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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

#301

Post by Multicomp »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #290
rom16384 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more. 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.

Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimental value.

Why? Because they are on a different incentive structure: non-comissioned payments for employees. They buy OEM parts, give a good warranty, charge fair prices, and they are always busy.

If this computer fad goes away, I'm going to open my own Toyota-only auto shop, trying to emulate them. They have 30 years of lead time on my hypothetical business, but the point stands: when people discover that high quality in this market, they stick to it closely.

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

#302

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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 used car market is market for lemons because it is difficult to distinguish between a car that has been well maintained and a car close to breaking down. However, the new car market is decidedly not a market for lemons because every car sold is tested by the state, and reviewed by magazines and such. You know exactly what you are buying.

Software is always sold new. Software can increase in quality the same way cars have generally increased in quality over the decades. Creating standards that software must meet before it can be sold. Recalling software that has serious bugs in it. Punishing companies that knowingly sell shoddy software. This is not some deep insight. This is how every other industry operates.

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

#303

Post by Retric »

mjr00 wrote: post #298
Retric wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind. That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast. The overwhelming majority of software is slow because the company simply doesn’t care about efficiency. Google actively penalized slow websites and many companies still didn’t make it a priority.

> That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast. So why is it so rarely the case? If it's so simple, why hasn't anyone recognized that Teams, Zoom, etc are all bloated and slow and made a hyper-optimized, feature-complete competitor, dominating the market? Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free. > The overwhelming majority of software is slow because th…

Not being free upfront isn’t the same thing as expensive.

Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here and the investment wouldn’t disappear, it would help drive further profits.

> Don't care about efficiency at all

Doesn’t care beyond basic functionality. Obviously they care if something takes an hour to load, but rarely do you see considerations for people running on lower hardware than the kind of machines you see at a major software company etc.

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

#304

Post by homebrewer »

mjr00 wrote: post #179
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 market sells as if all goods were high-quality The phrase "high-quality" is doing work here. The implication I'm reading is that poor performance = low quality. However, the applications people are mentioning in this comment section as low performance (Teams, Slack, Jira, etc) all have competitors with much better performance. But if I ask a person to pick between Slack and, say, a a fast IRC client like Weecha…

If you're being honest, compare Slack and Teams not with weechat, but with Telegram. Its desktop client (along with other clients) is written by an actually competent team that cares about performance, and it shows. They have enough money to produce a native client written in C++ that has fantastic performance and is high quality overall, but these software behemoths with budgets higher than most countries' GDP somehow never do.

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

#305

Post by crubier »

maccard wrote: post #119
Gigachad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news…

HOW does Slack take 20s to load for you? My huge corporate Slack takes 2.5s to cold load.

I'm so dumbfounded. Maybe non-MacOS, non-Apple silicon stuff is complete crap at that point? Maybe the complete dominance of Apple performance is understated?

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

#306

Post by fdr »

One of the things I think about sometimes, a specific example rather than a rebuttal to Carmack.

The Electron Application is somewhere between tolerated and reviled by consumers, often on grounds of performance, but it's probably the single innovation that made using my Linux laptop in the workplace tractable. And it is genuinely useful to, for example, drop into a MS Teams meeting without installing.

So, everyone laments that nothing is as tightly coded as Winamp anymore, without remembering the first three characters.

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

#307

Post by gmerc »

Perfect parallel to the madness that is AI. With even modest sustainability incentives, the industry wouldn't have pulverized a trillion dollar on training models nobody uses to dominate the weekly attention fight and fundraising game.

Evidence: DeepSeek

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

#308

Post by skydhash »

mjburgess wrote: post #159
sgarland wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: devs have made the mistake of turning everything into remote calls, without having any understanding as to the performance implications of doing so. Sonos’ app is a perfect example of this. The old app controlled everything locally, since the speakers set up their own wireless mesh network. This worked fantastically well. Someone at Sonos got the bright idea to completely rewrite the app such that it wasn…

Presumably they wanted the telemetry. It's not clear that this was a dev-initiated switch. Perhaps we can blame the 'statistical monetization' policies of adtech and then AI for all this -- i'm not entirely sold on developers. What, after all, is the difference between an `/etc/hosts` set of loop'd records vs. an ISP's dns -- as far as the software goes?

> Presumably they wanted the telemetry

Why not log them to a file and cron a script to upload the data? Even if the feature request is nonsensical, you can architect a solution that respect the platform's constraints. It's kinda like when people drag in React and Next.js just to have a static website.

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

#309

Post by skydhash »

api wrote: post #157
Gigachad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're comparing these applications to older applications that loaded instantly on much slower computers. Both sides are right. There is a ton of waste and bloat and inefficiency. But there's also a ton of stuff that genuinely does demand more memory and CPU. An incomplete list: - Higher DPI displays use intrinsically more memory and CPU to paint and rasterize. My monitor's pixel array uses 4-6X more memory than my…

Then you install Linux and get all that without the mess that is Win11. Inefficient software is inefficient software.

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

#310

Post by mjr00 »

Retric wrote: post #303
mjr00 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast. So why is it so rarely the case? If it's so simple, why hasn't anyone recognized that Teams, Zoom, etc are all bloated and slow and made a hyper-optimized, feature-complete competitor, dominating the market? Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free. > The overwhelming majority of software is slow because th…

Not being free upfront isn’t the same thing as expensive. Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here and the investment wouldn’t disappear, it would help drive further profits. > Don't care about efficiency at all Doesn’t care beyond basic functionality. Obviously they care if something takes an hour to load, but rarely do you see considerations for people runni…

> Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here

What would those 7 engineers specifically be working on? How did you pick 7? What part of the infrastructure would they be working on, and what kind of performance gains, in which part of the system, would be the result of their work?

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