The title is over-reach but the topic the article addresses is sound. “The end” is too discontinuous-sounding, as mentioned in the article itself. There is no

The title is over-reach but the topic the article addresses is sound. “The end” is too discontinuous-sounding, as mentioned in the article itself. There is no cliff, just entering into a new regime, in the broadest technological sense of the term. One odd moment: “Thompson and his colleagues showed that they could get a computationally intensive calculation to run some 47 times faster just by switching from Python, a popular general-purpose programming language, to the more efficient C. That’s because C, while it requires more work from the programmer, greatly reduces the required number of operations, making a program run much faster. Further tailoring the code to take full advantage of a chip with 18 processing cores sped things up even more. In just 0.41 seconds, the researchers got a result that took seven hours with Python code. That sounds like good news for continuing progress, but Thompson worries it also signals the decline of computers as a general purpose technology.“ I think that last sentence suggests that many of the programming activities that have provided similar or greater gains that many HN readers have done over the decades have signaled, perhaps even caused, the decline of computers as a general purpose technology. Shame on us. Note this is in a MIT publication. This is why tech writers need to review their copy with Subject Matter Experts.