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Compute is cheap if you're doing trivial things that doesn't require much compute. Flip side is that this is true for everyone. If you're only doing trivial th
by marginalia_nu 4y ago
Compute is cheap if you're doing trivial things that doesn't require much compute.
Flip side is that this is true for everyone. If you're only doing trivial things that could have been done 20 years ago, you really don't have much competitive advantage. It's difficult to be competitive in the area of solving easy problems.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago> Compute is cheap if you're doing trivial things that doesn't require much compute. A lot of the work on the web/API side is I/O bound (e.g. waiting for network I/O to database) so unless throughput is your game (e.g. Stackoverflow), it seems that Node is "good enough" for most web/API work.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIt is I/O bound because you aren't using the available compute as much as you could. Modern hardware is insanely powerful. Like it's absolutely bonkers how much you can do on a modern computer. Although most modern applications have capabilities on par with a 2006 flash game.
- CharlieDigital 4y agoAll true, but there's a point of nuance: because cloud is all virtualized, you are taking advantage of the underlying high performance modern hardware because a serverless Node function is one of who know how many on the physical hardware.
- bombcar 4y agoThe vast, vast majority of "business code" even at startups and unicorns like AirBNB and Uber is not doing "compute-bound" things. They're all basically fancy CRUD apps.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYeah, you can do more though, is my point. The CRUD market is pretty crowded. Feels like a lot of the AI hype is the sudden discovery that modern computers are actually pretty fast and squandered doing book-keeping in small-to-medium SQL tables (not that you need LLMs to do interesting things with them). Basically anything that required a data center in the year 2000 you can do on a powerful desktop PC today.
- cutler 4y agoYes, back in 2004 DHH created Rails on an 800Mhz PPC iBook with 256Mb RAM and launched Basecamp for the first year on a server with the same amount of RAM. A bargain basement VPS comes with 4 times the RAM these days.
- cutler 4y agoUber - are you kidding? Their shortest route algorithms are extremely CPU-intensive.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y agoAnd how much of their codebase is this? 0.5%, if that?
- imtringued 4y agoCompute is cheap if you only run one program on your computer. The moment two or more "compute is cheap" programs run on a computer is the moment when cheap is not so cheap anymore. Nothing like IntelliJ crashing during a video conference and then indexing your entire project from scratch... Encoding video in real time is CPU intensive, indexing a hundred libraries adds oil into the fire.