5 ms·

Don't forget the waste caused by people throwing away devices that are "too slow", and the resources required to build new computers/phones. Somewhere I saw a

Don't forget the waste caused by people throwing away devices that are "too slow", and the resources required to build new computers/phones. Somewhere I saw a rough figure about phones. Something like: if everyone was able to keep their phone one year longer, it would be the equivalent of 600,000 cars off the road or something. (Just looked it up - source is possibly the founder of iFixit). But you know, development velocity or whatever.

einpoklum 4y ago
Actually, in the PC/laptop space, I believe this phenomenon has been waning somewhat over the past... oh, the better part of a decade. This is a result of: * Single-core performance no longer dramatically improving - almost plateauing * The rate or extent of "bells and whistles" and other OS overhead being added - decreasing. * Budget consumer CPUs having reached smooth desktop performance (with sufficient memory and and an SSD) already, even with multiple applications open. .. and all of these had not been the case during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Now, if your machine's hardware doesn't brake down - and you're just a plain desktop user - your motivation for throwing away your machine is quite limited. --- Of course, this is not the case for smartphones, we're still on the roller-coaster there.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  I would say we're coming to that point with phones too. Phones have also largely reached the end of their breakneck big-annual-improvement phase; There's little annual improvement in performance, power consumption, form factor or feature set. Screen resolutions are plenty high for most users, similar for the cameras. Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates.
  - rurp 4y ago
    > Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates. Absolutely! Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. Regular users generally don't care one bit about whatever fad style or trendy feature got added with the latest update, they are just annoyed that their buttons or icons got moved around.
    - genocidicbunny 4y ago
      > Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. And many tech folks too. My phone is a tool, not a lifestyle. I don't need my tools constantly changing out from under me.
      - CrimsonCape 4y ago
        Here's an anecdote. I like to look at websites that offer "last season" outdoor gear at discounted prices. The major frustration is that the sizes are never my size of shoe/shirt/etc because the popular sizes are gone sooner than the odd sizes. There is no "domain-specific" improvement (The "domain" in this case being "last season discount retailer.") to the basic shopping cart ecommerce experience that would give me a way to flag my interested product or product category so that I could be notified when the item is in-stock. This basic feature would vastly improve my interaction with the websites and would probably result in higher sales. In today's world, that's a huge ask to have that kind of feature implemented. Heck, even asking for a good "syntaxable" search seems to be an impossible ask. Imagine being able to search "Category: Shoes; Brand: "North Face"; Price: >50&&<120" The fact that this is never implemented yet billions of dollars are poured into ecommerce development kinda reflects how the industry is focused on improving the tooling/back end and not the design. I see vastly more posts in this vein: "Nobody really knows how this complicated spaghetti-like system works" than in this vein: "X tool allowed us to build a Maserati of our domain."
josephg 4y ago
Yep. Most things most users do on our computers could be done just fine on a computer from 10 years ago. I think we're on a performance treadmill like this: - Developers get new, fast devices (yay). We make our software just fast enough to run smoothly (enough) on our own devices. Then we ship it. - Users' computers are slower than the developers' computers. Users experience is bad because the software is slow. - Users buy new computers too. Money is poured into R&D for even faster computers. - Hardware companies release faster hardware - Developers buy new, fast computers And the cycle continues. For general purpose computing, there's not really any meaningful difference between my computer today and my computer 15 years ago. But I can't use that old computer, because modern programs don't work well on it any more. I can't imagine how slow modern Discord or Microsoft Teams would run on my old 2012 macbook air - even though that machine is orders of magnitude faster than the computer I was using to chat on IRC in the late 90s. I'm low key convinced that if computers and phones stopped getting faster tomorrow, the software industry would grumble but get on with things and adapt. Users wouldn't really notice anything change, except we'd all be richer because we would no longer need to buy new computers every few years. There's a few notable exceptions of course: modern AI, video production & animation, and massive cloud services (like Google and Netflix) who actually optimize their code. I'm on the fence about compilers - do LLVM & rustc really need to be that slow? Netflix might never make it to 8k video (boo hoo). And ray traced video games might not happen. But the average consumer would probably be delighted. And the savings to the environment would be insane.
- chlorion 4y ago
  This is interesting, but maybe our software is doing a lot more today than it was back then. I guess the question is whether those things are necessary. There is of course some software that is just slower because of negligence too. I remember using a computer 20 years, and they would take multiple minutes to boot into something that was usable, and executing programs would take quite a few seconds because the HDD had to go searching for stuff the executable required. My current desktop has a Samsung 970 NVME SSD, it boots up in like 20 seconds or something, and everything is extremely responsive as far as reading from the disk goes. It's interesting that the one thing that hasn't been completely neutralized by the treadmill is SSDs! Also the LLVM and Rustc thing is interesting. I imagine they are doing much more advanced optimizations than what compilers did 20 years ago so they probably have a good excuse, but I think these optimizations are also neutralized by the treadmill eventually.

