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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

#151

Post by supriyo-biswas »

energy123 wrote: post #141
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…

Can't they use ML to predict where I'm going to click, and pre-cache the predicted page whenever the predicted button doesn't mutate important state? Or skip the difficult ML and have some basic rule of thumb that pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain, and conditioned on those pages being low bandwidth to pre-load.

> pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain

I don't think the current crop of fullstack engineers would be hard pressed to know what a "markov chain" is, but in theory yes, you could emit a bunch of speculation rules[1] based on your predictions.

I should also say that markov chain based approaches have been used for fraud detection, e.g. identifying checkout anomalies by detecting the sequence of web pages that they clicked on, amongst other factors.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Speculation...

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

#153

Post by adamddev1 »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #95
noosphr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. It's s about subpar models trained on subpar data doing subpar work. The only reason why anyone takes it seriously is that we've had a glut of subpar developers for 30 years so it all balances out in the end.

No it really is about the test suite, and provably so. As another poster pointed out, speed is a superoptimization problem and the test suite provides the constraints. If the constraints are appropriately set, even a naive genetic algorithm will eventually improve the outcome over time, provided suitable mixing of the proposal scheme. LLMs provide measurably better proposals than naive approaches, so the entire chain…

Tests do not prove the absence of bugs.

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

#154

Post by Onavo »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #150
energy123 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't they use ML to predict where I'm going to click, and pre-cache the predicted page whenever the predicted button doesn't mutate important state? Or skip the difficult ML and have some basic rule of thumb that pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain, and conditioned on those pages being low bandwidth to pre-load.

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…

> 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.

Welcome to Next.js

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

#157

Post by gr_norm »

This needs to be qualified with "to the degree that you have a specification of what that software should do." The better the spec, the more leeway you can give the optimizer. A very thorough spec lets you give the LLM total free rein to run optimization passes over your codebase.

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

#158

Post by za3faran »

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…

This sounds very interesting. Which JVM profiler do you use?

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

#159

Post by CalRobert »

energy123 wrote: post #141
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…

Can't they use ML to predict where I'm going to click, and pre-cache the predicted page whenever the predicted button doesn't mutate important state? Or skip the difficult ML and have some basic rule of thumb that pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain, and conditioned on those pages being low bandwidth to pre-load.

Heh, this is how browser accelerators from the dial up era worked
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