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

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.

> 20 hour workweek etc

We have that already. It's called part-time jobs. Usually they don't pay as much as full-time jobs, provide no health insurance or other benefits, etc.

Yes, this is an observation I've made about the illusion of choice in so-called free markets.

In actuality, everyone is doing the same thing and their decisions are already made for them. Companies don't just act evil because they are evil. They act evil because all they can ever be is evil. If they don't, then they lose. So what's left?

Facebook becoming an ad-ridden disaster was, in a way, predestined. Unavoidable.

Indeed, and I don't know why people keep saying that we ever thought the 20 hour workweek was feasible, because there is always more work to be done. Work expands to fill the constraints available, similar to Parkinson's Law.

This misses a huge part of the story, increase in productive, means a large economy, means more efficient use of resources, means compensation goes up over time. If you want to live the live of somebody that did 40h a week 40 years ago and only work 20h, you can already have most of that, and still have many options somebody back then didn't have that is virtually free.

The actual realization is that most people simple rather work 40h a week (or more) and spend their money on whatever they want to spend their money on.

Specially many of us here, can do so easily. I personally work 80% and could reduce it further if my goal was maximum leisure.

By far the biggest reason it doesn't feel that way, is that housing polices in most of the Western world have been utterly and completely braindead. That and the ever increasing cost of health care as people get ever older and older.

Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic.

The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it.

You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

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.

Pure marketing doesn’t always win. There are counter examples.

Famously Toyota beat many companies that were basing their strategy on marketing rather than quality.

They were able to use quality as part of their marketing.

My father in law worked in a car showroom and talks about when they first installed carpet there.

No one did that previously. The subtle point to customers being that Toyotas didn’t leak oil.

IIRC, Microsoft was also charging Dell for a copy of Windows even if they didn't install it on the PC! And yeah OS/2 was ahead by miles.

This is a massive oversimplification of the Windows and OS/2 story. Anybody that has studied this understands that it wasn't just marketing. I can't actually believe that anybody who has read deeply about this believes it was just marketing.

And its also a cherry picked example. There are so many counter-examples, how Sun out-competed HP, IBM, Appollo and DEC. Or how AMD in the last 10 years out-competed Intel, sure its all marketing. I could go on with 100s of examples just in computer history.

Marketing is clearly an important aspect in business, nobody denies that. But there are many other things that are important as well. You can have the best marketing in the world, if you fuck up your production and your supply chain, your company is toast. You can have the best marketing in the world, if your product sucks, people will reject it (see the Blackbarry Strom as an nice example). You can have the best marketing in the world, if your finance people fuck up, the company might go to shit anyway.

Anybody that reaches for simple explanations like 'marketing always wins' is just talking nonsense.

You can do this in Scala[0], and you'll get type inference and compile time type checking, informational messages (like the compiler prints an INFO message showing the SQL query that it generates), and optional schema checking against a database for the queries your app will run. e.g.

    case class Person(name: String, age: Int)
    inline def onlyJoes(p: Person) = p.name == "Joe"

    // run a SQL query
    run( query[Person].filter(p => onlyJoes(p)) )
    
    // Use the same function with a Scala list
    val people: List[Person] = ...
    val joes = people.filter(p => onlyJoes(p))

    // Or, after defining some typeclasses/extension methods
    val joesFromDb = query[Person].onlyJoes.run
    val joesFromList = people.onlyJoes

[0] https://github.com/zio/zio-protoquill?tab=readme-ov-file#sha...

[1] https://github.com/zio

[2] https://github.com/zio/zio-http

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:

    var set = new HashSet<Employee>();

    @JdbcRepository(dialect = ANSI) interface EmployeeQueries : CrudRepository<Employee, String> {
        fun findByCountryAndGender(country: String, gender: String): List<Employee>
    }

    val femaleUSEmployees = employees.findByCountryAndGender("US", "Female")

Your argument makes sense. I guess now it's your time to shine and to be the change you want to see in the world.

