The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by thewebguyd » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #88

_aavaa_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years. A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work…

> Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years.

Same thing happens with UI & Website design. When the designers and front-end devs all have top-spec MacBooks, with 4k+ displays, they design to look good in that environment.

Then you ship to the rest of the world which are still for the most part on 16:9 1920x1080 (or god forbid, 1366x768), low spec windows laptops and the UI looks like shit and is borderline unstable.

Now I don't necessarily think things should be designed for the lowest common denominator, but at the very least we should be taking into consideration that the majority of users probably don't have super high end machines or displays. Even today you can buy a brand new "budget" windows laptop that'll come with 8GB of RAM, and a tiny 1920x1080 display, with poor color reproduction and crazy low brightness - and that's what the majority of people are using, if they are using a computer at all and not a phone or tablet.

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

#372

Post by arolihas » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:32 PM UTC

ayewo wrote: post #358

mtalantikite wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the…

> But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?

looks like they are trying native advertising first

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

#373

Post by thewebguyd » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #364

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify takes 7 seconds from clicking on its icon to playing a song on a 2024 top-of-the-range MacBook Pro. Navigating through albums saved on your computer can take several seconds. Double clicking on a song creates a 1/4sec pause. This is absolutely remarkable inefficiency considering the application's core functionality (media players) was perfected a quarter century ago.

And on RhythmBox, on a 2017 laptop it works instantaneously. These big monetized apps were a huge mistake.

> These big monetized apps were a huge mistake.

It's electron. Electron was a mistake.

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

#374

Post by vel0city » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #354

vel0city wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I play around with retro computers all the time. Even with IO devices that are unthinkably performant compared to storage hardware actually common at the time these machines are often dog slow. Just rendering JPEGs can be really slow. Maybe if you're in a purely text console doing purely text things 100% in memory it can feel snappy. But the moment you do anything graphical or start working on large datasets it…

64MB is about the size of (a big) L3 cache. Today's L3 caches have a latency of 3-12ns and throughput measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second . And yet we can't manage to get responsive UIs because of tons of crud.

My modern machine running a modern OS is still way snappier while actually loading the machine and doing stuff. Sure, if I'm directly on a tty and just running vim on a small file its super fast. The same on my modern machine. Try doing a few things at once or handle some large dataset and see how well it goes.

My older computers would completely lock up when given a large task to do, often for many seconds. Scanning an image would take over the whole machine for like a minute per page! Applying a filter to an image would lock up the machine for several seconds even for a much smaller image a much simpler filter. The computer cannot even play mp3's and have a responsive word processor, if you really want to listen to music while writing a paper you better have it pass through the audio from a CD, much less think about streaming it from some remote location and have a whole encrypted TCP stream and decompression.

These days I can have lots of large tasks running at the same time and still have more responsiveness.

I have fun playing around with retro hardware and old applications, but "fast" and "responsive" are not adjectives I'd use to describe them.

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

#375

Post by volemo » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #363

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…

> This is already true and will become increasingly more true for AI. The user cannot differentiate between sophisticated machine learning applications and a washing machine spin cycle calling itself AI. The user cannot but a good AI might itself allow the average user to bridge the information asymmetry. So as long as we have a way to select a good AI assistant for ourselves...

> The user cannot but a good AI might itself allow the average user to bridge the information asymmetry. So as long as we have a way to select a good AI assistant for ourselves...

In the end it all hinges on the users ability to assess the quality of the product. Otherwise, the user cannot judge whether an assistant recommends quality products and the assistant has an incentive to suggest poorly (e.g. sellout to product producers).

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

#376

Post by generalizations » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

The world runs on the maximization of ( - entropy / $) and that's definitely not the same thing as minimizing compute power or bug count.

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

#377

Post by olejorgenb » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

rpnx wrote: post #352

thijson wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of see this in action when I'm comparing products on Amazon. When comparing two products on Amazon that are substantially the same, the cheaper one will have way more reviews. I guess this implies that it has captured the majority of the market.

I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin. If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see th…

You have to have bought the item om Amazon to review right? So these reviewers buy and return, or how does it work?

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

#378

Post by alkonaut » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #259

alkonaut wrote: post #181

"The world" runs on _features_ not elegant, fast, or bug free software. To the end user, there is no difference between a lack of a feature, and a bug. Nor is there any meaningful difference between software taking 5 minutes to complete something because of poor performance, compared to the feature not being there and the user having to spend 5 minutes completing the same task manually. It's "slow". If you keep maxim…

No way. You've got it totally backwards. Companies push features onto users who do not want them in order to make sales through forced upgrades because the old version is discontinued. If people could, no one would ever upgrade anything anymore. Look at how hard MS has to work to force anyone to upgrade. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a new version of Windows, Office, Slack, Zoom, etc. This is also why every…

> You've got it totally backwards. Companies push features onto users who do not want them in order to make sales through forced upgrades because the old version is discontinued.

I think this is more a consumer perspective than a B2B one. I'm thinking about the business case. I.e. businesses purchase software (or has bespoke software developed). Then they pay for fixes/features/improvements. There is often a direct communication between the buyer and the developer (whether it's off-the shelf, inhouse or made to spec). I'm in this business and the dialog is very short "great work adding feature A. We want feature B too now. And oh the users say the software is also a bit slow can you make it go faster? Me: do you want feature B or faster first? Them (always) oh feature B. That saves us man-weeks every month". Then that goes on for feature C, D, E, ...Z.

In this case, I don't know how frustrated the users are, because the customer is not the user - it's the users' managers.

In the consumer space, the user is usually the buyer. That's one huge difference. You can choose the software that frustrates you the least, perhaps the leanest one, and instead have to do a few manual steps (e.g. choose vscode over vs, which means less bloated software but also many fewer features).

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

#379

Post by tossandthrow » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

queuebert wrote: post #204

bob1029 wrote: post #46

We've been able to run order matching engines for entire exchanges on a single thread for over a decade by this point. I think this specific class of computational power - strictly serialized transaction processing - has not grown at the same rate as other metrics would suggest. Adding 31 additional cores doesn't make the order matching engine go any faster (it could only go slower). If your product is handling fewer…

Why can you not match orders in parallel using logarithmic reduction, the same way you would sort in parallel? Is it that there is not enough other computation being done other than sorting by time and price?

I think it is the temporal aspect of order matching - for exchanges it is an inherently serial process.

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

#380

Post by slowmovintarget » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #56

slowmovintarget wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think we are gonna go there. Talking is cumbersome. There's a reason, besides social anxiety that people prefer to use self-checkout and electronically order fastfood. There are easier ways to do a lot of things than with words. I'd bet on maybe ad hoc ai designed ui-s you click but have a voice search when you are confused about something.

Search is being replaced by LLM chat. Agent workflows are going to get us to a place where people can rally software to their own purposes. At that point, they don't have to interact with the web front end, they can interact with their own personal front-end that is able to navigate your backend.

Today a website is easier. But just like there's a very large percentage of people doing a great many things from their phone instead of tying themselves to a full-blown personal computer, there will be an increasing number of people who send their agents off to get things done. In that scenario, the user interface is further up the stack than a browser, if there's a browser as typically understood in the stack at all.