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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

#701

Post by CelestialMystic »

vel0city wrote: post #313
aloha2436 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers. On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and mo…

It's probably more so that any corporate Windows box has dozens of extra security and metrics agents interrupting and blocking every network request and file open and OS syscall installed by IT teams while the Macs have some very basic MDM profile applied.

This is exactly it. My Debian Install on older hardware than my work machine is relatively snappy. The real killer is the Windows Defender Scans once a week. 20-30% CPU usage for the entire morning because it is trying to scan some CDK.OUT directory (if I delete the directory, the scan doesn't take nearly as long).

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

#702

Post by theshackleford »

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’ve tried three whole things and are all out of ideas!

Guess it’ll just have to be this way forever and ever.

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

#704

Post by dijit »

vel0city wrote: post #568
ndriscoll wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I don't know what operating system you're talking about, but the bottleneck on my linux machine for asking for interfaces is the fact that stdout is write blocking.

I routinely have shy of 100 network interfaces active and `ip a` is able to query everything in nanoseconds.

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

#705

Post by runlaszlorun »

BrenBarn wrote: post #592
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 AI label itself commands a price premium. These days I feel like I'd be willing to pay more for a product that explicitly disavowed AI. I mean, that's vulnerable to the same kind of marketing shenanigans, but still. :-)

Ha! You're totally right.

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

#707

Post by mtalantikite »

kevinsync wrote: post #580
codethief wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [1] https://studiotanais.com/ First, honest impression: At least on my phone (Android/Chromium) the typography and style of the website don't quite match that "high quality & expensive ingredients" vibe the parfums are supposed to convey. The banners (3 at once on the very first screen, one of them animated!), italic text, varying font sizes, and janky video header would be rather off-putting to me. Maybe it's also…

I'm hesitant to reply because it sounds pejorative and snarky, and I will be downvoted, but... you are not the target market for this. End of story. This design is very 2025 and the rules you're judging by have long-since been thrown out the window. Most brands run on Shopify now, marketing is via myriad social channels in ways that feel insane and unintuitive, aesthetics are all over the map. What's old is new is ol…

Yeah, her customer is gen z or millennial women and queer men. It doesn't look like where I shop, but I'm not the target demo. A lot of the beauty and fragrance world looks like this these days, particularly as you go down towards gen z.

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

#708

Post by kbolino »

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?

And so we see the real outcome, on this axis, of these kinds of regulations, is to increase the quality gradient. A crappy old barebones water-hungry dishwasher with a phosphate-containing detergent worked just fine for me in an old apartment. Its comparably priced brand-new lower-water equivalent in a new house with phosphate-free detergent works awfully. Now you need a Bosch washer and premium detergent and so on. These exist and by all accounts are great. So we can say that the regulations didn't cause the quality problem, they just shifted the market.

Compliance with the regulations can be done both by the capable and the incapable, but caveat emptor rears its ugly head, and that assumes the end user is the buyer (right now, I'm renting). There's often quite a price gap between good enough and terrible too. A lot of people end up stuck with the crap and little recourse.

The government cares that your dishwasher uses less water and the detergent doesn't put phosphate into the water. It doesn't care that your dishwasher actually works well. We can layer more regulations to fix that problem too, but they will make things cost more, and they will require more expensive and competent civil servants to enforce, and so on. And I don't see any offer in that arrangement to replace my existing dishwasher, which is now just a sunk cost piece of future e-waste that neither the government nor the manufacturer have been made responsible for.

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

#709

Post by topaz0 »

voidspark wrote: post #677
scotty79 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 1980 maybe. But since 2005 it increased maybe 5x and even that's generous. And that's half of the time that passed and two decades. https://youtu.be/m7PVZixO35c?si=px2QKP9-80hDV8Ui

As the other guy said, top of the line CPUs today are roughly ~100x faster than 20 years ago. A single core is ~10x faster (in terms of instructions per second) and we have ~10x the number of cores.

And the memory quantity, memory speed, disk speed are also vastly higher now than 20 years ago.

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

#710

Post by wavemode »

caseyy wrote: post #135
armchairhacker wrote: post #108

Is there or could we make an iPhone-like that runs 100x slower than conventional phones but uses much less energy, so it powers itself on solar? It would be good for the environment and useful in survival situations. Or could we make a phone that runs 100x slower but is much cheaper? If it also runs on solar it would be useful in third-world countries. Processors are more than fast enough for most tasks nowadays; mor…

We have much hardware on the secondary market (resale) that's only 2-3x slower than pristine new primary market devices. It is cheap, it is reuse, and it helps people save in a hyper-consumerist society. The common complaint is that it doesn't run bloated software anymore. And I don't think we can make non-bloated software for a variety of reasons. As a video game developer, I can add some perspective (N=1 if you wil…

> Ultimately, I don't know who or what is the culprit of all this. The market demands cheap software. Games used to cost up to $120 in the 90s, which is $250 today. A common price point for good quality games was $80, which is $170 today. But the gamers absolutely decry any game price increases beyond $60. So the industry has no option but to look at every cost saving, including passing the cost onto the buyer through hardware upgrades.

Producing games doesn't cost anything on a per-unit basis. That's not at all the reason for low quality.

Games could cost $1000 per copy and big game studios (who have investors to worry about) would still release buggy slow games, because they are still going to be under pressure to get the game done by Christmas.

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