6 ms·

At some point I believe we will start to bump up against the limits we saw in the first three computer revolutions (tubes, transistors, integrated circuits). Th

At some point I believe we will start to bump up against the limits we saw in the first three computer revolutions (tubes, transistors, integrated circuits). This will cause the pendulum to swing from commodification to optimization. What I mean is, you won't be able to snap your fingers and scale up or out, thus optimization will begin again in earnest. Clearly this isn't always the case: GPU shaders, crypto ASICs, video processing... there are plenty of places where optimization is crucial for high performance loop tuning. But optimization hasn't been required across the board like there was just before the three big innovations I described hit.

c9fc42ad 5y ago
This tends to happen at a smaller scale with gaming consoles. Towards the end of a generation, the games coming out usually perform/look a lot better than the ones at the beginning of the generation. I'm assuming due to a lot more careful optimizations due to not being able to change the hardware. I've always been curious about how far we could really push modern computers if somebody wanted to spend the time going to the lengths in the original post when creating practical software. Of course it's usually not worth the tradeoff, but it's interesting to think about.
hackbinary 5y ago
Protip: while you made a great comment, ND people like me, and even most NT people have diffivulty ingesting walls of text like what you just wrote. Please, therefore, breakup your text into paragraphs every 3 sentences. It does wonders for readability for just about everyone. :)
- saagarjha 5y ago
  …it’s literally four sentences.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  You have multiple paragraphs longer than mine in your history.
  - hackbinary 5y ago
    This is what we call shifting the the goalposts and tu quoque fallacious attacks. Just because I have erred in the past does not mean I cannot suggest to you to improve your outputs. Or, I have had learnings previously, and I am simply trying to pass them along to you. Here is another protip: dinae be so defensive. I was not attacking you personally, but your reply clearly was an attempt to attack me.

c9fc42ad 5y ago

This tends to happen at a smaller scale with gaming consoles. Towards the end of a generation, the games coming out usually perform/look a lot better than the ones at the beginning of the generation. I'm assuming due to a lot more careful optimizations due to not being able to change the hardware. I've always been curious about how far we could really push modern computers if somebody wanted to spend the time going to the lengths in the original post when creating practical software. Of course it's usually not worth the tradeoff, but it's interesting to think about.

hackbinary 5y ago

Protip: while you made a great comment, ND people like me, and even most NT people have diffivulty ingesting walls of text like what you just wrote. Please, therefore, breakup your text into paragraphs every 3 sentences. It does wonders for readability for just about everyone. :)

saagarjha 5y ago
…it’s literally four sentences.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
You have multiple paragraphs longer than mine in your history.
- hackbinary 5y ago
  This is what we call shifting the the goalposts and tu quoque fallacious attacks. Just because I have erred in the past does not mean I cannot suggest to you to improve your outputs. Or, I have had learnings previously, and I am simply trying to pass them along to you. Here is another protip: dinae be so defensive. I was not attacking you personally, but your reply clearly was an attempt to attack me.