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

Clojure, friend. Clojure.

Other functional languages, too, but Clojure. You get exactly this, minus all the <'s =>'s ;'s and other irregularities, and minus all the verbosity...

I consider functional thinking and ability to use list comprehensions/LINQ/lodash/etc. to be fundamental skills in today's software world. The what, not the how!

Could you link any of these studies?

I couldn't find anything specific when searching.

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 suggestion for another name. It’s not that people want low quality. Nobody actually wants defective products. People are just price sensitive, and often don’t know what high quality is or how to find it (or how to price it), so obviously market forces will find a balance somewhere. And that balance is extremely likely to be lower on the quality scale than what people who care about high quality prefer. This is why I think you’re right about the software market tolerating low quality; it’s because market forces push everything toward low quality.

> [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.

She should double the price so customers wonder why hers costs so much more. Then have a sales pitch explaining the difference.

Some customers WANT to pay a premium just so they know they’re getting the best product.

To he blunt

this website looks like a scam website redirecter the one where you have to click on 49 ads and wait for 3 days before you get to your link the video playing immediately makes me think that's a Google ad unrelated to what the website is about the different font styles reminds me of the middle school HTML projects we had to do with each line in a different size and font face to prove that we know how to use <font face> and <font size>. All its missing is a jokerman font

Offer an eau de parfum line for price anchoring, and market segmentation. Win win.

Is that what the market demands, or is the market unable to differentiate?

From the site there's a huge assumption that potential customers are aware of what extrait de parfum is vs eau de parfum (or even eau de toilette!).

Might be worth a call out that these fragrances are in fact a standard above the norm.

"The highest quality fragrance money can buy" kind of thing.

> 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.

Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?

Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more.

The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc

But I understand your point.

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

> but only if they know the software is higher quality.

I assume all software is shit in some fashion because every single software license includes a clause that has "no fitness for any particular purpose" clause. Meaning, if your word processor doesn't process words, you can't sue them.

When we get consumer protection laws that require that software does what is says on the tin quality will start mattering.

> You are comparing applications with wildly different features and UI. That's neither an argument for nor against performance as an important quality metric.

Disagree, the main reason so many apps are using "slow" languages/frameworks is precisely that it allows them to develop way more features way quicker than more efficient and harder languages/frameworks.

> You are comparing applications with wildly different features and UI. That's neither an argument for nor against performance as an important quality metric.

I never said performance wasn't an important quality metric, just that it's not the only quality metric. If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind.

> How fast you can compile, start and execute some particular code matters. The experience of using a program that performs well if you use it daily matters.

Like any other feature, whether or not performance is important depends on the user and context. Chrome being faster than IE8 at general browsing (rendering pages, opening tabs) was very noticeable. uv/ruff being faster than pip/poetry is important because of how the tools integrate into performance-sensitive development workflows. Does Slack taking 5-10 seconds to load on startup matter? -- to me not really, because I have it come up on boot and forget about it until my next system update forced reboot. Do I use LibreOffice or Word and Excel, even though LibreOffice is faster? -- I use Word/Excel because I've run into annoying compatibility issues enough times with LO to not bother. LibreOffice could reduce their startup and file load times to 10 picoseconds and I would still use MS Office, because I just want my damn documents to keep the same formatting my colleagues using MS Office set on their Windows computers.

Now of course I would love the best of all worlds; programs to be fast and have all the functionality I want! In reality, though, companies can't afford to build every feature, performance included, and need to pick and choose what's important.

Some vendors even make it impossible to get information. See Oracle and Microsoft forbidding publishing benchmarks for their SQL databases.

There's likely some, although it depends on the environment. The more users of the system there are, the more there are going to be reviews and people will know that it's kind of buggy. Most people seem more interested in cost or features though, as long as they're not losing hours of work due to bugs.

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).

Suddenly, Microsoft makes perfect sense!

What did you replace Docker with?

Podman might have some limited API compatibility, but it's a completely different tool. Just off the bat it's not compatible with Skaffold, apparently.

