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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

danluu.com

391–400 of 530 posts

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

#391

"LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly." This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code. I can write code in almost any language (with a couple of exceptions) that outperforms "super-optimized assembly". Writing efficient code isn't about the language, and often isn't about the best algorithms either (but sometimes it is). Its a…

I think you’re talking somewhat at cross purposes to the original article.

The points I take away are:

- Good optimization is difficult and slow work, hence expensive, but LLMs can do it so we should be able to afford it more often now.

- There’s always a risk of over-fitting to your specific problem, but if everyone is now making bespoke optimizations maybe that isn’t actually a problem.

You said:

LLMs are terrible at optimizing memory utilization. There is just too little training code that does it well and far too much that doesn't.

There’s probably something in that, but it can be mitigated by testing against a local benchmark. LLMs are good at iterating tirelessly and finding incremental improvements. And as noted above, it doesn’t necessarily matter if your benchmark isn’t fully general.

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

#392
post #283

Earlier 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.

The genius play is to have an OSX expert write it with AI assistance, then let the press release say AI did it

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

#393
The problem is that there’s a tradeoff between MANY objectives, not just performance

You want code that’s fast, correct, stable, memory efficient, secure, usable, and more

The reason code might be slow is about product tradeoffs. It’s certainly easy to have an LLM optimize performance only, but what do you sacrifice? Is that an acceptable tradeoff?

Maybe slow code is a good idea if it’s the only way to get correct and secure code?

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

#394
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Windows used to have a checkbox somewhere to globally turn animations on or off.

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

#395

For me the comparison has always been 3DsMax vs Blender. Same kind of software, same kind of features, but Blender is so much faster. Architectural decisions have always been important.

Fun blender fact: every .blend file contains a serialisation of the complete data model of the blender version that wrote it. That's why they have a minimum file size of about 280kB.

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

#397

What makes large things slow is not the individual pieces of code but the way the architecture dynamically reacts to changes in the load. Sync vs async calls, buffers, parallel vs sequential processing. This includes optimizations made: do we want to wait until the call returns or do we proceed anyway and deal with the negative response later? Most developers can’t coherently (ie, with math, graphs and figures) expla…

Can you explain that? I don't think you can explain it either.

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

#399
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…

Yes. Apple Music is the most egregious example of this. It could be ridiculously fast on your pocket supercomputer but the moment a web request gets fired off from stumbling blindly across the field-of-dung user interface, bam, you’re done. Especially if your network connection isn’t great at that time. Things like this really pushed me to everything local systems. I’ll move actual files around if I want to do anythi…

Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great.

The original design had the speakers setting up a private mesh network, and the app would send commands directly to the speakers via your LAN. Then, they got the brilliant idea to route commands via their cloud service. The app would send commands to an endpoint, which would send them back to your speakers. Imagine trying to smoothly fade volume with a WAN hop. This went over as well as you’d expect, and they’ve since promised to work on performance. Thus far they seem to have been doing so; it isn’t as snappy as the original, but it’s quite a bit better.

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

#400
post #70

This speaks to me. I've been running an autoresearch loop the past couple of days to improve the load time of my various projects' frontends. I've been really, really impressed with how effective this is. I went from a 4s load on simulated slow 4g to ~750ms: https://image.non.io/speedup-graphs.webp Side by side vid of the results: https://video.non.io/speedups.mp4 This was for https://non.io , which is something I ha…

It takes about 6 seconds to get the site fully rendered on MacBook Air 2017 in Chile. HN is slightly above 1 second in comparison.
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