einpoklum 4y ago

Actually, in the PC/laptop space, I believe this phenomenon has been waning somewhat over the past... oh, the better part of a decade. This is a result of: * Single-core performance no longer dramatically improving - almost plateauing * The rate or extent of "bells and whistles" and other OS overhead being added - decreasing. * Budget consumer CPUs having reached smooth desktop performance (with sufficient memory and and an SSD) already, even with multiple applications open. .. and all of these had not been the case during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Now, if your machine's hardware doesn't brake down - and you're just a plain desktop user - your motivation for throwing away your machine is quite limited. --- Of course, this is not the case for smartphones, we're still on the roller-coaster there.

genocidicbunny 4y ago
I would say we're coming to that point with phones too. Phones have also largely reached the end of their breakneck big-annual-improvement phase; There's little annual improvement in performance, power consumption, form factor or feature set. Screen resolutions are plenty high for most users, similar for the cameras. Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates.
- rurp 4y ago
  > Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates. Absolutely! Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. Regular users generally don't care one bit about whatever fad style or trendy feature got added with the latest update, they are just annoyed that their buttons or icons got moved around.
  - genocidicbunny 4y ago
    > Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. And many tech folks too. My phone is a tool, not a lifestyle. I don't need my tools constantly changing out from under me.
    - CrimsonCape 4y ago
      Here's an anecdote. I like to look at websites that offer "last season" outdoor gear at discounted prices. The major frustration is that the sizes are never my size of shoe/shirt/etc because the popular sizes are gone sooner than the odd sizes. There is no "domain-specific" improvement (The "domain" in this case being "last season discount retailer.") to the basic shopping cart ecommerce experience that would give me a way to flag my interested product or product category so that I could be notified when the item is in-stock. This basic feature would vastly improve my interaction with the websites and would probably result in higher sales. In today's world, that's a huge ask to have that kind of feature implemented. Heck, even asking for a good "syntaxable" search seems to be an impossible ask. Imagine being able to search "Category: Shoes; Brand: "North Face"; Price: >50&&<120" The fact that this is never implemented yet billions of dollars are poured into ecommerce development kinda reflects how the industry is focused on improving the tooling/back end and not the design. I see vastly more posts in this vein: "Nobody really knows how this complicated spaghetti-like system works" than in this vein: "X tool allowed us to build a Maserati of our domain."

josephg 4y ago

Yep. Most things most users do on our computers could be done just fine on a computer from 10 years ago. I think we're on a performance treadmill like this: - Developers get new, fast devices (yay). We make our software just fast enough to run smoothly (enough) on our own devices. Then we ship it. - Users' computers are slower than the developers' computers. Users experience is bad because the software is slow. - Users buy new computers too. Money is poured into R&D for even faster computers. - Hardware companies release faster hardware - Developers buy new, fast computers And the cycle continues. For general purpose computing, there's not really any meaningful difference between my computer today and my computer 15 years ago. But I can't use that old computer, because modern programs don't work well on it any more. I can't imagine how slow modern Discord or Microsoft Teams would run on my old 2012 macbook air - even though that machine is orders of magnitude faster than the computer I was using to chat on IRC in the late 90s. I'm low key convinced that if computers and phones stopped getting faster tomorrow, the software industry would grumble but get on with things and adapt. Users wouldn't really notice anything change, except we'd all be richer because we would no longer need to buy new computers every few years. There's a few notable exceptions of course: modern AI, video production & animation, and massive cloud services (like Google and Netflix) who actually optimize their code. I'm on the fence about compilers - do LLVM & rustc really need to be that slow? Netflix might never make it to 8k video (boo hoo). And ray traced video games might not happen. But the average consumer would probably be delighted. And the savings to the environment would be insane.

chlorion 4y ago
This is interesting, but maybe our software is doing a lot more today than it was back then. I guess the question is whether those things are necessary. There is of course some software that is just slower because of negligence too. I remember using a computer 20 years, and they would take multiple minutes to boot into something that was usable, and executing programs would take quite a few seconds because the HDD had to go searching for stuff the executable required. My current desktop has a Samsung 970 NVME SSD, it boots up in like 20 seconds or something, and everything is extremely responsive as far as reading from the disk goes. It's interesting that the one thing that hasn't been completely neutralized by the treadmill is SSDs! Also the LLVM and Rustc thing is interesting. I imagine they are doing much more advanced optimizations than what compilers did 20 years ago so they probably have a good excuse, but I think these optimizations are also neutralized by the treadmill eventually.