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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

#391

Post by mike_hearn »

mieubrisse wrote: post #347
dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?

They focused heavily on the quality of things you can see, i.e. slick visuals, high build quality, even fancy cardboard boxes.

Their software quality itself is about average for the tech industry. It's not bad, but not amazing either. It's sufficient for the task and better than their primary competitor (Windows). But, their UI quality is much higher, and that's what people can check quickly with their own eyes and fingers in a shop.

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

#392

Post by criticalfault »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #2

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.

You have just explained how enshitification works.

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

#393

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dsr_ wrote: post #357
rpnx wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality. It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers. It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains…

The Lemon Market exists specifically when customers cannot tell, prior to receipt and usage, whether they are buying high quality or low quality.

Wow, that's actually a good argument for some kind of trial or freemium setup. Interesting.

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

#394

Post by bpshaver »

KapKap66 wrote: post #387
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…

There's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerate…

Sure, but there's not limit to what people can decide to care about. There will always be people who want more speed and less latency, but the question is: are they right to do so?

I'm with the person you're responding. I use the regular suite of applications and websites on my 2021 M1 Macbook. Things seem to load just fine.

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

#395

Post by bigstrat2003 »

fdr wrote: post #306

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 la…

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

I would far, far rather have Windows-only software that is performant than the Electron slop we get today. With Wine there's a decent chance I could run it on Linux anyway, whereas Electron software is shit no matter the platform.

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

#396

Post by naasking »

mike_hearn wrote: post #388
naasking wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improv…

Hm, you could do that quite easily but there isn't much juice to be squeezed from runtime selected data structures. Set with O(1) insert: var set = new HashSet (); Done. Don't need any fancy support for that. Or if you want to load from a database, using the repository pattern and Kotlin this time instead of Java: @JdbcRepository(dialect = ANSI) interface EmployeeQueries : CrudRepository { fun findByCountryAndGender(…

> Hm, you could do that quite easily but there isn't much juice to be squeezed from runtime selected data structures. Set with O(1) insert:

But now you've hard-coded this selection, why can't the performance characteristics also be easily parameterized and combined, eg. insert is O(1), delete is O(log(n)), or by defining indexes in SQL which can be changed at any time at runtime? Or maybe the performance characteristics can be inferred from the types of queries run on a collection elsewhere in the code.

> That would turn into an efficient SQL query that does a WHERE ... AND ... clause.

For a database you have to manually construct, with a schema you have to manually and poorly to an object model match, using a library or framework you have to painstakingly select from how many options?

You're still stuck in this mentality that you have to assemble a set of distinct tools to get a viable development environment for most general purpose programming, which is not what I'm talking about. Imagine the relational model built-in to the language, where you could parametrically specify whether collections need certain efficient operations, whether collections need to be durable, or atomically updatable, etc.

There's a whole space of possible languages that have relational or other data models built-in that would eliminate a lot of problems we have with standard programming.

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

#397

Post by xnorswap »

vel0city wrote: post #327
xnorswap wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It vastly depends on what software you're forced to use. Here's some software I use all the time, which feels horribly slow, even on a new laptop: Slack. Switching channels on slack, even when you've just switched so it's all cached, is painfully slow. I don't know if they build in a 200ms or so delay deliberately to mask when it's not cached, or whether it's some background rendering, or what it is, but it just feel…

I don't get any kind of spinner on Outlook opening emails. Especially emails which are pure text or only lightly stylized open instantly. Even emails with calendar invites load really fast, I don't see any kind of spinner graphic at all. Running latest Outlook on Windows 11, currently >1k emails in my Inbox folder, on an 11th gen i5, while also on a Teams call a ton of other things active on my machine. This is also…

I guess I shall screen record it, this is new-ish windows 11 laptop.

( This might also be a "new outlook" vs "out outlook" thing? )

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

#398

Post by naasking »

bflesch wrote: post #328
naasking wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improv…

Your argument makes sense. I guess now it's your time to shine and to be the change you want to see in the world.

I wish I had the time... always "some day"...

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

#399

Post by pona-a »

pydry wrote: post #39
_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.

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…

Did people make this exchange or did __the market__? I feel like we're assigning a lot of intention to a self-accelerating process.

You add a new layer of indirection to fix that one problem on the previous layer, and repeat it ad infinitum until everyone is complaining about having too many layers of indirection, yet nobody can avoid interacting with them, so the only short-term solution is a yet another abstraction.

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