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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#521

Post by maccard »

conradfr wrote: post #362
maccard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news…

All those things takes 4 seconds to launch or load on my M1. Not great, not bad.

Even 4-5 seconds is long enough for me to honestly get distracted. That is just so much time even on a single core computer from a decade ago.

On my home PC, in 4 seconds I could download 500MB, load 12GB off an SSD, perform 12 billion cycles (before pipelining ) per core (and I have 24 of them) - and yet miro still manages to bring my computer to its knees for 15 seconds just to load an empty whiteboard.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#522

Post by aucisson_masque »

dahart wrote: post #217
caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a compe…

You're laying it out like it's universal, in my experience there are products where people will seek for the cheapest good enough but there are also other product that people know they want quality and are willing to pay more.

Take cars for instance, if all people wanted the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business.

Same for professional tools and products, you save more by buying quality product.

And then, even in computer and technology. Apple iPhone aren't cheap at all, MacBook come with soldered ram and storage, high price, yet a big part of people are willing to buy that instead of the usual windows bloated spyware laptop that run well enough and is cheap.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#524

Post by rstuart4133 »

esafak wrote: post #433
dsr_ wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lemon Market exists specifically when customers cannot tell, prior to receipt and usage, whether they are buying high quality or low quality.

That does not describe the current subscription-based software market, then, because we do try it, and we can always stop paying, transaction costs aside.

There are two costs to software: what you pay for it, and the time needed to learn how to use it. That's a big different to the original Lemon paper. You don't need to invest time in learning how to use a car, so the only cost to replacing it is the upfront cost of a new car. Worse "Time needed to learn it" understates it, because the cost replacing lemon software is often far more than just training. For example: replacing your accounting system, where you need to keep the data it has for 7 years as a tax record. Replacing a piece of software will typically cost many times the cost of the software itself.

If you look around, notice people still use Microsoft yet ransomware almost universally attacks Windows installations. This is despite everyone knowing Windows is a security nightmare courtesy of the Sony hack 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Sony_Pictures_hack

Mind you, when I say "everyone", Microsoft's marketing is very good. A firm I worked lost $500k to a windows keyboard logger stealing banking credentials. They had virus scanners for firewalls installed of course, but they aren't a sure deference. As the technical lead for many years, I was asked about my opinion of what they could do. The answer is pretty simple: don't use Windows for banking. Buy an iPad of Android tablet, and do you safety critical stuff on there. The CEO didn't believe a tablet could be more secure than a several thousand dollar laptop when copy of Windows cost more than the tablet. Sigh.

So the answer to why don't people move away from poor quality subscription software is by the time they've figure out it's crap, the cost of moving isn't just the subscription. It's much larger than that.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#525

Post by maccard »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #168
aloha2436 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers. On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and mo…

VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive? Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in Also keep in mind that des…

> You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.

11 years ago I put in a ticket to slack asking them about their resource usage. Their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE and compilers and causing heap space issues with visual studio. 10 years ago things were exactly the same. 15 years ago, my coworkers were complaining that VS2010 was a resource hog compared to 10 years ago. My memory of loading photoshop in the early 2000’s was that it took absolutely forever and was slow as molasses on my home PC.

I don’t think it’s necessarily gotten worse, I think it’s always been pathetically bad.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#526

Post by maccard »

accrual wrote: post #509
Aurornis wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. > On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional I just launched IntelliJ (first time since reboot). Took maybe 2 seconds to the projects screen. I clicked a random project and was editing it 2…

> heavy anti-virus or corporate security scanning that's slowing your computer down more than you expect. Ugh, I personally witnessed this. I would wait to take my break until I knew the unavoidable, unkillable AV scans had started and would peg my CPU at 100%. I wonder how many human and energy resources are wasted checking for non-existant viruses on corp hardware.

