With RAM becoming expensive, developers will have no choice but to make memory efficient software.
There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
301–310 of 530 posts
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#302I understand now that most software is slow because of co-tenancy reasons requiring controlling resources or simply because they're safely insulated from competition. e.g. GitHub is the former: you can give yourself a git host and CI/CD system that is much higher quality by yourself since you're probably not using its social features. I think things like Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the latter. Once you cou…
> Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the opposite. Once you could do it and start typing but nowadays it needs to render the animation There is no technical reason that animation should take that long. Someone said, "good enough" and let it be visibly slow. The reasons for that could be anything, including non-performant code in dependencies, written by other people. But it just does not take much computing power…
Every visible UI animation is visibly slow. I've used MacOS computers before, and despite having hardware that benchmarks faster, they all feel slower than my old Linux desktop. The biggest reason for this is the animations.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI has 4,500 employees and a post-money valuation of $852 billion at its last funding round. You'd think they could get someone who specialises in writing MacOS apps to write their MacOS app.
No. They want the AI to do it.
So have the AI build a hybrid Crux, Windows and web app with shared Rust base.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#304Slow software is solved problem. Just give all developers Celeron J3455.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#305I've been using computers for 4 decades. They have gotten no faster. The nuclear plant computer system we built in 1989 had to present selected screens in 1 second. I don't think any apps I use today can do that.
It’s all incentives. I’ve worked on web projects where the people in charge cared about performance. It’s easy to get sub second speeds if you start with that goal. I’ve also worked on projects where the people in charge added 1mb client-side mapping libraries to render a static map and ignored my push back. Those website were slow
This. The author talks about the fact that now they can try far more experimental optimizations than they could before. But they already had an architecture with efficiency in mind, and were trying optimizations, to begin with. The kind of company that ships web UIs that take 5-10s to do some action 1) don't care or aren't capable of good architecture 2) don't care or aren't capable of doing the simplest low-hanging optimizations.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#306Here's this boiled down: > A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective This is superoptimization. We've known this since the 80s (Massalin, STOKE is more recent: https://github.com/StanfordPL/stoke ) The only novelty is that the proposer is now way better with LMs. Further, there's a large number of reasons for software writ…
> iykyk A story. I have a friend, who is - like me - interested in the CRDT / collaborative editing space. He asked ChatGPT to write him a CRDT. Then he grabbed every good CRDT implementation, and asked chatgpt to benchmark and optimise his CRDT, using tricks and techniques from existing hand-optimised CRDTs. He got massive performance gains by doing this - which is really interesting! I think it helped that he had a…
Small OT:
> Maybe I should document what I did!
Please do!
Me and a bunch of friends worked on a project that used diamond-types as the backing CRDT engine. It does indeed go brrrr. But damn, it took way too long to reconstruct what it was doing (we needed some more fine grained knobs, so we were playing with the frontier directly). We eventually moved out to something a bit better documented, which was a real pity. I really liked the general architecture and simplicity (of the text-only based version at least).
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> iykyk A story. I have a friend, who is - like me - interested in the CRDT / collaborative editing space. He asked ChatGPT to write him a CRDT. Then he grabbed every good CRDT implementation, and asked chatgpt to benchmark and optimise his CRDT, using tricks and techniques from existing hand-optimised CRDTs. He got massive performance gains by doing this - which is really interesting! I think it helped that he had a…
Hi Joseph, A story for a story. I had my CRDT implementation in libdog, which does per-token CRDT weave/diff/merge over a DAG of git blobs. It was written by Claude 4.8 I believe, in several iterations. It was, as you may guess, a piece of neuro-slop that passed the tests by some miracle. Once I had some time to look into it, I used a trick: I supplied it with my article on Chronofolds and some helpful kicks in the b…
> It has no sense of direction of its own maybe. Once you know what you are doing, you can ride it fine. If not, it makes a misstep so later things go haywire, and you are left guessing why.
This is a perfect description. Last week I asked claude opus to get AAC audio working in davinci resolve on linux. It managed to add aac in mov and mp4 containers very quickly. But mkv was another matter. For mkv files, resolve doesn't use ffmpeg. Instead, it has its own parser. Claude got totally lost down a weird rabbit hole trying to add aac support to resolve's mkv code. It was really struggling. Claude even knew it was lost - it kept telling me we should cut our losses and I should just release aac support without mkv.
Eventually I gave it the executable for davinci resolve on mac, which has aac support. Claude found the corresponding part of the code for the mac version and used it as a reference. Turns out, claude had made some much earlier mistake. Just like you said, it was going down a wrong path. Then it couldn't stop itself, and it kept making it worse.
Using the mac version of the binary as a reference, claude figured out how to get everything working very quickly. But - I'm left wondering. Maybe my real mistake was using Opus and not Fable. I wonder if fable would have been smart enough to figure out the mistake and course-correct.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> iykyk A story. I have a friend, who is - like me - interested in the CRDT / collaborative editing space. He asked ChatGPT to write him a CRDT. Then he grabbed every good CRDT implementation, and asked chatgpt to benchmark and optimise his CRDT, using tricks and techniques from existing hand-optimised CRDTs. He got massive performance gains by doing this - which is really interesting! I think it helped that he had a…
Small OT: > Maybe I should document what I did! Please do! Me and a bunch of friends worked on a project that used diamond-types as the backing CRDT engine. It does indeed go brrrr. But damn, it took way too long to reconstruct what it was doing (we needed some more fine grained knobs, so we were playing with the frontier directly). We eventually moved out to something a bit better documented, which was a real pity.…
Thanks! If I can ask - where did you get stuck?
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but it's also built by people who would rather tinker with AI than build MacOS apps. Intrinsic motivation is very hard to beat, especially in subtler areas like good UX or performant software.
OpenAI has 4,500 employees and a post-money valuation of $852 billion at its last funding round. You'd think they could get someone who specialises in writing MacOS apps to write their MacOS app.
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Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#310One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…
In my experience the main driver of latency is not ping time, but how long the server takes to process the request.
A lot of that is ultimately ping time, too though. Like making a naive number of round trips to a database not on the same machine.