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

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")

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 that.

Luxury items however seem to buck this trend, but this is all about conspicuous consumption.

"Market comes first, marketing second, aesthetic third, and functionality a distant fourth" ― Rob Walling in "Start Small, Stay Small"

Apple's aesthetic is more important than the quality (which has been deteriorating lately)

Not on Macintosh. On iPod, iPhone and iPad.

All of those were marketed as just-barely-affordable consumer luxury goods. The physical design and the marketing were more important than the specs.

They focused heavily on the quality of things you can see, i.e. slick visuals, high build quality, even fancy cardboard boxes.

Their software quality itself is about average for the tech industry. It's not bad, but not amazing either. It's sufficient for the task and better than their primary competitor (Windows). But, their UI quality is much higher, and that's what people can check quickly with their own eyes and fingers in a shop.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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

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.

What did you replace Docker with?

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.

How long did your computer take to start up, from power off (and no hibernation, although that presumably wasn't a thing yet), the first time you got to use a computer?

How long did it take the last time you had to use an HDD rather than SSD for your primary drive?

How long did it take the first time you got to use an SSD?

How long does it take today?

Did literally anything other than the drive technology ever make a significant difference in that, in the last 40 years?

> Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook

Instantly? Your applications don't have splash screens? I think you've probably just gotten used to however long it does take.

> 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems.

"An iPhone 11, which has 4GB of RAM (32x what the first-gen model had), can run the operating system and display a current-day webpage that does a few useful things with JavaScript".

This should sound like clearing a very low bar, but it doesn't seem to.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

depends on whether the fact that software can be finished will ever be accepted. If you're constantly redeveloping the same thing to "optimize and streamline my experience" (please don't) then yes, the advantage is dubious. But if not, then the saved value in operating costs keeps increasing as time goes on. It won't make much difference in my homelab, but at datacenter scale it does

> 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 think it'd be pretty funny if to book travel in 2035 you need to use a travel agent that's objectively dumber than a human. We'd be stuck in the eighties again, but this time without each other to rely on.

Of course, that would be suicide for the industry. But I'm not sure investors see that.

I don't think we are gonna go there. Talking is cumbersome. There's a reason, besides social anxiety that people prefer to use self-checkout and electronically order fastfood. There are easier ways to do a lot of things than with words.

I'd bet on maybe ad hoc ai designed ui-s you click but have a voice search when you are confused about something.

> 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.

> * 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> I can watch videos

Can you watch H.265 videos? That's the one limitation I regularly hit on my computer (that I got for free from some company, is pretty old, but is otherwise good enough that I don't think I'll replace it until it breaks). I don't think I can play videos recorded on modern iPhones.

We aren't talking numbers, though. Who cares about embedded? I mean that literally. This is computation invisible by design. If that were sufficient we wouldn't have smartphones.

> fancy radiation-hardened versions

Ha! What's special about rad-hard chips is that they're old designs. You need big geometries to survive cosmic rays, and new chips all have tiny geometries.

So there are two solutions:

1. Find a warehouse full of 20-year old chips.

2. Build a fab to produce 20-year old designs.

Both approaches are used, and both approaches are expensive. (Approach 1 is expensive because as you eventually run out of chips they become very, very valuable and you end up having to build a fab anyway.)

There's more to it than just big geometries but that's a major part of the solution.

I'm not sure what artemis or orion are, but you can blame defense contractors for this. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or Lockheed, even if they deliver unimpressive results at massive cost.