In a previous job, I was benchmarking compile times. I came in on a Monday and everything was 10-15% slower. IT had installed carbon black on my machine over the weekend, which was clearly the culprit. I sent WPA traces to IT but apparently the sales guys said there was no overhead so that was that.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#527

Post by nine_k »

caseyy wrote: post #515
nine_k wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A OnePlus Android phone is considered an inferior good; an iPhone (or a Samsung Galaxy Android phone) is considered superior. Both are of excellent quality No, the inferior good is a device with 2GB RAM, a poor quality battery, easy to crack screen, a poor camera. poor RF design and thus less stable connectivity, and poor mechanical assembly. But it has its market segment because it costs like 15% of the cost of an…

I mean "inferior good" as a macroeconomics term: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inferior-good.asp . And the point of my comment is to show that product quality alone doesn't determine whether it's an inferior good.

I see your point. But the choice between an iPhone and a Galaxy is mostly the ecosystem. And the choice between OnePlus and a Galaxy S is mostly about the quality of the camera. And the choice between a Galaxy and a Xioami is mostly about trusting a Chinese brand (not for its technical merits; they make excellent devices). The real quality / price differentiation, to my mind, lies farther down the scale.

That is, the choice between a $10 organic grass-fed milk and $8 organic grass-fed milk is literally a matter of taste, not the $2 price difference. The real price/quality choice is between the $10 fancy organic milk, $4.99 okay milk, and $2.49 bottom-shelf milk. They attract materially different customer segments.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#528

Post by actuallyalys »

Carmack is right to some extent, although I think it’s also worth mentioning that people replace their computers for reasons other than performance, especially smartphones. Improvements in other components, damage, marketing, and status are other reasons.

It’s not that uncommon for people to replace their phone after two years, and as someone who’s typically bought phones that are good but not top-of-the-line, I’m skeptical all of those people’s phones are getting bogged down by slow software.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#529

Post by naasking »

mike_hearn wrote: post #413
naasking wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hm, you could do that quite easily but there isn't much juice to be squeezed from runtime selected data structures. Set with O(1) insert: But now you've hard-coded this selection, why can't the performance characteristics also be easily parameterized and combined, eg. insert is O(1), delete is O(log(n)), or by defining indexes in SQL which can be changed at any time at runtime? Or maybe the performance characterist…

There are research papers that examine this question of whether runtime optimizing data structures is a win, and it's mostly not outside of some special cases like strings. Most collections are quite small. Really big collections tend to be either caches (which are often specialized anyway), or inside databases where you do have more flexibility. A language fully integrated with the relational model exists, that's PL…

> There are research papers that examine this question of whether runtime optimizing data structures is a win

If you mean JIT and similar tech, that's not really what I'm describing either. I'm talking about lifting the time and space complexity of data structures to parameters so you don't have to think about specific details.

Again, think about how tables in a relational database work, where you can write queries against sets without regard for the underlying implementation, and you have external/higher level tools to tune a running program's data structures for better time or space behavior.

> A language fully integrated with the relational model exists, that's PL/SQL

Not a general purpose language suitable for most programming, and missing all of the expressive language features I described, like type/shape inference, higher order queries and query composition and so on. See my previous comments. The tool you mentioned leaves a lot to be desired.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#530

Post by codethief »

mtalantikite wrote: post #335
dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a compe…

My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the…

> [1] https://studiotanais.com/

First, honest impression: At least on my phone (Android/Chromium) the typography and style of the website don't quite match that "high quality & expensive ingredients" vibe the parfums are supposed to convey. The banners (3 at once on the very first screen, one of them animated!), italic text, varying font sizes, and janky video header would be rather off-putting to me. Maybe it's also because I'm not a huge fan of flat designs, partially because I find they make it difficult to visually distinguish important and less important information, but also because I find them a bit… unrefined and inelegant. And, again, this is on mobile, so maybe on desktop it comes across differently.

Disclaimer: I'm not a designer (so please don't listen only to me and take everything with a grain of salt) but I did work as a frontend engineer for a luxury retailer for some time.

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