less than ideal. Terminal keeps getting stuck all the time, Mail app can take a while to render HTML emails, Xcode is Xcode, and so on.
Is there or could we make an iPhone-like that runs 100x slower than conventional phones but uses much less energy, so it powers itself on solar? It would be good for the environment and useful in survival situations. Or could we make a phone that runs 100x slower but is much cheaper? If it also runs on solar it would be useful in third-world countries. Processors are more than fast enough for most tasks nowadays; mor…
Yes, it's possible and very simple. Lower the frequency (dramatically lowers power usage), fewer cores, few threads, etc. The problem is, we don't know what we need. What if a great new apps comes out (think LLM); you'll be complaining your phone is too slow to run it.
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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.
I don't disagree that the engineering can be justified. But you don't need custom hardware to achieve radiation hardening, much less hiring fucking IBM. 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.
Citation needed
> much less hiring fucking IBM
It's an IBM designed processor, what are you talking about?!
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If we're talking numbers, there are many, many more embedded systems than general purpose computers. And these are mostly built on ancient process nodes compared to the cutting edge we have today; the shiny octa-cores on our phones are supported by a myriad of ancilliary chips that are definitely not cutting edge.
We aren't talking numbers, though. Who cares about embedded? I mean that literally. This is computation invisible by design. If that were sufficient we wouldn't have smartphones.
I still don't see how one can classify a smartphone as a general-purpose computing device, even though they have enough computing power as a laptop.
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The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a compe…
I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want t…
The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc
But I understand your point.