7 ms·

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still fully ongoing.

EGreg 2y ago
Now imagine same but with AI killer bot swarms. Slaughterbots. Because we could ! As long as we have COMPETITION as the main principle for all tech development — between countries or corporations etc. — we will not be able to rein in global crises such as climate change, destruction of ecosystems, or killer AI. We need “collaboration” and “cooperation” at the highest levels as an organizing principle, instead. Competition causes many huge negative externalities to the rest of the planet.
- HappMacDonald 2y ago
  What we really need is some way to force competition to be sportsmanlike. EG: cooperating to compete, just like well adjusted competitors in a friendly tournament who actually care about refining their own skills and facing a challenge from others who feel the same way instead of cutting corners and throats to get ahead. Cooperation with no competition subtracts all urgency because one must prioritize not rocking the boat and one never knows what negative consequences any decision one makes might prove to have. You need both forces to be present, but cooperation must also be the background/default touchstone with adversarial competition employed as a tool within that framework.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    I don’t see any urgency in depleting ecosystems or building AI quickly or any other innovations besides ones to safeguard the environment, including animals. Human society has developed far slower throughout all history and prehistory, and that was OK. We’ve solved child mortality and we are doing just fine. But 1/3 of arable farmland is now desertified, insect populations are plummeting etc. Urgency is needed the other way — in increasing cooperation. As we did ONE TIME with the Montreal Protocol and almost eliminated CFCs worldwide to repair the hole in the ozone layer
  - saulpw 2y ago
    I like this viewpoint of "cooperate to compete". It's what we've been doing on a global scale as ~all nations have agreed to property rights, international trade, and abiding by laws they've written down. And in fact some would say that at the largest business scale, there is this cooperation--witness the collusion between AAPL/GOOG/etc not to poach each others' employees. But there doesn't seem to be the same respect for "smaller" businesses, as they are viewed as prey instead of weaker hunters.
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  You're right, but it's not just tech development, it's pervasive throughout our civilization. And solving it requires solving it almost everywhere, at close to the same time.
alerighi 2y ago
The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory. Not talking about Windows, I don't even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!
- tomsmeding 2y ago
  Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye: > I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster! Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse than I thought). Have you tried putting an SSD in that thing? (And yes, I realise the irony of saying "just buy more expensive hardware". But SSDs are actually really cheap these days.)
  - ponector 2y ago
    But that is true. My laptop with windows, i7, nvme, 32gb ram now feels the same as my old laptop with i7, SSD and 16gb ram did 7 years ago. Bloat ware everywhere, especially browsers.
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      A brand new mid-range business PC is not as snappy as they were brand new 20 years ago with XP. And that was on an IDE HDD, with memory speed, processor speed and cores a fraction of today, and 512MB of graphics memory or less.
vnuge 2y ago
> It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Well said. I believe many of the "hard" issues in software were not "solved" but worked around. IMO containers are a perfect example. Polyglot application distribution was not solved, it was bypassed with container engines. There are tools to work AROUND this issue, I ship build scrips that install compilers and tools on user's machines if they want but that can't be tested well, so containers it is. Redbean and Cosmopolitan libc are the closest I have seen to "solving" this issue It's also a matter of competition, if I want users to deploy my apps easily and reliably, container it is. Then boom there goes 100mb+ of disk space plus the container engine.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It's very platform specific. MacOS has had "containers" since switching to NeXTStep with OS X in 2001. An .app bundle is essentially a container from the software distribution PoV. Windows was late to the party but they have it now with the MSIX system. It's really only Linux where you have to ship a complete copy of the OS (sans kernel) to even reliably boot up a web server. A lot of that is due to coordination problems. Linux is UNIX with extra bits, and UNIX wasn't really designed with software distribution in mind, so it's never moved beyond that legacy. A Docker-style container is a natural approach in such an environment.
  - titzer 2y ago
    > A lot of that is due to coordination problems. The dumpster fire at the bottom of that is libc and the C ABI. Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code and configured and recompiled on the target machine because ABI compatibility and laying out the filesystem so that .so's could even be found in the right spot was too hard.
    - vnuge 2y ago
      > Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code Yup, and I vendor a good number dependencies and distribute source for this reason. That and because distributing libs via package managers kinda stinks too, it's a lot of work. Id rather my users just download a tarball from my website and build everything local.
eternityforest 2y ago
Moore's law is still going, but we stopped making software slower. We use JITs and GPU acceleration and stuff in our mega frameworks, and maybe more importantly, we kind of maxed out the amount of crazy JS powered animations and features people actually want. Well, except backdrop filter. That still slows everything down insanely whenever it feels like it.
asp_hornet 2y ago
> path of least resistance Great take. It feels like the path of least resistance peppered with obscene amounts of resume driven development. Complexity in all the wrong places.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >Did we lose our way It wasn't supposed to be like this but it looks like most people never have found the way by now. So, misguided efforts, wasted resources, and technical debt piles up like never before, and at an even faster rate than efficiency of the software itself declines on the surface.
guestbest 2y ago
I disagree. It’s all the frameworks and security features like telemetry of the operating systems and those framework libraries. There are programs written in Lazarus (free pascal) that run blazing fast on windows, even the modern ones like Windows 11. Keeping the software written for a specific purpose for the desktop is the best bet for quickness and stability. Every modernization (hardware and framework) in software is a tax on the underlying software in its functional entirety

EGreg 2y ago

Now imagine same but with AI killer bot swarms. Slaughterbots. Because we could ! As long as we have COMPETITION as the main principle for all tech development — between countries or corporations etc. — we will not be able to rein in global crises such as climate change, destruction of ecosystems, or killer AI. We need “collaboration” and “cooperation” at the highest levels as an organizing principle, instead. Competition causes many huge negative externalities to the rest of the planet.

