4 ms·

> We're building stuff for people, not other geeks. Of course, but everyone, including the end user, would greatly benefit from a less messy and more elegant,

by d_tr 6y ago

> We're building stuff for people, not other geeks. Of course, but everyone, including the end user, would greatly benefit from a less messy and more elegant, consistent "computing stack". The programmers would be (much) happier, the code would be smaller and better, the product would be better and cheaper and the freed resources could be allocated elsewhere. These improvements (and IMHO there is huge potential for such improvements on all the layers) would bring the same kind of benefits that better automation has brought.

groby_b 6y ago
The end user does not care about the "computing stack" at all. "Does it work" and "is it cheap enough" are the main considerations. And "the product would be better and cheaper" is really wishful thinking. I've worked in this industry for ~4 decades, so I really remember vividly working on those "less messy and more elegant" systems, and no, building a remote-controlled doorbell with life video on one of them would neither be better nor cheaper. The sheer idea of doing this on a 128B machine (Olivetti Programma 101, my first machine) is ludicrous. The idea of processing any kind of video on a DG Nova Eclipse(second one) is... ambitious. The first time we had machines with the processing power to do useful things with video for an at least semi-reasonable price was sometimes around the introduction of the Pentium, with dedicated hardware to process the incoming camera stream. I happen to know because I moved a video package that required a cluster of SGI machines to said P90. Yes, the code was small. The video processing core was also the result of 6 rather sleepless weeks, squeezing every single cycle out of the CPU. I couldn't just grab OpenCV and make it happen. It also involved lots of spectacular hacks and shortcuts that happened to work in the environment in question, but would break down for a general purpose video processing system. Around that same time the world also just barely had figured out the basic ideas behind making WiFi work usefully. But let's assume we would've just hard-wired that camera. If you wanted to do that with an embedded system, you wrote your own networking stack. That takes about 18 months to make work in anything that's not an extremely controlled environment - it turns out people's ability to misread networking specs and produce barely non-compliant systems is spectacular. (Source: Been there, done that ;) So now we have the most basic system working. We have, however, no way of storing the video stream without more dedicated hardware, because realtime compression is not possible. (And if you think that dedicated hardware was less messy and more elegant... /lolsob) Was the total codebase smaller? Yes. Were the programmers happier? F# NO. Would it have had anywhere close to the functionality that something like Ring has? Yeah, really, no. It's size would've been roughly a large desktop tower. It's cost would've been ~$5000. The "good old days" really weren't.
- efreak 6y ago
  A remote controlled doorbell with live video doesn't need video processing. It doesn't need to be digital. It doesn't need to be high resolution unless you're working on sensitive materials--for most people, low-quality analogue would be good enough.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    At this point you're saying "if something that didn't have most of the features of a Ring camera would be built, it would be much simpler". That's a tautology. It's also ignoring market realities. We had doorbell systems with crappy analogue cameras, and nobody wanted them because they were overpriced for what they did, and what they did wasn't particularly useful. (The "good enough" low-res analog cams made for great guessing game who's at the door, but they didn't actually suffice for recognizing who was at the door without them plastering their face right in front of the camera) And this is true for other consumer electronics too - of course you can build something inferior with less effort. But nobody wants that. (I mean, it's not like modern systems get built because somebody just wants to lose some money) This leaves the conclusion that you're mostly arguing for it because you liked the developer "simplicity", and... it wasn't simple. It became simpler once we introduced computers. It became simpler as we built abstraction layers on top. Yes, current systems are harder to understand top-to-bottom, and we paid for ease of development with increased systems complexity. But the rose-colored glasses of a "better past" are just that. Yes, we could understand the things we built more easily, but we couldn't build what we build today in that past.
ska 6y ago
These arguments have been made, mutatis mutandis, roughly since the beginning of computing. At least, certainly since the 70s/80s. Gabriel articulated some of these in "Worse is Better" (89?) but it wasn't new then.

by d_tr 6y ago

groby_b 6y ago

The end user does not care about the "computing stack" at all. "Does it work" and "is it cheap enough" are the main considerations. And "the product would be better and cheaper" is really wishful thinking. I've worked in this industry for ~4 decades, so I really remember vividly working on those "less messy and more elegant" systems, and no, building a remote-controlled doorbell with life video on one of them would neither be better nor cheaper. The sheer idea of doing this on a 128B machine (Olivetti Programma 101, my first machine) is ludicrous. The idea of processing any kind of video on a DG Nova Eclipse(second one) is... ambitious. The first time we had machines with the processing power to do useful things with video for an at least semi-reasonable price was sometimes around the introduction of the Pentium, with dedicated hardware to process the incoming camera stream. I happen to know because I moved a video package that required a cluster of SGI machines to said P90. Yes, the code was small. The video processing core was also the result of 6 rather sleepless weeks, squeezing every single cycle out of the CPU. I couldn't just grab OpenCV and make it happen. It also involved lots of spectacular hacks and shortcuts that happened to work in the environment in question, but would break down for a general purpose video processing system. Around that same time the world also just barely had figured out the basic ideas behind making WiFi work usefully. But let's assume we would've just hard-wired that camera. If you wanted to do that with an embedded system, you wrote your own networking stack. That takes about 18 months to make work in anything that's not an extremely controlled environment - it turns out people's ability to misread networking specs and produce barely non-compliant systems is spectacular. (Source: Been there, done that ;) So now we have the most basic system working. We have, however, no way of storing the video stream without more dedicated hardware, because realtime compression is not possible. (And if you think that dedicated hardware was less messy and more elegant... /lolsob) Was the total codebase smaller? Yes. Were the programmers happier? F# NO. Would it have had anywhere close to the functionality that something like Ring has? Yeah, really, no. It's size would've been roughly a large desktop tower. It's cost would've been ~$5000. The "good old days" really weren't.

efreak 6y ago
A remote controlled doorbell with live video doesn't need video processing. It doesn't need to be digital. It doesn't need to be high resolution unless you're working on sensitive materials--for most people, low-quality analogue would be good enough.
- groby_b 6y ago
  At this point you're saying "if something that didn't have most of the features of a Ring camera would be built, it would be much simpler". That's a tautology. It's also ignoring market realities. We had doorbell systems with crappy analogue cameras, and nobody wanted them because they were overpriced for what they did, and what they did wasn't particularly useful. (The "good enough" low-res analog cams made for great guessing game who's at the door, but they didn't actually suffice for recognizing who was at the door without them plastering their face right in front of the camera) And this is true for other consumer electronics too - of course you can build something inferior with less effort. But nobody wants that. (I mean, it's not like modern systems get built because somebody just wants to lose some money) This leaves the conclusion that you're mostly arguing for it because you liked the developer "simplicity", and... it wasn't simple. It became simpler once we introduced computers. It became simpler as we built abstraction layers on top. Yes, current systems are harder to understand top-to-bottom, and we paid for ease of development with increased systems complexity. But the rose-colored glasses of a "better past" are just that. Yes, we could understand the things we built more easily, but we couldn't build what we build today in that past.

ska 6y ago

These arguments have been made, mutatis mutandis, roughly since the beginning of computing. At least, certainly since the 70s/80s. Gabriel articulated some of these in "Worse is Better" (89?) but it wasn't new then.