That an alternate tool might perform better is compatible with the claim that performance alone is never the only difference between software.

Podman might be faster than Docker, but since it's a different tool, migrating to it would involve figuring out any number of breakage in my toolchain that doesn't feel worth it to me since performance isn't the only thing that matters.

I swapped Terminal for iTerm2 because I wanted specific features, not because of performance. iTerm2 is probably slower for all I care.

Another example is that I use oh-my-zsh which is adds weirdly long startup time to a shell session, but it lets me use plugins that add things like git status and kubectl context to my prompt instead of fiddling with that myself.

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 sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional, and their core functionality has regressed significantly in the last decade. I’m not talking about features that I prefer, but as an example if you load two links in Reddit in two different tabs my experience has been that it’s 50/50 if they’ll actually both load or if one gets stuck either way skeletons.

What timescale are we talking about? Many DOS stock and accounting applications were basically instantaneous. There are some animations on iPhone that you can't disable that take longer than a series of keyboard actions of a skilled operator in the 90s. Windows 2k with a stripped shell was way more responsive that today's systems as long as you didn't need to hit the harddrives.

The "instant" today is really laggy compared to what we had. Opening Slack takes 5s on a flagship phone and opening a channel which I just had open and should be fully cached takes another 2s. When you type in JIRA the text entry lags and all the text on the page blinks just a tiny bit (full redraw). When pages load on non-flagship phones (i.e. most of the world), they lag a lot, which I can see on monitoring dashboards.

I guess you don't need to wrestle with Xcode?

Somehow the Xcode team managed to make startup and some features in newer Xcode versions slower than older Xcode versions running on old Intel Macs.

E.g. the ARM Macs are a perfect illustration that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

After a very short 'free lunch' right after the Intel => ARM transition we're now back to the same old software performance regression spiral (e.g. new software will only be optimized until it feels 'fast enough', and that 'fast enough' duration is the same no matter how fast the hardware is).

Another excellent example is the recent release of the Oblivion Remaster on Steam (which uses the brand new UE5 engine):

On my somewhat medium-level PC I have to reduce the graphics quality in the Oblivion Remaster so much that the result looks worse than 14-year old Skyrim (especially outdoor environments), and that doesn't even result in a stable 60Hz frame rate, while Skyrim runs at a rock-solid 60Hz and looks objectively better in the outdoors.

E.g. even though the old Skyrim engine isn't by far as technologically advanced as UE5 and had plenty of performance issues at launch on a ca. 2010 PC, the Oblivion Remaster (which uses a "state of the art" engine) looks and performs worse than its own 14 years old predecessor.

I'm sure the UE5-based Oblivion remaster can be properly optimized to beat Skyrim both in looks and performance, but apparently nobody cared about that during development.

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

There's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerates because they don't compare them back to back very often (there are perceptual differences between framerates of 30, 60, 120, 300, and 500, at the minimum, even on displays incapable of refreshing at these higher speeds), but you'll often hear people say that 60 fps is "silky smooth," which is not true whatsoever lol.

If you haven't compared high and low latency directly next to each other then there are good odds that you don't know what it looks like. There was a twitter video from awhile ago that did a good job showing it off that's one of the replies to the OP. It's here: https://x.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960

Sorry if I'm too presumptuous, however; you might be completely correct and instant is instant in your case.

I'd wager that a 2021 MacBook, like the one I have, is stronger than the laptop used by majority of people in the world.

Life on an entry or even mid level windows laptop is a very different world.

A mix of both. There are large number of websites that are inefficiently written using up unnecessary amounts of resources. Semi-modern devices make up for that by just having a massive amount of computing power.

However, you also need to consider 2 additional factors. Macbooks and iPhones, even 4 year old ones, have usually been at the upper end of the scale for processing power. (When compared to the general mass-market of private end-consumer devices)

Try doing the same on a 4 year old 400 Euro laptop and it might look a bit different. Also consider your connection speed and latency. I usually have no loading issue either. But I have a 1G fiber connection. My parents don't.

