3 ms·

While this is true and arguably of more importance, the thesis of the article was something quite specific: "the economic cycle that has led to the usage of a c

by dTal 3y ago

While this is true and arguably of more importance, the thesis of the article was something quite specific: "the economic cycle that has led to the usage of a common computing platform, underpinned by rapidly improving universal processors, is giving way to a fragmentary cycle, where economics push users toward divergent computing platforms driven by special purpose processors". This is likely to exacerbate the issue you describe, but it is not caused by it. I don't think your observation was any less true 20 years ago either. There hasn't been a "decline", as such - more of a failure to realize potential. Office Space (1999) was full of people doing mindless busywork that could easily be automated.

ethbr1 3y ago
From a hardware perspective, the ACM cycle discussed is tightly tied to continued general purpose CPU performance gains. There are many pure-performance classes of software, where more performance = more value. Those classes have been diverging since the 80s (media playback), 90s (graphics), 00s (mobile), and ~10s (gpgpu). But there are other classes that are functionality limited. E.g. electronic medical record or enterprise resource planning. If software functionality were more plastic or expanded in those, the same general purpose performance would then be more valuable, and investment would also be incentivized. Accepting the inevitability of divergent, harder to user-program platforms, when we still have a lot of value on the table feels premature. And like it bodes badly for further losses of user computing-sovereignty as hyper-optimized hardware makes cloud platforms more attractive and kills off user-owned processing.