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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

#561

Post by vel0city »

ndriscoll wrote: post #560
vel0city wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the drawing an icon to a screen that takes the half second, it's querying out to hardware on driver stacks designed for PCI WiFi adapters from the XP era along with all the other driver statuses. It's like how Wi-Fi drivers would cause lag from querying their status, lots of poorly designed drivers and archaic frameworks for them to plug in. And I doubt any hardware you had when Wolfenstein:ET came out rende…

You don't need to query the hardware to know the network interface is up. A higher level of the stack already knows that along with info like addresses, routes, DNS servers, etc. IIRC it ran at 76 fps (higher than monitor refresh, one of the locally optimal frame rates for move speed/trick jumps) for me back then on something like an GeForce FX 5200? As long as you had a dedicated GPU it could hit 60 just fine. I thi…

It's not just showing "is the interface up", it's showing current signal strength, showing current ssid, showing results from the recent poll of stations, etc.

And then doing the same for Bluetooth.

And then doing the same for screen rotation and rotation lock settings. And sound settings, And then another set of settings. And another set of settings. All from different places of the system configuration while still having the backwards compatibility of all those old systems.

It's not a slowness on painting it. It can do that at screen refresh rates no problem. It's a question of querying all these old systems which often result in actual driver queries to get the information.

43fps? Sure sounds slow to me. Why not 333fps on that hardware? So bloated, so slow.

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

#562

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Consider UX:

Click the link and contemplate while X loads. First, the black background. Next it spends a while and you're ready to celebrate! Nope, it was loading the loading spinner. Then the pieces of the page start to appear. A few more seconds pass while the page is redrawn with the right fonts; only then can you actually scroll the page.

Having had some time to question your sanity for clicking, you're grateful to finally see what you came to see. So you dwell 10x as long, staring at a loaded page and contemplating the tweet. You dwell longer to scroll and look at the replies.

How long were you willing to wait for data you REALLY care about? 10-30 seconds; if it's important enough you'll wait even longer.

Software is as fast as it needs to be to be useful to humans. Computer speed doesn't matter.

If the computer goes too fast it may even be suspected of trickery.

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

#563

Post by ndriscoll »

vel0city wrote: post #561
ndriscoll wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to query the hardware to know the network interface is up. A higher level of the stack already knows that along with info like addresses, routes, DNS servers, etc. IIRC it ran at 76 fps (higher than monitor refresh, one of the locally optimal frame rates for move speed/trick jumps) for me back then on something like an GeForce FX 5200? As long as you had a dedicated GPU it could hit 60 just fine. I thi…

It's not just showing "is the interface up", it's showing current signal strength, showing current ssid, showing results from the recent poll of stations, etc. And then doing the same for Bluetooth. And then doing the same for screen rotation and rotation lock settings. And sound settings, And then another set of settings. And another set of settings. All from different places of the system configuration while still…

You're just listing mechanisms for how it might be slow, but that doesn't really make it sensible. Why would the OS query hardware for something like screen rotation or volume? It knows these things. They don't randomly change. It also knows the SSID it's connected to and the results of the last poll (which it continuously does to see if it should move).

And yes it should cache that info. We're talking bytes. Less than 0.0001% of the available memory.

Things were different on old hardware because old hardware was over 1000x slower. On modern hardware, you should expect everything to be instantaneous.

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

#566

Post by peatmoss »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #297
titzer wrote: post #12

I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabi…

I think on year 2001 GHz CPU should be a performance benchmark that every piece of basic non-high performance software should execute acceptably on. This is kind of been a disappointment to me of AI when I've tried it. This has kind of been a disappointment to me of AI when I've tried it. Llm should be able to Port things. It should be able to rewrite things with the same interface. It should be able to translate fro…

I've pondered this myself without digging into the specifics. The phrase "sufficiently smart compiler" sticks in my head.

Shower thoughts include whether there are languages that have features, other than through their popularity and representation in training corpuses, help us get from natural language to efficient code?

I was recently playing around with a digital audio workstation (DAW) software package called Reaper that honestly surprised me with its feature set, portability (Linux, macOS, Windows), snappiness etc. The whole download was ~12 megabytes. It felt like a total throwback to the 1990s in a good way.

It feels like AI should be able to help us get back to small snappy software, and in so doing maybe "pay its own way" with respect to CPU and energy requirements. Spending compute cycles to optimize software deployed millions of times seems intuitively like a good bargain.

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

#567

Post by boznz »

dahart wrote: post #217
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 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…

>lower costs, and therefore lower quality,

Many high-quality open-source designs suggest this is a false premise, and as a developer who writes high-quality and reliable software for much much lower rates than most, cost should not be seen as a reliable indicator of quality.

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

#568

Post by vel0city »

ndriscoll wrote: post #563
vel0city wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just showing "is the interface up", it's showing current signal strength, showing current ssid, showing results from the recent poll of stations, etc. And then doing the same for Bluetooth. And then doing the same for screen rotation and rotation lock settings. And sound settings, And then another set of settings. And another set of settings. All from different places of the system configuration while still…

You're just listing mechanisms for how it might be slow, but that doesn't really make it sensible. Why would the OS query hardware for something like screen rotation or volume? It knows these things . They don't randomly change. It also knows the SSID it's connected to and the results of the last poll (which it continuously does to see if it should move). And yes it should cache that info. We're talking bytes. Less t…

And yet doing an ipconfig or netsh wlan show interfaces isn't always instantaneous depending on your hardware and the rest of your configuration. I can't tell you what all it's actually doing under the hood, but I've definitely seen variations of performance on different hardware.

Sometimes the devices and drivers just suck. Sometimes it's not the software's fault it's running at 43fps.

I'm hitting the little quick settings area on my exceptionally cheap and old personal laptop. I haven't experienced that slowness once. Once again I imagine the other stuff running interrupting all the OS calls and what not loading this information causes it to be slow.

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

#569

Post by genewitch »

maccard wrote: post #525
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive? Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in Also keep in mind that des…

> You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then. 11 years ago I put in a ticket to slack asking them about their resource usage. Their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE and compilers and causing heap space issues with visual studio. 1…

Photoshop for windows 3.11 loads in a couple seconds on a 100mhz pentium. Checked two days ago.

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

#570

Post by jimbokun »

worik wrote: post #497
jimbokun wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the introduction of insurance for covering the cost of a security breach, suddenly managers have an understanding of the value of at least the security aspect of software quality. As it impacts their premiums.

I really hope so. But I do not have much faith in insurance companies. I have seen what they have done to worker safety, made it a minefield for workers, a box ticking exercise for bosses, and done very little for worker safety. What works for worker safety is regulation. I am afraid the same will be true for software.

The regulations are the reason the insurance policies exist. Otherwise, corporations would just ignore or cover up any breaches.
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