To note, people will have wildly different tolerance to delays and lag.

On the extreme, my retired parents don't feel the difference between 5s or 1s when loading a window or clicking somewhere. I offered a switch to a new laptop, cloning their data, and they didn't give a damn and just opened the laptop the closest to them.

Most people aren't that desensitized, but for some a 600ms delay is instantaneous when for other it's 500ms too slow.

I don’t think abundance vs speed is the right lens.

No user actually wants abundance. They use few programs and would benwfit if those programs were optimized.

Established apps could be optimized to the hilt.

But they seldom are.

Did people make this exchange or did __the market__? I feel like we're assigning a lot of intention to a self-accelerating process.

You add a new layer of indirection to fix that one problem on the previous layer, and repeat it ad infinitum until everyone is complaining about having too many layers of indirection, yet nobody can avoid interacting with them, so the only short-term solution is a yet another abstraction.

> Most of it was exchanged for abstractions which traded runtime speed for the ability to create apps quickly and cheaply.

Really? Because while abstractions like that exist (i.e. a webserver frameworks, reactivity, SQL and ORMs etc), I would argue that these aren't the abstractions that cause the most maintenance and performance issues. These are usually in the domain/business application and often not something that made anything quicker to develop or anything, but instead created by a developer that just couldn't help themselves

IMO, the prime offender is simply not understanding fundamentals. From simple things like “a network call is orders of magnitude slower than a local disk, which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM…” (and moreover, not understanding that EBS et al. are networked disks, albeit highly specialized and optimized), or doing insertions to a DB by looping over a list and writing each row individually.

I have struggled against this long enough that I don’t think there is an easy fix. My current company is the first I’ve been at that is taking it seriously, and that’s only because we had a spate of SEV0s. It’s still not easy, because a. I and the other technically-minded people have to find the problems, then figure out how to explain them b. At its heart, it’s a culture war. Properly normalizing your data model is harder than chucking everything into JSON, even if the former will save you headaches months down the road. Learning how to profile code (and fix the problems) may not be exactly hard, but it’s certainly harder than just adding more pods to your deployment.

Use of underpowered databases and abstractions that don't eliminate round-trips is a big one. The hardware is fast but apps take seconds to load because on the backend there's a lot of round-trips to the DB and back, and the query mix is unoptimized because there are no DBAs anymore.

It's the sort of thing that can be handled via better libraries, if people use them. Instead of Hibernate use a mapper like Micronaut Data. Turn on roundtrip diagnostics in your JDBC driver, look for places where they can be eliminated by using stored procedures. Have someone whose job is to look out for slow queries and optimize them, or pay for a commercial DB that can do that by itself. Also: use a database that lets you pipeline queries on a connection and receive the results asynchronously, along with server languages that make it easy to exploit that for additional latency wins.

Unicode worked since Plan9. And antialiasing it's from the early 90's.

You’re describing a situation where I - or a very smart compiler can choose when to bounds check or not to make that intelligent realization.

> Your understanding of how bounds checking works in modern languages and compilers is not up to date.

One I am familiar with is Swift - which does exactly this because it’s a library feature of Array.

Which languages will always be able to determine through function calls, indirect addressing, etc whether it needs to bounds check or not?

And how will I know if it succeeded or whether something silently failed?

> if you have an image processing algorithm that is literally reading every single pixel one-by-one to perform a 2-instruction operation and calculating bounds check on every access in the year 2025, you're doing a lot of things very wrong

I agree. And note this is an example of a scenario you can encounter in other forms.

> Do you have any examples at all? Or is this just speculation?

Yes. Java and python are not competitive for graphics and audio processing.

> The bounds only need to be checked once for a for loop, not on each iteration.

This is a theoretical argument. It depends on the compiler being able to see that’s what you’re doing and prove that there is no other mutation.

