6 ms·

In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the

In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running the same software but in a much more responsive environment.

vachina 8mo ago
> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. I feel this. Humanity has peaked.
- accrual 8mo ago
  Every time Discord updates (which is often) I'm like "cool, slightly more code to run on the same hardware..."
idiotsecant 8mo ago
This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.
- dlcarrier 8mo ago
  I don't follow your analogy. Can you elaborate?
- anthk 8mo ago
  Debian Sarge, Kopete with KDE3: 256M of RAM, AMD Athlon 2000. Windows 11, Discord: 4GB are not enough to run it well. FYI, Kopete allowed inline LaTeX, Youtube videos (low res, ok, 480p maybe, but it worked), emoticos, animations, videoconference, themes, maybe basic HTML tags and whatnot. And it ran fast.
gavinsyancey 8mo ago
> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.
- dlcarrier 8mo ago
  You joke, but it really is more work. Iv'e developed software in languages from assembly language to JavaScript, and for any given functionality it's been easier to write it in RISC assembly language running directly than to get something working reliably in JavaScript running on a framework in an interpreter in a VM in a web browser, where it's impossible to reliably know what a call is going to do, because everything is undocumented and untested. One of the co-signers of the Agile Manifesto had previously stated that "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ward_Cunningham#Law https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ward_Cunningham#L...) I'm convinced that the Agile Manifesto was an attempt to make an internet post of the most-wrong way to manage a software projects, in hopes someone would correct it with the right answer, but instead it was adopted as-is.
  - iknowstuff 8mo ago
    What’s the most complex thing you wrote in RISC assembly?
  - dale_glass 8mo ago
    What makes Agile the most-wrong way to manage, in your opinion? I'm curious.
    - smackeyacky 8mo ago
      I think the poster was partly being facetious about being corrected on the internet. Agile has turned out to be terrible in most organisations I’ve worked at. From officious PMs demanding stupidly mismatched sprints vs the deliverables, to the use of story points as a baseball bat of invented malarkey instead of proper estimation. The useless ceremonies that aren’t tuned to the state of the project. The fantasy land of ill specified tickets and terrible business analysis landing on developers. Not all of that is purely due to agile but the ephemeral nature of sprints seem to encourage terrible behaviour from the non technical parts of the project management cycle. I hate it.
majormajor 8mo ago
Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral. SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.
- nucleardog 8mo ago
  > SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. For me they were. I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD. I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop. Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go in about 2 seconds. (Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers from like a decade and a half ago.) For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.
  - majormajor 8mo ago
    Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff? Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts, disk space, etc. (45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and test it out... :) )
  - phil21 8mo ago
beastman82 8mo ago
Agree 100%. the compute was always bottlenecked by insanely high i/o latency. SSDs opened up fast computers like no processor ever did.
steve1977 8mo ago
I mean, HDD were much faster than floppy disks. Which were in turn much faster than tape cassettes. And so on...
lich_king 8mo ago
Eh. In the 1980s and 1990s, the capabilities of the software you could run on your new computer were changing dramatically every two years or so. Completely new types of computer games and productivity software, vastly improved audio and video, more and more real-time functionality. Nowadays, you really don't get these magical moments when you upgrade, not on the device itself. The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was basically just more ads. Games released today look about as good as games released 5-10 years ago. The music-making or photo-editing program you installed back then is still good. Your email works the same as before. In fact, I'm not sure I have a single program on my desktop that feels more capable or more responsive than it did in 2016. There's some magic with AI, but that's all in the cloud.
kelnos 8mo ago
> In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. When SSDs became mainstream, yes, I agree they had a bigger impact than any CPU speed increases at that particular time. But back in the double-digit MHz days of CPU speeds, upgrading your CPU was king when it came to better performance, and I'd argue that effect was more pronounced than the the HDD to SSD transition was. It's hard to convey what huge jumps CPUs were making during that time period, and how big a difference it made. I also remember a time, somewhere in the middle of that, when adding more RAM could be a bigger boost than a CPU upgrade. But back in the 80s and 90s (and prior, but I have no personal experience with that), there was only so much RAM you could add, and the CPU was still often what was holding you back. But CPUs just haven't been the bottleneck for most home user workloads for a long time now. These days when I buy a new laptop, I certainly want the best CPU I can get, but I'm more concerned about how much RAM I can put in it, and the iGPU's specs. (SSDs are a given, so I don't need to think much about it.)
vrighter 8mo ago
everything is less responsive than it used to be. Every single thing.

