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The system’s been hijacked. The craft of real engineering—building sharp, efficient, elegant systems—is buried under layers of corporate sludge. It’s not about
by sim7c00 2y ago
The system’s been hijacked. The craft of real engineering—building sharp, efficient, elegant systems—is buried under layers of corporate sludge. It’s not about progress anymore; it’s about control. Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much.
I’m running 24 threads at 5GHz, sipping data through a GB pipe, and somehow, sites still crawl. Apps hesitate like they need divine intervention just to start. Five billion instructions just to boot up? My 5GB/s NVMe too sluggish for a few megabytes of binary? What the hell happened?
The internet isn’t just bloated—it’s an executioner. It’s strangling new hardware, and the old hardware? That’s been dead for years. Sure, you can run a current through a corpse and watch it twitch, but that doesn’t mean it’s alive.
- high_na_euv 2y agoSingle threaded code / problems are unlikely to get faster with more cores. Foundational limitations still exist
- NegatioN 2y agoAlthough that in itself is a true statement, there is sooo much performance left on the table everywhere.
- sim7c00 2y agogoing from 1ghz to 5ghz should make single threads go a little faster ? IO might be a bottle neck on spinning rust, but we've come far from those days too..
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoIt's obviously less dramatic than running across a dozen cores at once, but per-core performance has continued to improve over time
- fsflover 2y ago> Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much. This is nothing else than enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
- fsflover 2y agoWhy is this comment so controversial, receiving many upvotes and then downvotes? Isn't enshittification an accepted and known thing?
- kibwen 2y agoIt's accepted and known, but in an economy where most megacorps make their money via enshittification, the well-paid engineers who get paid to shovel the aforementioned shit down our throats don't like being reminded of their essential role.
- zython 2y agoI'd have just one final remark, that it really is not a engineering problem but rather a business decision. After all; having paid gazillions to engineers and project managers to build the sludgefest, all that cash needs to be harvested back into the pockets.
- sim7c00 2y agonot untrue. though many good projects existed because of passion for good engineering. there is much less good open source now. people want money for their time...
- didgetmaster 2y agoPeople tell me all the time that I should just open source my project that I have spent thousands of hours developing. As if doing so would make money magically appear in my bank account.
- zython 2y agoTragically my landlord refused my proposal to pay him in github stars :(
- h2zizzle 2y agoPeople need to realize that leisure time - time off work, commute, chores - is paid for by their employer (as far as they're concerned). Which is to say that those of us with only a couple of hours to ourselves a day are being stiffed, no matter how much money we make. Stop letting the workaholics dictate how the rest of us live.
- Eikon 2y agoPretty sure that’s written with AI. The dash gives it away.
- acuozzo 2y agoNot OP, but… what? On Windows I have a trigger finger for Alt+0133, Alt+0150, and Alt+0151. I use proper ellipses, en–dash, and em—dash all the time.
- automatic6131 2y agoBeing aware of Alt character codes puts you in the top 1% of computer users for ability.
- kibwen 2y agoKnowing what a file is puts you in the top 1% of computer users for ability. What's your point?
- remote-dev 2y agoOn Linux (maybe only certain distros, not sure) the keys are different, but you can enable a Compose key and enable special character keybinds as well. For example on Mint en–dash is "<compose> <minus> <minus> <period>" and em—dash is "<compose> <minus> <minus> <minus>"
- blooalien 2y agoI do a similar thing on Linux with a feature called the "Compose Key". I press the compose key (caps-lock on my keyboard), and then the next couple of keypresses translate into the proper character. "a -> ä, ~n -> ñ, etc.
- dingaling 2y agoGood grief, memorising arcane key combos? Doesn't sound ready for the desktop!
- sim7c00 2y ago
- aredox 2y agoThis is the result of “programmer time is more expensive than computer time” (which means "than user time"). https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/ https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
- muixoozie 2y agoIt's a good blog post, but the site is ironically unreadable outside Firefox Reader due to the annoying snow flake animation.
- didgetmaster 2y agoIf it takes a programmer an hour to optimize something that saves a second each time it is run, management thinks that is a complete waste since you have to run it 3600 times to 'break even'. You might think that their thinking would change when you point out that the code is run millions of times each day on computers all over the world, so those saved seconds will really add up. But all those millions of saved seconds do not affect the company's bottom line. Other people reap the benefits of the saved time (and power usage, and heat generated, and ...) but not the company that wrote the code. So it is still a complete waste in their minds. Multiply this thinking across millions of programs and you get today's situation of slow, bloated code everywhere.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoAs improvements to manufacturing tech and CPU designs become unable to deliver the improvements that they used to, the cost of computer time will approach the cost of programmer time. As they converge and possibly flip, optimizations will become more useful (and required) to produce the gains we've become accustomed to. I'm not sure how many years away that is.
- cman1444 2y agoI agree. Hardware improvement will hit a wall at some point. From then on, all performance improvement will have to come from software optimization. I do wonder if AI will allow that to happen much quicker. Could an AI just crawl through an organization's entire code and make optimization recommendations, which are then reviewed by a human? It seems like there could be a lot of low hanging fruit.
- austin-cheney 2y ago> I’m running 24 threads at 5GHz, sipping data through a GB pipe, and somehow, sites still crawl. Aside from websites, we will talk about that in a minute, how is performance? I am running Windows 11 on new hardware and it is running great. I built personal box with 64gb of the fastest DDR5 and a AMD 9900xtx. The most expensive component (and least bang for the buck)... the video card. This is my first time to have an NVMe disk and its absolutely amazing. I am running Debian 12 on mini computer with much less hardware and its doing amazing there too. I can run anything on the box except AAA games and 4k video movies. Now, for the web talk. I was a JavaScript developer for 15 years, and yes its garbage. Most of the people doing that work have absolutely no idea what they are doing and there is no incentive to do so. The only practical goal there is to put text on screen and most of the developers doing that work struggle to do even that. Its why I won't do that work any more, because its a complete race to the bottom. If I see a job post that mentions React, Vue, or Angular I stop reading it and move on.
- Sincere6066 2y agoBut there is no 9900xtx?
- austin-cheney 2y agoI stand corrected: 9900x. 9900xtx is a video card.
- avo1d 2y agoWhere did you move from JS? I am trying my best to learn low level stuff to NOT have these situations. But frameworks are bloated already and any optimisation feels useless
- nashashmi 2y ago> The craft of real engineering—building sharp, efficient, elegant systems—is buried under layers of corporate sludge No. It is buried under the laziness of build-fast, optimize-next. Except optimizing never comes. Building fast requires lightweight development on heavyweight architectures. And that means using bloats like JS frameworks.
- ryandrake 2y agoIt might be time for "24 core CPU and I can't move my mouse"[1][2] to make the rounds on HN again. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733829 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095032
- wat10000 2y agoThere's a saying about engineering, "Anyone can design a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that barely stands." I might rephrase that for our field: anyone can design software that works. It takes an engineer to design software that barely works.