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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

#411

Post by ck45 »

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

Storypoints do not mean "time". Time would be too concrete and measurable and would be bad for selling more agile coachings. Instead storypoints represent "effort". What does it mean and how can it be used to estimate a shipping date? I was told that I just don't understand.

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

#412

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

charcircuit wrote: post #194
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we stored the edges (links) and nodes (pages) separately, rather than requiring you to blindly run a node's code just to discover what its edges might be, then you could skip the prediction and instead pre-cache the next hop for all edges just in case you follow one. You could even do this to two or three hops. This might seem wasteful, but if the web were content addressed instead of server addressed you could th…

>but if the web were content addressed instead of server addressed you could then be serving that cache to your municipality even after it became disconnected from the rest of the internet. This is already possible without content addressing with CDNs. They can serve content from a local cache even when the host is disconnected from the internet.

Without content addressing how do I know that whoever holds the cache hasn't tampered with the content?

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

#413

Post by [deleted] »

benj111 wrote: post #380
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…

Surely the biggest cause of slowness is doing more stuff. We don't turn faster hardware into faster programs, we turn it into more program. AI isn't going to change that. We'll just get even more program because the optimisation has freed up space for that. Unfortunately most of the time, the more program isn't for our benefit. I note that by far the heaviest program I use is my web browser. The one thing I don't get…

[deleted]

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

#414

Post by lazide »

inigyou wrote: post #377
lazide wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difficulty - Microsoft retroactively cancelling lifetime licenses.

Let them sue you if they want to.

They literally unlicense the product out from under you as part of windows update. You’re the one having to sue, unless you never connect your machine to the internet anyway.

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

#415

Post by jkercher »

josephg wrote: post #133
mccoyb wrote: post #55

Here'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…

I think you nailed it. And that would make sense and should be expected. 99.9% of the world's software (the training data) is several orders of magnitude away from max performance.

Another possible confusing thing for an LLM is that getting close to max doesn't necessarily require any "tricks." A big part of getting in the ballpark is just not doing anything you don't have to. If program A is faster than program B, most of the time is not some magic algorithm. It's that program A just did less stuff.

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

#416

Post by Flamkuchlo »

jjcm wrote: 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 loads in 4 seconds for me on a fast landline.

And there are plenty of things you did not opimize for. Like making sure certain dimensions are already known to the dom renderer so that the layout doesn't jump around.

Or progressive images so that it doesn't just popup suddenly.

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

#417

Post by gcanyon »

I'm a product manager. We work with Claude Code all the time, so I'm in Terminal pretty regularly. One of the developers insisted that I need to use his flavor of shell. He set it up to load automatically whenever I run Terminal, and now once the terminal window opens it takes another five seconds to get to the command line -- WTF?!

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

#418

Post by ricardobeat »

jjcm wrote: 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 still feels pretty slow, and I see some low-hanging fruit:

- in safari, every image is loaded twice, .heic and .webp

- default.png is re-downloaded 31 times, uncached

- images below the fold are request immediately, lazy loading would avoid that [1]

But most important, you have 229 requests for tiny files being served over HTTP 1.1. Without GZIP. From a pretty slow server - 700ms+ to download the main json data. Bundling your JS, or enabling HTTP2 or QUIC/HTTP3 alone would massively improve performance.

If this is the result of days of autoresearch, it's not really anything to celebrate.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

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

#419

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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…

Unfortunately, you either put all the commercially interesting bits on your own server and let your customers eat the latency, or you ship it to the edge and let piracy decimate your profits. I don't think there is any technical way out of this, and probably not any reasonable legal ways.

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

#420

Post by stickfigure »

chii wrote: post #224
stickfigure wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I went through this last week. I (ok, codex) optimized a hot path in some Java code from ~350ms to ~60ms, which made a substantial difference in "is this whole business going to work". My Java profiling knowledge is... let's call it "antique". I was really not looking forward to ramping back up for this work. Turns out, I didn't have to do any of it. The LLM chose the tools (flight recorder) and even buil…

> the other half were definitely "wow" moments. do you have some samples? It would be interesting to learn what it might be.

Here are two:

* Using spherical points instead of trig to calculate distance between two geo locations.

* Packing data to minimize memory bandwidth consumption. Converting arrays of objects to multiple arrays of their component parts I sort of expected; bitshifting to pack and unpack multiple values into a `long` I did not.

Maybe other people would find these obvious, but I don't usually have to optimize at this level. My mental model of the relative speed of some CPU operations was a little out of date.

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