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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

#691

Post by bluGill »

titzer wrote: post #343
bluGill wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bounds checking solves one tiny subset of security. There are hundreds of other subsets that we know how to solve. However these days the majority of the bad attacks are social and no technology is likely to solve them - as more than 10,000 years of history of the same attack has shown. Technology makes the attacks worse because they now scale, but social attacks have been happening for longer than recorded history (…

> However these days the majority of the bad attacks are social You're going to have to cite a source for that. Bounds checking is one mechanism that addresses memory safety vulnerabilities. According to MSFT and CISA[1], nearly 70% of CVEs are due to memory safety problems. You're saying that we shouldn't solve one (very large) part of the (very large) problem because there are other parts of the problem that the so…

CVEs are never written for social attacks. Which is fair what they are trying to do. However attacking the right humans and not software is easier.

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

#692

Post by josefx »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #29
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…

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

> on countless layers of abstractions

Even worse, our bottom most abstraction layers pretend that we are running on a single core system from the 80s. Even Rust got hit by that when it pulled getenv from C instead of creating a modern and safe replacement.

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

#693

Post by CelestialMystic »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #686
ninalanyon wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high. And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

Nap, parent just bought a crappy toilet.

Which is the same as every other toilet.

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

#694

Post by runlaszlorun »

nothercastle wrote: post #389
mtalantikite wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She has, these prices are actually lower than they were before, as most customers don't seem to care about things like concentration. Likely it's just that most aren't that informed about the differences. They'll pay more because it's Chanel or because a European perfumer made it, not because the quality is higher.

The market can’t tell high quality vs not it’s all signaling. Wine has the same problem

Funny, I was about to say the same about wine.

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

#695

Post by CelestialMystic »

ninalanyon wrote: post #671
CelestialMystic wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally had a new toilet put in a couple of years ago. It clogs pretty easily. So you just end up flushing it more, so you don't actually save any water. BTW the same thing happened with vacuum cleaners, you need to hover more to get the same amount of dust out because they capped the power in the EU. My old Vacuum Cleaner I managed to find, literally sticks to the carpet when hoovering.

My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high. And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

> My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high.

I don't believe you and it besides the point because I suspect that it is an expensive vacuum cleaner. I don't want to put any thought into a vacuum cleaner. I just want to buy the most powerful (bonus points if it is really loud), I don't care about it being quiet or efficient. I want the choice to buy something that makes a dent in my electricity bill if I so choose to.

> And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

This reads as "I have some fancy bathroom that costs a lot, if you had this fancy bathroom you wouldn't have issues". I don't want to have to care whether my low flush toilet is some fancy Norwegian brand or not. I just want something to flush the shit down the hole. The old toilets never had the problems the newer ones have. I would rather buy the old design, but I can't. I am denied the choice because someone else I have never met thinks they know better than I.

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

#696

Post by sorcerer-mar »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #546
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Zero effort once you know how to do it” is another way of saying “time and effort.” Congratulations you’ve discovered the value of abstractions! I mean, you’re the one who started this off with the insane claim that there’s no tradeoff, then claimed there are no optimizations available below C++ (i.e. C++ is the absolute most optimized code a person can write). Not my fault you stake out indefensible positions.

Your original comment was saying you have to give up features and development speed to have faster software. I've seen this claim before many times, but it's always from people rationalizing not learning anything beyond the scripting languages they learned when they got in to programming. I explained to you exactly why this is true, and it's because writing fast software just means doing some things slightly differen…

So again, what you're saying is there is a tradeoff. You just think it should be made in a different place than where the vast majority of engineers in the world choose to make it. That's fine! It's probably because they're idiots and you're really smart, but it's obviously not because there's no tradeoff.

> that asm is some sort of necessity for software that runs faster than scripting languages.

It seems you're not tracking the flow of the conversation if you believe this is what I'm saying. I am saying there is always a way to make things faster by sacrificing other things developer productivity, feature sets, talent pool, or distribution methods. You agree with me, it turns out!

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

#697

Post by Ratfor »

cylemons wrote: post #633
jolt42 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Microsoft was also charging Dell for a copy of Windows even if they didn't install it on the PC! And yeah OS/2 was ahead by miles.

How was that legal? They were charging dell for something they weren't using?

It wasn't; see U.S. vs Microsoft.

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

#698

Post by CelestialMystic »

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.

Every Wednesday my PC becomes so slow it is barely usable. It is the Windows Defender scans. I tried doing a hack to put it on a lower priority but my hands are tied by IT.

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

#699

Post by andyferris »

immibis wrote: post #643
rapsey wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaping wound that lifted billions out of powerty and produced the greatest standard of living in human history.

Actually, the system that produced the greatest standard of living increase in human history is whatever Communist China's been doing for the last century.

Not century.

Mao and communism brought famine and death to millions.

The move from that to "capitilism with Chinese characteristics" is what has brought about the greatest standard of living increase in human history.

What they're doing now is a mix of socialism, capitilism and CPP dominance. I'm not an American, but I understand FDR wielded socialism too, and that really catapulted the US towards its golden era.

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

#700

Post by branko_d »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #42
nottorp wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, bloated software passes the costs to the customer and it's hard to evaluate the loss. Except your browser taking 180% of available ram maybe. By the way, the world could also have some bug free software, if anyone could afford to pay for it.

What cost? The hardware is dirt cheap. Programmers aren't cheap. The value of being able to use cheap software on cheap hardware is basically not having to spend a lot of time optimizing things. Time is the one thing that isn't cheap here. So there's a value in shipping something slightly sub optimal sooner rather than something better later. > Except your browser taking 180% of available ram maybe. For most business…

> The hardware is dirt cheap. Programmers aren't cheap.

That may be fine if you can actually improve the user experience by throwing hardware at the problem. But in many (most?) situations, you can't.

Most of the user-facing software is still single-threaded (and will likely remain so for a long time). The difference in single-threaded performance between CPUs in wide usage is maybe 5x (and less than 2x for desktop), while the difference between well optimized and poorly optimized software can be orders of magnitude easily (milliseconds vs seconds).

And if you are bottlenecked by network latency, then the CPU might not even matter.

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