4 ms·
> Modern programs are 100 times slower, but they definitely aren't 100 times more functional. I don't know if this matters. My terminal is fast enough that I'v
by wyattpeak 6y ago
> Modern programs are 100 times slower, but they definitely aren't 100 times more functional.
I don't know if this matters. My terminal is fast enough that I've never thought about its latency. If my computer doubled in speed, I'd be happy for all of that to go to a 10% increase in terminal functionality, because otherwise it's getting wasted speeding up a task I can't tell is taking any time at all.
- tuatoru 6y agoFine, your computer can render textual characters quickly enough for you. OK. People do other things with computers. Draw. Make music. Edit music and video. Play twitch games. Get them to understand and respond to speech. The extra layers of abstraction--specifically, the latency caused by the layers--really hurts these activities. Saying that today's computers are better than those of the 1980s is very weak tea. They weren't good enough then, and they're still not good enough now.
- kranner 6y ago> People do other things with computers. Draw. Make music. Edit music and video. Play twitch games. Get them to understand and respond to speech. But these compute-intensive tasks are more often than not implemented in lower-level, highly optimised code like BLAS, CUDA, etc. I think your overall point is valid though -- I'm looking at the Gmail tab in Chrome -- but maybe not for these particular examples.
- adrianN 6y agoIf your software doubled in speed you could use a processors that needed only a fraction of the power your current processor needs. Computers consume on the order of 1% of all global energy.