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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

#651

Post by CelestialMystic »

mint2 wrote: post #627
kortilla wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Efficiency related regulation like the energy star is THE reason why companies started caring. Same with low flush toilets. I vaguely remember the initial ones had issues, but tbh less than the older use a ton of water toilets my family had before that were also super clog prone. Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time a low flush toilet clogged. Massive water saving that took regulation. Efficiency regulations…

I literally had a new toilet put in a couple of years ago. It clogs pretty easily. So you just end up flushing it more, so you don't actually save any water.

BTW the same thing happened with vacuum cleaners, you need to hover more to get the same amount of dust out because they capped the power in the EU. My old Vacuum Cleaner I managed to find, literally sticks to the carpet when hoovering.

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

#652

Post by Panzer04 »

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…

This is a good point.

A big part of the drive towards lower prices is likely driven by companies exploiting that lack of information to deliver a low-quality product for a high price. Consumers rationally respond to this by just always picking the low-price product

Unless, of course, there's another factor (such as brand) that assures users they are receiving something worth spending extra on (and of course it's oh so easy for companies with such a reputation to temporarily juice returns if they are willing to make sacrifices)

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

#653

Post by casey2 »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #174
ngangaga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course". Interesting conclusion—I'd argue we haven't seen much innovation since the smartphone (18 years ago now), and it's entirely because capital is relying on the advances of hardware to sell what is to consumers essentially the same product that they already have. Of course, I can't read anything past the first tweet.

And I'd argue that we've seen tons of innovation in the past 18 years aside from just "the smartphone" but it's all too easy to take for granted and forget from our current perspective. First up, the smartphone itself had to evolve a hell of a lot over 18 years or so. Go try to use an iPhone 1 and you'll quickly see all of the roadblocks and what we now consider poor design choices littered everywhere, vs improvement…

>netflix

>steam

>Sublime (Of course ed, vim, emacs, sam, acme already existed for decades by 2007)

>No they weren't TomTom already existed for years, GPS existed for years

>You're right that they already existed

>Again, already existed, glad we agree

>Tech was already there just putting it in a phone doesn't count as innovation

>NASA was driving electric cars on the moon while Elon Musk was in diapers

>I was doing that in the early 80s, but Skype is a fine pre 2007 example thanks again >Your right we didn't have 4k displays in 2007, not exactly a software innovation. This is a good example of a hardware innovation used to sell essentially the same product >? Are you sure you didn't have a bad printer there have been good color printers since the 90s let alone 2007. The price to performance arguably hasn't changed since 2007 you are just paying more in running costs than upfront. >This is definitely hardware. Scripting language 3.0 or FOTM framework isn't innovative in that there is no problem being solved and no economic gain, if they didn't exist people would use something else and that would be that. With AI the big story was that there WASN'T a software innovation and that what few innovation do exist will die to the Bitter lesson

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

#654

Post by kristianp »

jeroenhd wrote: post #612
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, everyone laments that nothing is as tightly coded as Winamp anymore, without remembering the first three characters. I would far, far rather have Windows-only software that is performant than the Electron slop we get today. With Wine there's a decent chance I could run it on Linux anyway, whereas Electron software is shit no matter the platform.

Wine doesn't even run Office, there's no way it'd run whatever native video stack Teams would use. Linux has Teams purely because Teams decided to go with web as their main technology. Even the Electron version of Teams on Linux has a reduced feature set because there's no Office to integrate with.

Of course Wine can run office! At least Word and Excel I have used under Wine. They're probably some of the primary targets of compatibility work.

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

#655

Post by ryao »

vdqtp3 wrote: post #519
Aurornis wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can never tell if all of these comments are exaggerations to make a point, or if some people really have computers so slow that everything takes 20 seconds to launch (like the other comment claims). I'm sure some of these people are using 10 year old corporate laptops with heavy corporate anti-virus scanning, leading to slow startup times. However, I think a lot of people are just exaggerating. If it's not instantl…

It's not an exaggeration. I have a 12 core Ryzen 9 with 64GB of RAM, and clicking the emoji reaction button in Signal takes long enough to render the fixed set of emojis that I've begun clicking the empty space where I know the correct emoji will appear. For years I've been hitting the Windows key, typing the three or four unique characters for the app I want and hitting enter, because the start menu takes too long t…

I have a 16 core Ryzen 9 with 128GB of RAM. I have not noticed any slowness in Signal. This might be caused by differences in our operating systems. It sounds like you run Windows. I run Gentoo Linux.