> abominations of C and C++

Sounds like you don’t understand the design choices that made this languages successful.

> However these days the majority of the bad attacks are social

You're going to have to cite a source for that.

Bounds checking is one mechanism that addresses memory safety vulnerabilities. According to MSFT and CISA[1], nearly 70% of CVEs are due to memory safety problems.

You're saying that we shouldn't solve one (very large) part of the (very large) problem because there are other parts of the problem that the solution wouldn't address?

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-saf...

I am not suggesting we refuse to close one window because another window is open. That would be silly. Of course we should close the window. Just pointing out that the "950X" example figure cited fails to account for the full cost (or overestimates the benefit).

Playing devil's advocate, compare their popularity. You may have fallen prey to the base rate fallacy.

> it is very unlikely that a smaller company can.

I think it's the reverse: a small company doesn't have the liquidity, buying power or ability to convert more resource into more money like Google.

And of course a lot of small companies will be paying Google with a fat margin to use their cloud.

Getting by with less resources, or even on-premise reduced hardware will be a way bigger win. That's why they'll pay a DBA full time to optimize their database needs to reduce costs 2 to 3x the salary. Or have full team of infra guys mostly dealing with SRE and performance.

> If salaries dominate over compute costs, then minimizing the latter at the expense of the former is counterproductive.

And with client side software, compute costs approach 0 (as the company isn’t paying for it).

> single core performance has not improved.

Single core performance has improved, but at a much slower rate than I experienced as a kid.

Over the last 10 years, we are something like 120% improvement in single core performance.

And, not for nothing, efficiency has become much more important. More CPU performance hasn't been a major driving factor vs having a laptop that runs for 12 hours. It's simply easier to add a bunch of cores and turn them all off (or slow them down) to gain power efficiency.

Not to say the performance story would be vastly different with more focus on performance over efficiency. But I'd say it does have an effect on design choices.

Single core performance has improved about 10x in 20 years

> * Video streaming services

Netflix video streaming launched in 2007.

> * VSCode-style IDEs (you really would not have appreciated Visual Studio or Eclipse of the time..)

I used VS2005 a little bit in the past few years, and I was surprised to see that it contains most of the features that I want from an IDE. Honestly, I wouldn't mind working on a C# project in VS2005 - both C# 2.0 and VS2005 were complete enough that they'd only be a mild annoyance compared to something more modern.

> partial autopilot features aside from 1970's cruise control

Radar cruise control was a fairly common option on mid-range to high-end cars by 2007. It's still not standard in all cars today (even though it _is_ standard on multiple economy brands). Lane departure warning was also available in several cars. I will hand it to you that L2 ADAS didn't really exist the way it does today though.

The future is unevenly distributed.

> Video streaming services

We watched a stream of the 1994 World Cup. There was a machine at MIT which forwarded the incoming video to an X display window

    xhost +machine.mit.edu

To be sure, it was only a couple of frames per second, but it was video, and an audience collected to watch it.

> EV Cars (that anyone wanted to buy)

People wanted to buy the General Motors EV1 in the 1990s. Quoting Wikipedia, "Despite favorable customer reception, GM believed that electric cars occupied an unprofitable niche of the automobile market. The company ultimately crushed most of the cars, and in 2001 GM terminated the EV1 program, disregarding protests from customers."

I know someone who managed to buy one. It was one of the few which had been sold rather than leased.

...TomTom just getting off the ground

TomTom was founded in 1991 and released their first GPS device in 2004. By 2007 they were pretty well established.

I worked for a 3rd party food delivery service in the summer of 2007. Ordering was generally done by phone, then the office would text us (the drivers) order details for pickup & delivery. They provided GPS navigation devices, but they were stand-alone units that were slower & less accurate than modern ones, plus they charged a small fee for using it that came out of our pay.

Your post seems entirely anachronistic.

2007 is the year we did get video streaming services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_iPlayer

Steam was selling games, even third party ones, for years by 2007.

