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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

#571

Post by diputsmonro »

xg15 wrote: post #534
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…

This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda. Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the ra…

Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom.

Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.

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

#572

Post by lotsofpulp »

mmooss wrote: post #486
jcadam wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just software -- My wife owns a restaurant. Operating a restaurant you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success. We're still trying to figure out the marketing. I'm convinced the high failure rate of restaurants is due largely to founders who know how to make good food and think their culinary skills plus word-of-mouth will get them sales.

> you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success. Doesn't that depend on your audience? Also, what do you mean by quality? Where I live, the best food can lead to big success. New tiny restaurants open, they have great food, eventually they open their big successor (or their second restaurant, third restaurant, etc.).

In my experience, the landlord catches onto the restaurant’s success and starts increasing rents and usually that means cuts in quality.

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

#573

Post by femto »

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…

It can depend on the application/niche.

I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice.

Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire and the radios not skipping a beat during the emergency response. Word of mouth traveled in a relatively close knit community and the "quality" did win customers.

Oddly we didn't have explicit procedures to maintain that quality. The key in my mind was that we had enough time in the day to address the root cause of bugs, it was a small enough team that we knew what was going into the repository and its effect on the system, and we developed incrementally. A few years later, we got spread thinner onto more products and it didn't work so well.

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

#574

Post by throwaway2037 »

femto wrote: post #573
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…

It can depend on the application/niche. I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice. Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from cus…

    > feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire
Which skyscrapers (plural)? Fires in NYC high-rise buildings are incredibly rare in the last 20 years.

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

#575

Post by throwaway2037 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #545
dahart wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia page for Market for Lemons more or less summarizes it as a condition of defective products caused by information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection, which can lead to market collapse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The Market for Lemons idea seems like it has merit in general but is too strong and too binary to apply broadly, that’s where I was headed with the suggesti…

Once upon a time, the price of a product was often a good indicator of its quality. If you saw two products side by side on the shelf and one was more expensive, then you might assume that it was less likely to break or wear out soon. Now it seems that the price has very little to do with quality. Cheaply made products might be priced higher just to give the appearance of quality. Even well known brands will cut corn…

What about furniture? From my childhood until now, it seems like furniture has really held out. Price is a pretty good indication of quality.

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

#576

Post by gus_massa »

naasking wrote: post #299
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…

> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improv…

Isn't this comprehension in Python https://www.w3schools.com/python/python_lists_comprehension.... ?

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

#577

Post by kortilla »

diputsmonro wrote: post #571
xg15 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda. Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the ra…

Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a…

Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood.

Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that they look at things that are clearly useless and start to pull apart things they think might be useless.

The good will has been burned on the “trust me, the government knows best”, so now we’re in an era of cuts that will absolutely go too far and cause damage.

Your post mentioning “imagined inefficiencies” is a shining example of the issue of why they are there. Thinking the government doesn’t have inefficiencies is as dumb as thinking it’s pointless. Politicians are about as corrupt of a group as you can get and budget bills are filled with so much excess waste it’s literally called “pork”.

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

#578

Post by femto »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #574
femto wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can depend on the application/niche. I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice. Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from cus…

> feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire Which skyscrapers (plural)? Fires in NYC high-rise buildings are incredibly rare in the last 20 years.

Don't know. The customer ran a radio network which was used by fire brigade(s?) in NY, so we weren't on the "coal face". It was about 15 years ago.

It was an interesting job. Among other things, our gear ran stage management for a couple of Olympic opening ceremonies. Reliability was key given the size of the audience. We also did gear for the USGC, covering the entire US coastline. If you placed an emergency call at sea, it was our radios that were receiving that signal and passing it into the USCG's network.

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

#579

Post by dleink »

tjader wrote: post #422
vel0city wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider. And…

But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place? And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when…

You hit on something there, I could type faster than my 2400 baud connection but barring a bad connection those connections were pretty reliable.

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

#580

Post by kevinsync »

codethief wrote: post #530
mtalantikite wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm hesitant to reply because it sounds pejorative and snarky, and I will be downvoted, but... you are not the target market for this. End of story.

This design is very 2025 and the rules you're judging by have long-since been thrown out the window. Most brands run on Shopify now, marketing is via myriad social channels in ways that feel insane and unintuitive, aesthetics are all over the map.

What's old is new is old is different is the same is good is bad, and what is garish to you (strangely, honestly) isn't to most; you'll see if you hang out with some young people lol, promise.

P.S. I am not young, I'm figuring this out by watching from afar HAHAHA

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