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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

#801

Post by mrguyorama »

didgetmaster wrote: post #545
dahart wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia page for Market for Lemons more or less summarizes it as a condition of defective products caused by information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection, which can lead to market collapse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The Market for Lemons idea seems like it has merit in general but is too strong and too binary to apply broadly, that’s where I was headed with the suggesti…

Once upon a time, the price of a product was often a good indicator of its quality. If you saw two products side by side on the shelf and one was more expensive, then you might assume that it was less likely to break or wear out soon. Now it seems that the price has very little to do with quality. Cheaply made products might be priced higher just to give the appearance of quality. Even well known brands will cut corn…

>Once upon a time, the price of a product was often a good indicator of its quality. If you saw two products side by side on the shelf and one was more expensive, then you might assume that it was less likely to break or wear out soon.

I don't think this has ever actually been true. There was plenty of expensive snake oil in 1800s America. There were plenty of expensive shit things. There always has been. Christ, that ancient tablet of that guy complaining about copper quality is one of the oldest written documents we have, and I can assure you that copper was not cheap.

Price has never been a signal of quality because it wouldn't make any sense. The price is set by the seller. That's the only signal it can convey; what the seller expects you to pay. There's never been a perfectly efficient market where a seller is forced to set the price of something to match it's value or quality. There has always been information asymmetry. There has always been a difficulty in finding out whether that thing for sale is actually worth it.

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

#802

Post by yifanl »

astrange wrote: post #634
yifanl wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.

That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once. The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link…

> That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning.

Should I draw from this conclusion that modern software is not designed to run on modern hardware?

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

#803

Post by ngneer »

fsflover wrote: post #789
ngneer wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate, compare their popularity. You may have fallen prey to the base rate fallacy.

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/are-we-safe-because-we-re-a-rel... tl;dr: Qubes security relies on Xen, which is quite popular. But even Xen has more vulnerabilities than Qubes thanks to a clever design: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#statistics .

Touché

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

#804

Post by mrguyorama »

mieubrisse wrote: post #347
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…

I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?

Apple's supposed high quality is mostly marketing.

They have constant, frequent, hardware design issues that they just don't even acknowledge and somehow people still treat their hardware as "high quality"

They once shipped a phone that lost signal if you held it with your hand. Their solution, after insisting that people hold their phone differently, was cheap plastic cases.

They shipped a new keyboard that would fail after singular grains of dust got into it, in order to save a millimeter of thickness on a product that was already quite thin. In order to repair or replace the keyboard, you have to replace half of the whole machine, for half the price of a brand new laptop.

Apple does not spend real effort on hardware quality.

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

#805

Post by pwiecz »

treszkai wrote: post #795
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…

> Smart Laundry with LG's AI Washing Machines: Efficient Spin Cycles & Beyond Finally, the perfect example of AI-washing.

Reminds me of a "Washing Machine Trategy" by Stanisław Lem. A short story that may be a perfect parabole of the today's AI bubble.

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

#806

Post by panick21_ »

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 argument that a buyer can't verify quality is simply false. Specially if the cost of something is large. And for lots of things, such verification isn't that hard.

The Market for Lemons story is about a complex thing that most people don't understand and is to low value. But even that paper misses many real world solution people have found for this.

> The user cannot differentiate between sophisticated machine learning applications and a washing machine spin cycle calling itself AI.

Why then did people pay for ChatGPT when Google claimed it had something better? Because people quickly figured out that Google solution wasn't better.

Its easy to share results, its easy to look up benchmarks.

The claim that anything that claims its AI will automatically be able to demand some absurd prices is simply not true. At best people just slap AI on everything and its as if everybody stands up in a theater, nobody is better off.

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

#807

Post by panick21_ »

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…

This misses a huge part of the story, increase in productive, means a large economy, means more efficient use of resources, means compensation goes up over time. If you want to live the live of somebody that did 40h a week 40 years ago and only work 20h, you can already have most of that, and still have many options somebody back then didn't have that is virtually free.

The actual realization is that most people simple rather work 40h a week (or more) and spend their money on whatever they want to spend their money on.

Specially many of us here, can do so easily. I personally work 80% and could reduce it further if my goal was maximum leisure.

By far the biggest reason it doesn't feel that way, is that housing polices in most of the Western world have been utterly and completely braindead. That and the ever increasing cost of health care as people get ever older and older.

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

#808

Post by panick21_ »

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…

This is a massive oversimplification of the Windows and OS/2 story. Anybody that has studied this understands that it wasn't just marketing. I can't actually believe that anybody who has read deeply about this believes it was just marketing.

And its also a cherry picked example. There are so many counter-examples, how Sun out-competed HP, IBM, Appollo and DEC. Or how AMD in the last 10 years out-competed Intel, sure its all marketing. I could go on with 100s of examples just in computer history.

Marketing is clearly an important aspect in business, nobody denies that. But there are many other things that are important as well. You can have the best marketing in the world, if you fuck up your production and your supply chain, your company is toast. You can have the best marketing in the world, if your product sucks, people will reject it (see the Blackbarry Strom as an nice example). You can have the best marketing in the world, if your finance people fuck up, the company might go to shit anyway.

Anybody that reaches for simple explanations like 'marketing always wins' is just talking nonsense.

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

#809

Post by astrange »

yifanl wrote: post #802
astrange wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once. The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link…

> That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Should I draw from this conclusion that modern software is not designed to run on modern hardware?

Indeed it isn't. That's hard when everything is fighting against it.

Nintendo can do it because they only have one hardware target (unlike multiplatform games) and they can spend an extra year or two doing performance work.

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

#810

Post by naasking »

rjbwork wrote: post #797
naasking wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LINQ is on the right track but doesn't quite go far enough with query composition. For instance, you can't "unquote" a query within another query (although I believe there is a library that tries to add this). EF code-first is also on the right track, but the fluent and attribute mapping are awkward, foreign key associations often have to be unpacked directly as value type keys, there's no smooth transition between i…

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "unquote"? I've not heard this term and I can't find any relevant info from search.

In F# and MetaOCaml it's called splicing:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...

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