I'm not sure what a "VS-Code style IDE" is, but I absolutely did appreciate Visual Studio ( and VB6! ) prior to 2007.

2007 was in fact the peak of TomTom's profit, although GPS navigation isn't really the same as general purpose mapping application.

Grocery delivery was well established, Tesco were doing that in 1996. And the idea of takeaways not doing delivery is laughable, every establishment had their own delivery people.

Yes, there are some things on that list that didn't exist, but the top half of your list is dominated by things that were well established by 2007.

most of that list is iteration, not innovation. like going from "crappy colour printer" to "not-so-crappy colour printer"

>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

Stupid question, since I know next to nothing about exchanges and regulations... but couldn't you just process serially by security?

E.G. if user A wants to buy Apple stock and user B wants to buy Facebook stock, does it matter which order came first? And if yes, why?

HFT would love to do more complex calculations for some of their trades. They often make the compromise of using a faster algorithm that is known to be right only 60% of the time vs the better but slower algorithm that is right 90% of the time.

That is a different problem from yours though and so it has different considerations. In some areas I/O dominates, in some it does not.

I work in card payments transaction processing and IO dominates. You need to have big models and lots of data to authorize a transaction. And you need that data as fresh as possible and as close to your compute as possible... but you're always dominated by IO. Computing the authorization is super cheap.

Tends to scale vertically rather than horizontally. Give me massive caches and wide registers and I can keep them full. For now though a lot of stuff is run on commodity cloud hardware so... eh.

I feel like the argument is similar to that of all corporate externality pushes.

For example "polluting the air/water, requiring end-users to fill landfills with packaging and planned obscolescence" allows a company to more cheaply offer more products to you as a consumer.. but now everyone collectively has to live in a more polluted world with climate change and wasted source material converted to expensive and/or dangerous landfills and environmental damage from fracking and strip mining.

But that's still not different from theft. A company that sells you things that "Fell off the back of a truck" is in a position to offer you lower costs and greater variety, as well. Aren't they?

Our shared resources need to be properly managed: neither siphoned wastefully nor ruined via polution. That proper management is a cost, and it either has to be borne by those using the resources and creating the waste, or it is theft of a shared resource and tragedy of the commons.

It's like ignoring backwards compatibility. That is really cheap since all the cost is pushed to end-users (that have to relearn the UI) or second/third-party developers (that have to rewrite their client code to work with a new API). But it's OK since everyone is doing it and also without all those pointless rewrites many of us would not have a job.

> has been externalized to customers in search of ill-gotten profits.

'Externality' does not mean 'thing I dislike'. If it is the customers running the software or waiting the extra couple of seconds, that's not an externality. By definition. (WP: "In economics, an externality is an indirect cost (external cost) or benefit (external benefit) to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity.") That is just the customers picking their preferred point on the tradeoff curves.

Also offloaded to the miserable devs maintaining the system.

From what I’m seeing people do on their computers, it barely changed from what they’ve been doing on their pentium 4 one. But now, with Electron-based software and the generals state of Windows, you can’t recommend something older than 4 years. It’s hard to not see it as stealing when you have to buy a 1000+ laptop, when a 400 one could easily do the job if the software were a bit better.

It’s only a tradeoff for the user if the user find the added features useful.

Increasingly, this is not the case. My favorite example here is the Adobe Creative Suite, which for many users useful new features became far and few between some time ~15 years ago. For those users, all they got was a rather absurd degree of added bloat and slowness for essentially the same thing they were using in 2010. These users would’ve almost certainly been happier had 80-90% of the feature work done in that time instead been bug fixes and optimization.

Try loading slack and youtube on a 4 year old laptop. It’s more in the 10s, and good luck if you only have 8GB of ram.

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.

> I just wish developers cared a little bit more than they do.

Ask the nice product owner to stop crushing me with their deadlines and I'll happily oblige.

Balatro was started in vacation time and underwent a ton of tweaking: https://localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh So if it had to be written in C, probably neither of those would have happened.