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Comparing state of the art semiconductors to web browsers feels like an insult honestly In my opinion browesr are just huge mess of shitton of technologies tha

Comparing state of the art semiconductors to web browsers feels like an insult honestly In my opinion browesr are just huge mess of shitton of technologies that are constantly changing/moving, yet fundamentally it is just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor. Nothing novel that we weren't doing before or in other software (OSes, compilers, etc) Meanwhile semico feels to be close to the limits of the physics.

hutzlibu 4y ago
" just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor" Sure, nothing more. Except that this drawing colors on the monitor is plattform independent and used worldwide for all kinds of sandboxed applications and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now. So quite trivial and surely anyone can do it.
- tester756 4y ago
  Sure I made it sound trivial, but that's in the context of comparison with state of the art semiconductor engineering. Semico. engineering is current "rocket science" of 70s. Cross-platform GUIs aren't novel. Frameworks for this shit probably appear every year and are as messy as existing ones. It's a mess, hard mess, but not novelty, not the edge of science / engineering. The problem is to get people to agree on something. >and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now What's so novel about it? SMS or even your Master/Visa cards were doing it for decades IRC, Email too. And of course still: we were using Web browser as platform those things for decades. It's not a bleeding "edge" technology in $currentYear. WebAssembly ecosystem? yet another collection of VMs/Compilers/Intermediate Languages? We were doing it for decades. >sandboxed applications Ok, that's fair point - there's novelty needed. Very often because we try to write technology that's... easy to fuckup? idk - check how huge % of CVEs is related to JIT compiler or because we write it in unsafe languages - check how huge % of CVEs is related to mem. issues. But yea, I agree on security - stuff like postquant crypto and other protections.
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Semico. engineering is current "rocket science" of 70s. Even rocket science is just Newtonian physics, for the most part.
    - tester756 4y ago
      That's the theory behind, the execution is hard. Meanwhile, unlike moon-landings - we're constantly doing web browsers: there was IE, there was Edge, there is Firefox, there is Chromium and its forks. There are smaller browsers with less resources than Google. Yet, we are not trying to figure out how to make web browser possible. We know how to do it, we are doing it for decades. It's just hard due to reasons - money, effort required, moving target, backward compatibility, and probably many other. Can same be said about semico? Do we know what needs to be done to reach "state of the art" for year 2033? Do semico competitors know their roads to match its competitors capabilities 10 years from now? I dont think so.
black3r 4y ago
I get what you mean, but my original thought was about complexity as in how much effort (work & time & money) would it take to re-create the thing and start a competing business, given you already have all the necessary knowledge. Cause it increasingly feels like working on state-of-the-art is only achievable by big players... Under these assumptions it's not really being bleeding edge, how much research went into it, or how hard of a science is behind that make it complex, but rather the amount of components and parts needed to assemble it (and in case of hardware also the rarity of them). When I am talking about state-of-the-art technology there I just mean the newest competitive version of a thing that most people use daily...
jimbokun 4y ago
Modern browsers have code execution environments that very much push the state of the art in compilation and os-like capabilities.
- tester756 4y ago
  >Modern browsers have code execution environments that very much push the state of the art in compilation By which metric?
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Well, I’m not a practitioner in that space, and maybe my perception is out of date. But didn’t the semantics of JavaScript lead to some pretty novel ways of just-in-time compiling code at runtime? When the V8 engine was introduced, for example.

hutzlibu 4y ago

" just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor" Sure, nothing more. Except that this drawing colors on the monitor is plattform independent and used worldwide for all kinds of sandboxed applications and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now. So quite trivial and surely anyone can do it.

tester756 4y ago
Sure I made it sound trivial, but that's in the context of comparison with state of the art semiconductor engineering. Semico. engineering is current "rocket science" of 70s. Cross-platform GUIs aren't novel. Frameworks for this shit probably appear every year and are as messy as existing ones. It's a mess, hard mess, but not novelty, not the edge of science / engineering. The problem is to get people to agree on something. >and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now What's so novel about it? SMS or even your Master/Visa cards were doing it for decades IRC, Email too. And of course still: we were using Web browser as platform those things for decades. It's not a bleeding "edge" technology in $currentYear. WebAssembly ecosystem? yet another collection of VMs/Compilers/Intermediate Languages? We were doing it for decades. >sandboxed applications Ok, that's fair point - there's novelty needed. Very often because we try to write technology that's... easy to fuckup? idk - check how huge % of CVEs is related to JIT compiler or because we write it in unsafe languages - check how huge % of CVEs is related to mem. issues. But yea, I agree on security - stuff like postquant crypto and other protections.
- amelius 4y ago
  > Semico. engineering is current "rocket science" of 70s. Even rocket science is just Newtonian physics, for the most part.
  - tester756 4y ago
    That's the theory behind, the execution is hard. Meanwhile, unlike moon-landings - we're constantly doing web browsers: there was IE, there was Edge, there is Firefox, there is Chromium and its forks. There are smaller browsers with less resources than Google. Yet, we are not trying to figure out how to make web browser possible. We know how to do it, we are doing it for decades. It's just hard due to reasons - money, effort required, moving target, backward compatibility, and probably many other. Can same be said about semico? Do we know what needs to be done to reach "state of the art" for year 2033? Do semico competitors know their roads to match its competitors capabilities 10 years from now? I dont think so.

black3r 4y ago

I get what you mean, but my original thought was about complexity as in how much effort (work & time & money) would it take to re-create the thing and start a competing business, given you already have all the necessary knowledge. Cause it increasingly feels like working on state-of-the-art is only achievable by big players... Under these assumptions it's not really being bleeding edge, how much research went into it, or how hard of a science is behind that make it complex, but rather the amount of components and parts needed to assemble it (and in case of hardware also the rarity of them). When I am talking about state-of-the-art technology there I just mean the newest competitive version of a thing that most people use daily...

jimbokun 4y ago

Modern browsers have code execution environments that very much push the state of the art in compilation and os-like capabilities.

tester756 4y ago
>Modern browsers have code execution environments that very much push the state of the art in compilation By which metric?
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Well, I’m not a practitioner in that space, and maybe my perception is out of date. But didn’t the semantics of JavaScript lead to some pretty novel ways of just-in-time compiling code at runtime? When the V8 engine was introduced, for example.