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

#656

Post by monkeyelite »

olejorgenb wrote: post #377
rpnx wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin. If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see th…

You have to have bought the item om Amazon to review right? So these reviewers buy and return, or how does it work?

If you think about it there is basically no scalable way for Amazon to ensure a seller is providing the same product over time - and to all customers.

Random sampling can make sure a product matching the description arrives. But someone familiar with it would have to carefully compare over time. And that process doesn’t scale.

One thing Walmart does right is having “buyers” in charge of each department in the store. For example fishing - and they know all the gear and try it out. And they can walk into any store and audit and know if something is wrong.

I’m sure Amazon has responsible parties on paper - but the size and rate at which the catalog changes makes this a lower level of accountability.

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

#658

Post by TingPing »

mike_hearn wrote: post #401
crubier wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HOW does Slack take 20s to load for you? My huge corporate Slack takes 2.5s to cold load. I'm so dumbfounded. Maybe non-MacOS, non-Apple silicon stuff is complete crap at that point? Maybe the complete dominance of Apple performance is understated?

Yes it is and the difference isn't understated, I think everyone knows by now that Apple has run away with laptop/desktop performance. They're just leagues ahead. It's a mix of better CPUs, better OS design (e.g. much less need for aggressive virus scanners), a faster filesystem, less corporate meddling, high end SSDs by default... a lot of things.

Qualcomm CPUs outperform Apple now, Apple was just early and had exclusivity for manufacturing 3nm at TSMC.

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

#659

Post by smikhanov »

caseyy wrote: post #542
aucisson_masque wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qualit…

Not everyone wants the cheapest, but lemons fail and collapse the expensive part of the market with superior goods. To borrow your example, it's as if Mercedes started giving every 4th customer a Lada instead (after the papers are signed). The expensive Mercedes market would quickly no longer meet the luxury demand of wealthy buyers and collapse. Not the least because Mercedes would start showing super-normal profits…

    for software, the top end of the market is now non-existent
The issue here isn't absence, but misrecognition: the top end absolutely does exist -- it just doesn't always look like what people wish it looked like.

If by "top end" you mean "built to spec, hardened, and close to bug-free", it's alive and well in heavy manufacturing, telecommunication, automotive, aerospace, military, and medical industries. The technologies used there are not sexy (ask anyone working at Siemens or Nokia), the code wouldn't delight you, the processes are likely glacial, but there you will find software that works because it absolutely has to.

If by "top end" you mean "serves the implied user need in the best way imaginable", then modern LLMs systems are a good example. Despite the absolute mess and slop that those systems are built of, very few people come to ChatGPT and leave unsatisfied with its results.

If by "top end" you mean "beautifully engineered and maintained", think SQLite, LLVM and some OS kernels, like seL4. Those are well-written, foundational pieces of software that are not end-products in themselves, but they're built to last, studied by developers, and trusted everywhere. This is the current forefront in our knowledge of how to write software.

If by "top end" you mean "maximising profit through code", then the software in the top trading firms match this description. All those "hacker-friendly" and "tech-driven" firms run on the same sloppy code as everyone else, but they are ruthlessly optimised to make money. That's performance too.

You can carry on. For each definition of "top end", there is a real-life example of software matching it.

One can moan about the market rewarding mediocrity, but we, as technologists, all have better things to do instead of endless hand-wringing, really.

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

#660

Post by tliltocatl »

archargelod wrote: post #549
mamcx wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software In fact, the realization is that the market buy support . And that includes google and other companies that lack much of human support. This is the key. Support is manifested in many ways: * There is information about it (docs, videos, blogs, ...) * There is people that help me ('look ma, this is how you use google') * There…

So you're telling me that if companies want to optimize profitability, they’d release inefficient, bug-ridden software with bad UI—forcing customers to pay for support, extended help, and bug fixes? Suddenly, everything in this crazy world is starting to make sense.

Afaik, SAS does exactly that (haven't any experience with them personally, just retelling gossips). Also Matlab. Not that they are BAD, it's just that 95% of matlab code could be python or even fortran with less effort. But matlab have really good support (aka telling the people in charge how they are tailored to solve this exact problem).
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