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How much your computer can do in a second

computers-are-fast.github.io

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Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#31

Post by gizmo »

mwcampbell wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…

So is there any way to stop this treadmill, short of overthrowing capitalism itself? Edit: If that seems like a non-sequitur, I said it because the parent comment started by saying that the market is wasteful.

There is certainly a case to be made for overthrowing capitalism, but I don't see why an anti-capitalist revolution would automatically result in a society with higher quality software.

Open source software suffers from much the same problems as commercial software. There is much about writing good software we haven't figured out how to do yet as an industry, and in the meantime we have to work with tools that are totally inadequate.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#32

Post by tedunangst »

logicallee wrote: post #30
gizmo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eye-opening experience is running an IDE like Visual Studio 6 or a really old version of Photoshop on a modern machine. It starts instantly, compile times are a fraction of what we're used to. The interface is totally responsive. It's remarkable how much better software feels when everything is instant.

>An eye-opening experience is running an IDE like Visual Studio 6 or a really old version of Photoshop on a modern machine. It starts instantly, compile times are a fraction of what we're used to. The interface is totally responsive. If you gave that to a Product Manager candidate (as part of an interview) and pretended it's your current product (assume they didn't know it already), asked them to play around with it…

Or start with the current version, then demo the ancient version, and claim you've "streamlined and tuned" the program?

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#33

Post by icantdrive55 »

agumonkey wrote: post #17
userbinator wrote: post #13

Alternatively, this could be titled "do you know how much your computer could do in a second but isn't because of bad design choices, overengineered bloated systems, and dogmatic adherence to the 'premature optimisation' myth?" Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted. A recent related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…

This will sound pathetic, and it's partially because I don't have much of a life, and spend way too much time with electronics, but one of my biggest regrets is---

Upgrading.

I've always fell for the increased security, and blah, blah, blah, but in the end I have a device, I once used, become slow, programs become useless, or my plethora of USB devises don't have the right updated firmware.

I have a Mac, and a MacBook Pro I'm thinking about wiping clean, and installing the original operating systems. It's just a pain, and yes--I know security is important.

I did finally learn on the IPad, but I'm still not completely sure I'm doing the right thing. I must have hit "tomorrow for 9.3.5---three hundred times. I just don't want to make this devise slower. I paid way too much years ago, and I hate putting things in my electronic graveyard--my closet.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#34

Post by dahart »

userbinator wrote: post #13

Alternatively, this could be titled "do you know how much your computer could do in a second but isn't because of bad design choices, overengineered bloated systems, and dogmatic adherence to the 'premature optimisation' myth?" Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted. A recent related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

To be fair, that article is discussing a small bug, not over engineering or dogma. The size of the deal people made over it was more wasteful than the CPU time this (now fixed) bug cost.

And FWIW, of all the problems that matter to me and my teams, I find premature optimization to be far, far more wasteful of money and human energy than wasted CPU cycles. There are definitely times to worry about performance, and I fancy myself a deeply performance oriented person, and yet I am and will continue to be proud of my dogmatic adherence to avoiding premature optimization, because in my experience it's not a myth at all. I have watched literally years and millions of dollars wasted multiple times by teams that decided to prematurely engineer high performance solutions to problem they thought they had but didn't actually. So I'm way more scared of premature optimization than I am of wasting cycles.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#36

Post by userbinator »

mwcampbell wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…

So is there any way to stop this treadmill, short of overthrowing capitalism itself? Edit: If that seems like a non-sequitur, I said it because the parent comment started by saying that the market is wasteful.

I don't think capitalism is to blame, as this is endemic even in free software. The way to stop this is to stop repeating dogmatic myths about optimisation, consider efficiency/optimisation as an integrated part of the design process and not something to be applied afterwards, and focus on "user time is expensive" instead of "developer time is expensive" --- and sometimes, those users may also be developers.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#37

Post by ue_ »

mwcampbell wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…

So is there any way to stop this treadmill, short of overthrowing capitalism itself? Edit: If that seems like a non-sequitur, I said it because the parent comment started by saying that the market is wasteful.

Within capitalism, products are made to maximise exchange value rather than use value. This is because it is more profitable to optimise for products to be exchanged rather than used. In fact, it can be detrimental to maximise use value, because a product that can be used for longer will mean that fewer people will have motivation to purchase another one any time soon.

I like the idea of overthrowing capitalism itself to resolve this.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#38

Post by logicallee »

tedunangst wrote: post #32
logicallee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An eye-opening experience is running an IDE like Visual Studio 6 or a really old version of Photoshop on a modern machine. It starts instantly, compile times are a fraction of what we're used to. The interface is totally responsive. If you gave that to a Product Manager candidate (as part of an interview) and pretended it's your current product (assume they didn't know it already), asked them to play around with it…

Or start with the current version, then demo the ancient version, and claim you've "streamlined and tuned" the program?

What I was getting at is that the suggestions to add crap would come from the product manager candidate themselves - thereby "proving" (if the results match my prediction) that the requirement for slow unresponsive interfaces come directly from the PM's, who would add it if it weren't already slow.

Like, I want the experiment to test if a product isn't already slow, would a product manager actively make it slow? (I think, "yes".)

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#39

Post by Athas »

userbinator wrote: post #13

Alternatively, this could be titled "do you know how much your computer could do in a second but isn't because of bad design choices, overengineered bloated systems, and dogmatic adherence to the 'premature optimisation' myth?" Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted. A recent related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

> Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted.

While computers are fast, the performance improvements have been spread very unevenly. CPUs have improved the most, with memory lagging significantly behind, and persistent storage even more distant. On the other hand, networks have become much faster than before. I like this list of Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#40

Post by loeg »

supergarfield wrote: post #6
gravypod wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC with -O3 might try to unroll this loop into a single constant. O(0) is pretty fast.

That's very likely. Clang 8.0 collapses the loop with any optimizer setting other than -O0. But if you had to do it manually, loop unrolling and SIMD instructions (although not part of standard C) would be good bets and can probably get you an order of magnitude.

Clang 8.0?
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