3 ms·
The software being written being slower is of course enabled by those hardware improvements, but 1) the slow software is due to those technical inefficiencies m
by will_pseudonym 6y ago
The software being written being slower is of course enabled by those hardware improvements, but 1) the slow software is due to those technical inefficiencies making software easier/less expensive to produce, and 2) we can still make fast software by not using those inefficient means.
That said, there's something of a problem with that though, because by making 1) more and more prevalent, it makes 2) more expensive due to fewer people choosing to work in that manner. Similar to how consumer technology goods get much less expensive, but have many more defects and issues. That "race to the bottom" makes cheap things cheaper, but makes more expensive things more difficult to make. I don't know what that phenomenon is called specifically, but it's definitely something I've been frustrated by in nearly every industry and product category.
- Apocryphon 6y agoI think you're definitely onto something, and what you're describing is a reoccurring pattern of modern society chasing after quick gains and optimizing certain metrics (e.g. short-term profit) over other considerations. It's not that people or organizations were necessarily more considerate or contemplative in the past, it's just that the processes or technological improvements (e.g. better hardware) weren't there to allow those races to the bottom. And maybe the systems we were living under didn't reward that behavior as much.
- markstos 6y agoThere's also a counterculture of projects that are lightweight alternatives: Sway as a lightweight window manager (among many lightweight WMs), musl vs libc, libressl vs openssl, gemini vs http, Alpine Linux vs Ubuntu, Alacritty as a blazing fast terminal. This software culture is visible on Linux than macOS, but it's alive and thriving.