There's no reason for software to be slow anymore • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by Lucasoato » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

mawadev wrote: post #289

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…

I agree and see this as a side effect of a subtler thing. As people shall be replacable, software is designed and subtly mimics the organization's communication patterns. Features are cut up into the tiniest pieces with clear separation from the start (at least its claimed), and over time whatever change or feature seems overly complicated, won't be done or won't be done in a sane manner because its uneconomical. You…

> 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 product don’t matter because you’re focused in cost attribution and no body does anything if it doesn’t come in your JIRA board, the managers are all coming from consultancy companies and all they do is finding someone to blame.

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

#312

Post by oblio » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

chvid wrote: post #283

aureate wrote: post #274

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.

Hopefully at some point gravity pulls them back down and they reach the maturity and humility to realize that LLMs are just tools and even though they're good for many things, you can't do absolutely everything with them.

I think the "maturity and humility" phase of the LLM hype cycle is probably still 2-3 years into the future.

And that phase probably comes immediately after the "LLMs overinvestments have caused a massive global recession".

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

#313

Post by stymaar » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

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…

> If your software has the affordance of a waiting dialogue or loading wheel for many of its UI controls, you are building with this default blocked assumption. Even if you are building something web based, ask yourself if that's actually necessary for your software or if you could build it differently to avoid constant UI blocking.

I wish Atlassian listened to you.

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

#314

Post by embedding-shape » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

mccoyb wrote: post #73

Aurornis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The knobs you'd need to get serious performance are nearly unreachable in languages which LMs are good at (even Rust requires a discipline that the default language doesn't enforce). When you drop into the lower realms, you're trading consumption context for access to these levers. The levers are also "soft": you find yourself writing a bunch of skills, and tools to try and enforce the discipline. Hasn’t been my…

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 clean it up, because there won't be any misunderstandings, assumptions or other things, just code fulfilling what the specification says.

Granted, this does require you to not use obviously dumb models, like anything you can run locally today, and at least within reasonable range of SOTA models. But they been able to do this for 6 months or more at this point.

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

#315

Post by adrian_b » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #195

jcelerier wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a new laptop with a rtx 5090. Opening any GL context takes more than half a second. There's tons of things that can be optimized and are pretty far from web.

I assume you're running proprietary drivers? Because I've never experienced anything like that on mesa. Launching an app that opens a window with a gl or vk context is so fast on my almost 10 year old hardware that it's nearly imperceptible.

There must be some quirk of whatever combination of software packages are installed there, but the proprietary drivers are not the culprit, at least not alone (i.e. there could be some interaction with other software packages with which I have little experience, like Gnome).

I have been using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for more than 2 decades on various hardware, both desktops and laptops, mostly with Gentoo Linux.

Opening an OpenGL context or any other OpenGL operations have always been instant.

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

#316

Post by tomxor » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:35 AM UTC

Funny they mention demoscene as an example. I've tried to get various LLMs to explain or modify my demos and they utterly fail. At the extreme end this style of coding requires you to hold all understanding of what is happening end to end in your head, this x-ray vision allows you to reason and think about fundamentals without getting held back by abstractions.

LLMs operate in abstractions. "Reasoning" is bolted on.

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

#317

Post by saidnooneever » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

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…

there is different scales at which software is slow. this os one and definitely a pain in the ass. everything being online for no good reason other than to harvest user data. which it really turns out to be every time. (for good or bad purpose).

second is on a smaller timescale. so many features and crap that is never asked for and never used is crammed into software so the systems that execute it are just juggling pretty much dead code in and stale data in their caches all days long.

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

#318

Post by crabbone » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

There are so many unwarranted ideas here... I stopped reading half-way because of it.

Eg. JIT compilers are rare because they are difficult to write. JIT compilers come with tradeoffs, they aren't an absolute boon. JIT-compiled code isn't good for short-running scripts, for example. Even normally JIT-compiled languages try to special-case parts of the code that would not benefit from compilation and interpret them instead. Another huge downside of JIT-compiled code is debugging it. JIT compilation is better for languages that don't deal with memory allocation directly, and, in general, expose fewer low-level primitives to the language user. It would be a fool's errand to make a JIT-compiled C... I bet someone tried it, but, seriously...

Another one: a solution to slow search is building an index... Boy do I have bad news for you... Even a beginner DBA knows that an index can be a curse or a blessing. There's no one size fits all solution to this.

And the author continues to misrepresent similar problems only to make his solution make sense.

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

#319

Post by tcp_handshaker » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

Every post by the this person, beats the record for most unreadable, most difficult to parse, smallest font, mangled and aggregated paragraphs.

Make it as harder as possible to communicate your message...I am not sure if this is supposed to pass for minimalism...but looks more lie readability hostile snobbery. Good content does not excuse contempt for the person trying to read it.

If your argument is worth attention, presenting it legibly is basic respect for the reader....

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

#320

Post by kotaKat » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

All we had to do was stop approving requests for developers to have 64GB of ram as a daily default.

They could have worked in 8GB of RAM but chose not to, and now the rest of us suffer as a result because we couldn’t afford $5000 dev laptops as daily drivers.