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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

#621

Post by Cthulhu_ »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #390
KapKap66 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I fear that such comments are similar to the old 'a monster cable makes my digital audio sound more mellow!' The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful.

Modern operating systems run at 120 or 144 hz screen refresh rates nowadays, I don't know if you're used to it yet but try and go back to 60, it should be pretty obivous when you move your mouse.

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

#622

Post by TFYS »

rapsey wrote: post #617
TFYS wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you can't ignore the negative sides like environmental destruction and wealth and power concentration. Just because we haven't yet invented a system that produces a good standard of living without these negative side effects doesn't mean it can't be done. But we aren't even trying, because the ones benefiting from this system the most, and have the most power, have no incentive to do so.

Those are all results of political corruption, not capitalism. It is the government's job to set the ground rules for the economy.

Political corruption is a consequence of capitalism. Taking over the political system provides a huge competitive advantage, so any entity rich enough to influence it has an incentive to do so in an competition based economy that incentivizes growth.

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

#623

Post by dragandj »

naasking wrote: post #299
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…

> 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…

Clojure, friend. Clojure.

Other functional languages, too, but Clojure. You get exactly this, minus all the 's ;'s and other irregularities, and minus all the verbosity...

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

#624

Post by makeitdouble »

bjourne wrote: post #411
xondono wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you’re self selecting for a company that has high engineering costs, big fat margins to accommodate expenses like additional hardware, and lots of projects for engineers to work on. The evaluation needs to happen in the margins, even if it saves pennies/year on the dollar, it’s best to have those engineers doing that than have them idling. The problem is that almost no one is doing it, because the way we make…

I think the parent's point is that if Google with millions of servers can't make performance optimization worthwhile, then it is very unlikely that a smaller company can. If salaries dominate over compute costs, then minimizing the latter at the expense of the former is counterproductive. > The evaluation needs to happen in the margins, even if it saves pennies/year on the dollar, it’s best to have those engineers do…

> it is very unlikely that a smaller company can.

I think it's the reverse: a small company doesn't have the liquidity, buying power or ability to convert more resource into more money like Google.

And of course a lot of small companies will be paying Google with a fat margin to use their cloud.

Getting by with less resources, or even on-premise reduced hardware will be a way bigger win. That's why they'll pay a DBA full time to optimize their database needs to reduce costs 2 to 3x the salary. Or have full team of infra guys mostly dealing with SRE and performance.

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

#625

Post by TFYS »

chii wrote: post #616
TFYS wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think regulations are enough. They're just a band-aid on the gaping wound that is a capitalist, market based economy. No matter what regulations you make, some companies and individuals become winners and over time will grow rich enough to influence the government and the regulations. We need a better economic system, one that does not have these problems built in.

> We need a better economic system none has been found. The command economy is inefficient, and prone to corruption. informal/barter systems are too small in scale and does not produce sufficient amounts to make the type of abundant lifestyle we enjoy today possible. As the saying goes - free market capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.

We haven't really been trying to find such a system. The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge, so what was once impossible might now be possible if we put some effort into it.

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

#626

Post by Lio »

bruce511 wrote: post #452
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…

You're on the right track, but missing an important aspect. In most cases the company making the inferior product didn't spend less. But they did spend differently. As in, they spent a lot on marketing. You were focused on quality, and hoped for viral word of mouth marketing. Your competitors spent the same as you, but half their budget went to marketing. Since people buy what they know, they won. Back in the day MS…

Pure marketing doesn’t always win. There are counter examples.

Famously Toyota beat many companies that were basing their strategy on marketing rather than quality.

They were able to use quality as part of their marketing.

My father in law worked in a car showroom and talks about when they first installed carpet there.

No one did that previously. The subtle point to customers being that Toyotas didn’t leak oil.

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

#627

Post by mint2 »

kortilla wrote: post #577
diputsmonro wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a…

Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood. Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that the…

Efficiency related regulation like the energy star is THE reason why companies started caring.

Same with low flush toilets. I vaguely remember the initial ones had issues, but tbh less than the older use a ton of water toilets my family had before that were also super clog prone. Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time a low flush toilet clogged. Massive water saving that took regulation.

Efficiency regulations may not be directly written in blood, instead they are built on costly mountains of unaddressed waste.

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

#628

Post by maccard »

genewitch wrote: post #619
maccard wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was 30 years ago, not 10.

"early 2000s" was at least 22 years ago, as well. Sorry if this ruins your night. 100mhz 1994 vs 1000mhz in 2000, that's the only parallel i was drawing. 10x faster yet somehow adobe...

Ah sorry - I’m in my mid 30s so my early pc experiences as a “power user” were win XP, by which point photoshop had already bolted on the kitchen sink and autodesk required a blood sacrifice to start up.

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

#629

Post by Mashimo »

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…

Odd, I tested two news sides (tagesschau.de and bbc.com) and both load in 1 - 2 seconds. Airbnb in about 4 - 6 seconds though. My reddit never gets stuck, or if it does it's on all tabs because something goes wrong on their end.

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

#630

Post by astrobe_ »

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…

> People want cheap

There is an exception: luxury goods. Some are expensive, but people don't mind them being overpriced because e.g. they are social status symbols. Is there such a thing like "luxury software"? I think Apple sort of has this reputation.

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