vachina 8mo ago

> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. I feel this. Humanity has peaked.

accrual 8mo ago
Every time Discord updates (which is often) I'm like "cool, slightly more code to run on the same hardware..."

idiotsecant 8mo ago

This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.

dlcarrier 8mo ago
I don't follow your analogy. Can you elaborate?
anthk 8mo ago
Debian Sarge, Kopete with KDE3: 256M of RAM, AMD Athlon 2000. Windows 11, Discord: 4GB are not enough to run it well. FYI, Kopete allowed inline LaTeX, Youtube videos (low res, ok, 480p maybe, but it worked), emoticos, animations, videoconference, themes, maybe basic HTML tags and whatnot. And it ran fast.

gavinsyancey 8mo ago

> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.

dlcarrier 8mo ago
You joke, but it really is more work. Iv'e developed software in languages from assembly language to JavaScript, and for any given functionality it's been easier to write it in RISC assembly language running directly than to get something working reliably in JavaScript running on a framework in an interpreter in a VM in a web browser, where it's impossible to reliably know what a call is going to do, because everything is undocumented and untested. One of the co-signers of the Agile Manifesto had previously stated that "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ward_Cunningham#Law https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ward_Cunningham#L...) I'm convinced that the Agile Manifesto was an attempt to make an internet post of the most-wrong way to manage a software projects, in hopes someone would correct it with the right answer, but instead it was adopted as-is.
- iknowstuff 8mo ago
  What’s the most complex thing you wrote in RISC assembly?
- dale_glass 8mo ago
  What makes Agile the most-wrong way to manage, in your opinion? I'm curious.
  - smackeyacky 8mo ago
    I think the poster was partly being facetious about being corrected on the internet. Agile has turned out to be terrible in most organisations I’ve worked at. From officious PMs demanding stupidly mismatched sprints vs the deliverables, to the use of story points as a baseball bat of invented malarkey instead of proper estimation. The useless ceremonies that aren’t tuned to the state of the project. The fantasy land of ill specified tickets and terrible business analysis landing on developers. Not all of that is purely due to agile but the ephemeral nature of sprints seem to encourage terrible behaviour from the non technical parts of the project management cycle. I hate it.

majormajor 8mo ago

Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral. SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.

nucleardog 8mo ago
> SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. For me they were. I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD. I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop. Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go in about 2 seconds. (Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers from like a decade and a half ago.) For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.
- majormajor 8mo ago
  Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff? Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts, disk space, etc. (45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and test it out... :) )
- phil21 8mo ago

beastman82 8mo ago

Agree 100%. the compute was always bottlenecked by insanely high i/o latency. SSDs opened up fast computers like no processor ever did.

steve1977 8mo ago

I mean, HDD were much faster than floppy disks. Which were in turn much faster than tape cassettes. And so on...

lich_king 8mo ago

Eh. In the 1980s and 1990s, the capabilities of the software you could run on your new computer were changing dramatically every two years or so. Completely new types of computer games and productivity software, vastly improved audio and video, more and more real-time functionality. Nowadays, you really don't get these magical moments when you upgrade, not on the device itself. The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was basically just more ads. Games released today look about as good as games released 5-10 years ago. The music-making or photo-editing program you installed back then is still good. Your email works the same as before. In fact, I'm not sure I have a single program on my desktop that feels more capable or more responsive than it did in 2016. There's some magic with AI, but that's all in the cloud.

kelnos 8mo ago

> In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. When SSDs became mainstream, yes, I agree they had a bigger impact than any CPU speed increases at that particular time. But back in the double-digit MHz days of CPU speeds, upgrading your CPU was king when it came to better performance, and I'd argue that effect was more pronounced than the the HDD to SSD transition was. It's hard to convey what huge jumps CPUs were making during that time period, and how big a difference it made. I also remember a time, somewhere in the middle of that, when adding more RAM could be a bigger boost than a CPU upgrade. But back in the 80s and 90s (and prior, but I have no personal experience with that), there was only so much RAM you could add, and the CPU was still often what was holding you back. But CPUs just haven't been the bottleneck for most home user workloads for a long time now. These days when I buy a new laptop, I certainly want the best CPU I can get, but I'm more concerned about how much RAM I can put in it, and the iGPU's specs. (SSDs are a given, so I don't need to think much about it.)

vrighter 8mo ago

everything is less responsive than it used to be. Every single thing.