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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

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Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#341

Post by intrasight »

locallost wrote: post #336
intrasight wrote: post #62

I'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.

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.

In my case neither Andy nor Bill was involved. For that project we used Sun 3 workstations which were powered by Motorola 68020 I believe. So a more fair comparison would be that 1988 workstation against a modern Unix workstation. I bet the results would still be that a modern workstation would struggle to update the display in one second.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#342

Post by n4r9 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #314
mccoyb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair for a well-scoped subroutine: what I meant is that if you ask an agent to write a compiler and let it rip for a few days, you are going to be spending a few more days correcting the default behaviors in the distribution, which often do not tend towards hardware-oriented design. To correct those behaviors, you're going to write tools and skills, and that's going to help, but it is still clear that you are…

Yes, say "Build a compiler" will require you to clean up stuff if you leave the agent for days, but not because of the LLM or the quality of the tool, but because you hardly specified anything, so of course it's gonna make assumptions you need to correct. If you instead spend a day writing a proper specification, then ask the agent to spend a week implementing that, you'll need zero tools and skills afterwards to cle…

You're making assumptions; OP made no mention of how detailed their spec was.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#343

Post by Lucasoato »

mawadev wrote: post #330
Lucasoato wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ticket driven development I feel this is so much real. Like if there were two kinds of companies: the ones who deliver, they care about their product but most of all they care about their customers, the managers get their hands dirty and everyone pushes towards the same direction; then there are companies in which you open a ticket and wait for two weeks for something that should take 5 minutes, customers and produ…

I could go on about this all day. Best meme is when you estimate stories for storypoints and then they haggle with you without changing the content of the story. Meanwhile points mean actual time. Then on another side if you haggled down points, you then have more slots for more points. So you end up getting assigned 3x work for the same time. The blame game starts when the sprints elapse lmao

The only ways out of these situations are: a manager that understands what you’re doing; knowing that these “story points” are just indicative and there’s no broken incentive towards gaming them.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#345

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

eaftan wrote: post #148

I've been working on a similar agentically engineered regex project called SafeRE: https://github.com/eaftan/safere https://eaftan.github.io/safere-intro/ Mine is for Java and is intended to be production grade. The first goal is to guarantee linear-time behavior to prevent ReDoS attacks. My collaborator and I have recently been optimizing it to try to surpass native RE2 in performance. It turns out optimizations are…

Looks nice!

One little thing I spotted is you use Boyer Moore Horspool for fast literal search. This is actually not linear in the worst case, although it is almost always sublinear. Worst case would be a literal composed of the same character searching a text of the same character, where it becomes quadratic.

You can actually search strings with character classes using Horspool if you want to, and I have some enhancements to basic Horspool which could maybe help. My library, byteseek [1], implements these.

I also have a much faster algorithm, HashChain [2] which also has a guaranteed linear time version. This was published in the Symposium for Experimental Algorithmics in 2024.

[1] https://github.com/nishihatapalmer/byteseek

[2] https://github.com/nishihatapalmer/HashChain

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#347

Post by vidarh »

ehnto wrote: post #44

One 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…

It's particularly egregious to see the number of apps that will slow to a crawl even for things that works offline if the network is down or slow.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#348

Post by lazide »

alightsoul wrote: post #184
hsn915 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very hard to engineer software with these two constraints at the same time: * Must feel very responsive * Network requests can take up to 500ms end to end

That's why phones and windows use animations. You can also use intersitials related to the product you sell. Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background. For example in the interstitial, use an animation that takes up a small portion of the screen and not just a simple spinner or loading icon. Something more complicated wit…

I absolutely hate this shit, because my goal is actually doing something in a reasonable amount of time.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#349

Post by lazide »

xstas1 wrote: post #241
alightsoul wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canva replaced PowerPoint. Canva is cloud based and PowerPoint is not. There's so many apps that are cloud only so that corporate it no longer has to manage installations and users don't need to ask IT for permission anymore. I think SaaS doesn't really work without the cloud, you could technically do what adobe does but why bother with app distribution and windows' quirks. Cloud based web apps are write once, run an…

I like this example. A lot of people would prefer to use PowerPoint because they can still use their files and templates they made last year even if Microsoft doubles the price of Powerpoint, removes features, discontinues the product, or goes bankrupt.

Difficulty - Microsoft retroactively cancelling lifetime licenses.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#350

Post by lazide »

alightsoul wrote: post #229
ddejohn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background This gave me a chuckle because I personally hate things like watching the browser jump through 50+ redirects when logging into a website.

My bad, I mean the interstitial. Like it should stay for at least a second to not make it jarring. People believe computers need to think so you can't make things too fast either. Not the interstitial and not the app either, to the point you sometimes have to deliberately slow down the app, add latency to make people trust it because it "gives the computer time to think"

Power users absolutely hate this mindset. It’s resulted in Apple animations taking seconds for something that was done before the animation even started.
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