HappMacDonald 2y ago
What we really need is some way to force competition to be sportsmanlike. EG: cooperating to compete, just like well adjusted competitors in a friendly tournament who actually care about refining their own skills and facing a challenge from others who feel the same way instead of cutting corners and throats to get ahead. Cooperation with no competition subtracts all urgency because one must prioritize not rocking the boat and one never knows what negative consequences any decision one makes might prove to have. You need both forces to be present, but cooperation must also be the background/default touchstone with adversarial competition employed as a tool within that framework.
- EGreg 2y ago
  I don’t see any urgency in depleting ecosystems or building AI quickly or any other innovations besides ones to safeguard the environment, including animals. Human society has developed far slower throughout all history and prehistory, and that was OK. We’ve solved child mortality and we are doing just fine. But 1/3 of arable farmland is now desertified, insect populations are plummeting etc. Urgency is needed the other way — in increasing cooperation. As we did ONE TIME with the Montreal Protocol and almost eliminated CFCs worldwide to repair the hole in the ozone layer
- saulpw 2y ago
  I like this viewpoint of "cooperate to compete". It's what we've been doing on a global scale as ~all nations have agreed to property rights, international trade, and abiding by laws they've written down. And in fact some would say that at the largest business scale, there is this cooperation--witness the collusion between AAPL/GOOG/etc not to poach each others' employees. But there doesn't seem to be the same respect for "smaller" businesses, as they are viewed as prey instead of weaker hunters.
NoGravitas 2y ago
You're right, but it's not just tech development, it's pervasive throughout our civilization. And solving it requires solving it almost everywhere, at close to the same time.

alerighi 2y ago

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory. Not talking about Windows, I don't even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!

tomsmeding 2y ago
Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye: > I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster! Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse than I thought). Have you tried putting an SSD in that thing? (And yes, I realise the irony of saying "just buy more expensive hardware". But SSDs are actually really cheap these days.)
- ponector 2y ago
  But that is true. My laptop with windows, i7, nvme, 32gb ram now feels the same as my old laptop with i7, SSD and 16gb ram did 7 years ago. Bloat ware everywhere, especially browsers.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    A brand new mid-range business PC is not as snappy as they were brand new 20 years ago with XP. And that was on an IDE HDD, with memory speed, processor speed and cores a fraction of today, and 512MB of graphics memory or less.

vnuge 2y ago

> It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Well said. I believe many of the "hard" issues in software were not "solved" but worked around. IMO containers are a perfect example. Polyglot application distribution was not solved, it was bypassed with container engines. There are tools to work AROUND this issue, I ship build scrips that install compilers and tools on user's machines if they want but that can't be tested well, so containers it is. Redbean and Cosmopolitan libc are the closest I have seen to "solving" this issue It's also a matter of competition, if I want users to deploy my apps easily and reliably, container it is. Then boom there goes 100mb+ of disk space plus the container engine.

mike_hearn 2y ago
It's very platform specific. MacOS has had "containers" since switching to NeXTStep with OS X in 2001. An .app bundle is essentially a container from the software distribution PoV. Windows was late to the party but they have it now with the MSIX system. It's really only Linux where you have to ship a complete copy of the OS (sans kernel) to even reliably boot up a web server. A lot of that is due to coordination problems. Linux is UNIX with extra bits, and UNIX wasn't really designed with software distribution in mind, so it's never moved beyond that legacy. A Docker-style container is a natural approach in such an environment.
- titzer 2y ago
  > A lot of that is due to coordination problems. The dumpster fire at the bottom of that is libc and the C ABI. Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code and configured and recompiled on the target machine because ABI compatibility and laying out the filesystem so that .so's could even be found in the right spot was too hard.
  - vnuge 2y ago
    > Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code Yup, and I vendor a good number dependencies and distribute source for this reason. That and because distributing libs via package managers kinda stinks too, it's a lot of work. Id rather my users just download a tarball from my website and build everything local.

eternityforest 2y ago

Moore's law is still going, but we stopped making software slower. We use JITs and GPU acceleration and stuff in our mega frameworks, and maybe more importantly, we kind of maxed out the amount of crazy JS powered animations and features people actually want. Well, except backdrop filter. That still slows everything down insanely whenever it feels like it.

asp_hornet 2y ago

> path of least resistance Great take. It feels like the path of least resistance peppered with obscene amounts of resume driven development. Complexity in all the wrong places.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>Did we lose our way It wasn't supposed to be like this but it looks like most people never have found the way by now. So, misguided efforts, wasted resources, and technical debt piles up like never before, and at an even faster rate than efficiency of the software itself declines on the surface.

guestbest 2y ago

I disagree. It’s all the frameworks and security features like telemetry of the operating systems and those framework libraries. There are programs written in Lazarus (free pascal) that run blazing fast on windows, even the modern ones like Windows 11. Keeping the software written for a specific purpose for the desktop is the best bet for quickness and stability. Every modernization (hardware and framework) in software is a tax on the underlying software in its functional entirety