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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

#581

Post by LordGrignard »

mtalantikite wrote: post #335
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…

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…

To he blunt

this website looks like a scam website redirecter the one where you have to click on 49 ads and wait for 3 days before you get to your link the video playing immediately makes me think that's a Google ad unrelated to what the website is about the different font styles reminds me of the middle school HTML projects we had to do with each line in a different size and font face to prove that we know how to use and . All its missing is a jokerman font

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

#582

Post by spinarrets »

nine_k wrote: post #516
jcadam wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just software -- My wife owns a restaurant. Operating a restaurant you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success. We're still trying to figure out the marketing. I'm convinced the high failure rate of restaurants is due largely to founders who know how to make good food and think their culinary skills plus word-of-mouth will get them sales.

My wife ran a restaurant that was relatively successful due to the quality of its food and service. She was able to establish it as an upper-tier experience, by both some word of mouth, but also by catering to right events, taking part in shows, and otherwise influencing the influencers of the town, without any massive ad campaigns. As a result, there were many praises in the restaurant's visitor book, left by people…

If it paid for people's lives and sustained itself, that sounds like a huge success to me. There's a part of me that thinks, maybe we'd all be better off if we set the bar for success of a business at "sustains the lives of the people who work there and itself is sustainable."

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

#583

Post by musicale »

xg15 wrote: post #534
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…

This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda. Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the ra…

> 20 hour workweek etc

We have that already. It's called part-time jobs. Usually they don't pay as much as full-time jobs, provide no health insurance or other benefits, etc.

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

#584

Post by quantadev »

Developers over 50ish (like me) grew up at a time when CPU performance and memory constraints affected every application. So you had to always be smart about doing things efficiently with both CPU and memory.

Younger developers have machines that are so fast they can be lazy with all algorithms and do everything 'brute force'. Like searching thru an array every time when a hashmap would've been 10x faster. Or using all kinds of "list.find().filter().any().every()" chaining nonsense, when it's often smarter to do ONE loop, and inside that loop do a bunch of different things.

So younger devs only optimize once they NOTICE the code running slow. That means they're ALWAYS right on the edge of overloading the CPU, just thru bad coding. In other words, their inefficiencies will always expand to fit available memory, and available clock cycles.

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

#585

Post by mmooss »

jimbokun wrote: post #496
mmooss wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could compete by developing new and better products? Ford isn't selling the same car with lower and lower costs every year. It's really hard to reconcile your comment with Silicon Valley, which was built by often expensive innovation, not by cutting costs. Were Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft successful because they cut costs? The AI companies?

Microsoft yes, the PC market made it very hard for Apple to compete on price. Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies. Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share?

> Apple

Apple's incredible innovation and attention to detail is what made them legendary and successful. Steve Jobs was legendary for both.

> Meta and Alphabet had zero cost products (to consumers) that they leveraged to become near monopolies.

What does zero cost have to do with it? The comment I responded to spoke of cutting the business's costs - quality inputs, labor, etc. - not their customers' costs. Google made a much better search engine than competitors and then better advertising engine; Facebook made the best social media network.

> Aren’t all the AI companies believed to be providing their products below cost for now to grab market share?

Again, what does that have to do with cutting costs rather than innovating to increase profit?

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

#586

Post by mmooss »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #572
mmooss wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success. Doesn't that depend on your audience? Also, what do you mean by quality? Where I live, the best food can lead to big success. New tiny restaurants open, they have great food, eventually they open their big successor (or their second restaurant, third restaurant, etc.).

In my experience, the landlord catches onto the restaurant’s success and starts increasing rents and usually that means cuts in quality.

Interesting; thanks.

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

#587

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

reidrac wrote: post #222
ManlyBread wrote: post #212

I have been thinking about this a lot ever since I played a game called "Balatro". In this game nothing extraordinary happens in terms of computing - some computations get done, some images are shuffled around on the screen, the effects are sparse. The hardware requirements aren't much by modern standards, but still, this game could be ported 1:1 to a machine with Pentium II with a 3dfx graphics card. And yet it dema…

It is made in lua using love2d. That helped the developers and comes with a cost in minimal requirements (even if they aren't much for a game released in 2024).

One way to think about it is: If we were coding all our games in C with no engine, they would run faster, but we would have far fewer games. Fewer games means fewer hits. Odds are Balatro wouldn't have been made, because those developer hours would've been allocated to some other game which wasn't as good.

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

#588

Post by QuarterReptile »

accrual wrote: post #509
Aurornis wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. > On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional I just launched IntelliJ (first time since reboot). Took maybe 2 seconds to the projects screen. I clicked a random project and was editing it 2…

> heavy anti-virus or corporate security scanning that's slowing your computer down more than you expect. Ugh, I personally witnessed this. I would wait to take my break until I knew the unavoidable, unkillable AV scans had started and would peg my CPU at 100%. I wonder how many human and energy resources are wasted checking for non-existant viruses on corp hardware.

I used to think that was the worst, but then my org introduced me to pegging HDD write at 100% for half an hour at a time. My dad likes to talk about how he used to turn on the computer, then go get coffee; in my case it was more like turn on machine, go for a run, shower, check back, coffee, and finally... maybe.

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

#589

Post by andrehacker »

cheema33 wrote: post #481
nostrademons wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic. The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which…

> Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." This. Per your example, this is exactly what it was like when most of us first used Google after having used AltaVista for a few years. Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was…

>> Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.

Except that they didn't: they bought a company that had been building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition (Where 2 Technologies), then they also bought Keyhole which became Google Earth.

Incidentally they also bought, not built, Youtube .. and Android.

So, yes, they had a good nose for "experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that.""

They arguably did do a good job investing their resources but it was mostly in buying, not building.

.. and they are good at marketing :)

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

#590

Post by amy_petrik »

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…

> 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.

Relevant apocrypha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ

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