I love your comment. I can only imagine how thrilling it would have been in the early days to see order of magnitude improvements in generalised single threaded

I love your comment. I can only imagine how thrilling it would have been in the early days to see order of magnitude improvements in generalised single threaded computer performance every couple of years. Today, as it happens with all fields that become more complex over time, excitement is found in more nuanced areas. Hardware has become task specific and that makes it exciting to different niches for different reasons. You mention the idea of thinking in cycles and that concept is quite appealing to me. I believe the lack of focus on squeezing performance is a symptom of the accessibility of modern application development combined with the fact that most commercial products wouldn't see a financial benefit to delivering computationally efficient applications. I do wish modern applications were more efficient, but that's a fool's errand as I don't see companies like Spotify rewriting their desktop client in 5 or 6 different native UI kits. Vendors like Microsoft and Apple will never collaborate on a common UI specification outside of web standards, so we are forced to suffer through Electron apps. Heck, Microsoft can't even figure out what UI API it wants to offer for Windows. That said, if you're interested in computer science, we are only just uncovering novel approaches on how languages can allow engineers the ability to ergonomically leverage parallel computation. We see this in languages like Rust and Go - both of which are not perfect but there are so many lessons being learned here. To me, the software engineering and language design world is unbelievably thrilling right now. I do think and wish that large companies who own the platforms would work together more to avoid this standards mishmash application developers must contend with in today's landscape as it would help facilitate greater accessibility to writing efficient cross platform client applications that aren't written using web technologies.