3 ms·

Tell HN: In the old days, computers used to get constantly faster and cheaper

14 points by wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago

damnitbuilds 5mo ago
We are in a blip. It will end when Big AI crashes and we can all go back to running stuff locally (on cheap VRAM).
- casey2 5mo ago
  Not at all, general computing has long been dead, hardware for domain specific tasks will keep improving. There instead will be a long unwinding of the decades of hasty abstractions and some "too big to fail WPU/DOMPU" hardware if we even use the web in 10 years.
onion2k 5mo ago
The hardware specs improved, but the software ate all the gains, so really things stayed pretty much the same for years. The primary advantage of faster CPUs, more RAM, and better GPUs in PCs has been to make it less developer-intensive to write software. Where you needed a team of 10 before, now one dev with Electron or Tauri can knock-up a basic business app on their own. Alternatively we just run the software in a browser (again, the primary advantage being to the developers, not the user) and need hardware to run 'browser + suboptimal app' instead of 'optimized app'. Essentially modern dev is doing what Visual Basic did in the 1990s, only more so. The impact of that is we buy faster computers to run slower software at a reasonable speed. The thing is though, this is all a massive win. The supply of software is by far the most important part of tech. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is if the app you need doesn't exist. We shouldn't change it.
yawpitch 5mo ago
In the old days, the rich didn’t think it was a good idea to burn the atmosphere to produce plausibly deniable child porn.
- pixel_popping 5mo ago
  What did I just read? Which rich person is thinking this?
  - yawpitch 5mo ago
    Elon (definitely), Sam (albeit obliquely), Donald (nepotistically), Jeffrey (previously), Peter (apocalyptically)… really it’s take your pick, or propose one who isn’t.
    - ManlyBread 5mo ago
      Orange man mentioned out of the blue, wow it's like I am really on reddit.com!
      - yawpitch 5mo ago
        Out of the blue usually means “unexpected”… when asked for a list of rich people with interests in the intersection between generative AI and inappropriate sexualization of the underaged, can the good doctor’s name possibly be anything but expected?
        ManlyBread 5mo ago
        Really now? You saw a thread about computing being better in the past and your mind immediately jumped to a bunch of "rich child porn producers". Does that sound normal to you? Because to me it sounds like reading something written by a terminally online person who has no idea how unhinged it sounds to regular people.
        yawpitch 5mo ago
        Funny, you seem to have [mis]read the thread as somehow being about computing being better in the past, when it’s actually about the trend being worse in the present and foreseeable future. Computers aren’t getting faster or cheaper today not because we’ve passed peak computer, but because we’ve collectively decided to let billionaires chase the next AI winter. An economic bubble that represents a colossal societal self-own — the actual effect of which is to generate enormous environmental and economic hardship in exchange for a very small real productivity gain, nothing even vaguely resembling AGI, and an unbelievably large amount of misogynistic wank material — coupled with the geo-political instability and violence required to stoke that fever is the actual reason compute isn’t following the trajectory of the past. Could I have used a less sarcastic way of voicing the basic point that allowing the capitalists to capture and secure all the means of production drives up the cost of those means while simultaneously pushing down the quality of the capital, the product, and the lived conditions of the capitalist’s feed stock, sure… but then I’d really be spending too much time and energy on this throwaway thread (and, ironically, on producing more waste energy for less valuable compute time).
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
nemosaltat 5mo ago
I got my first MacBook in ‘06, the mid-range white one, when the black one was the max spec’. It was $899 with a .edu, and ~$960 with tax then, I might be off by a little, someone can check OWC. In the last 2 months, I walked out of my local Target with a neo for just under $750 with Apple care (there was a special) so, cheaper, faster across most metrics a consumer cares about, plus longer battery life, lighter, aluminum over plastic, a USB-C shaped hole that will mostly somewhat work with something you have. However, if you mean cheap in the sense that if it breaks I’m at the mercy of someone else. Yes. My ‘06 MBB had a data-doubler, and SSD upgrades, and maxed RAM, and I can and did replace and maintain many of its parts myself. Plus, firewire with target disk mode to just clone it onto another machine with SuperDuper that just don’t exist in the same way.
late_night_fix 5mo ago
Cheaper and faster felt predictable.Now every new chip launch comes with the fine print and hype.
dvirdung 5mo ago
Not sure they were becoming cheaper all the time.. prices flattened out around year 2000 I would say, but speed are still improving I would say. Software and OS is a factor in this also of course..
mikewarot 5mo ago
Programming peaked about the time of Visual Basic 6, Microsoft Office, and Borland's Delphi. Normal folks, especially domain experts, could use a GUI form designer, then add a few methods to wire up the behavior they needed. We haven't had anything close since the Web came, and replaced the clean Win32 interface on a single system with an ever churning mess of mostly usable, but intermittent and unreliable, network layers, http protocols, and way too much javascript. Then of course there was the enshittification of IE6, and the browser wars, the demise of flash, and the rest of it. All that extra code and muck served to eat up performance and all the hardware and network bandwidth that could be thrown at it.

14 points by wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago

damnitbuilds 5mo ago

We are in a blip. It will end when Big AI crashes and we can all go back to running stuff locally (on cheap VRAM).

casey2 5mo ago
Not at all, general computing has long been dead, hardware for domain specific tasks will keep improving. There instead will be a long unwinding of the decades of hasty abstractions and some "too big to fail WPU/DOMPU" hardware if we even use the web in 10 years.

onion2k 5mo ago

The hardware specs improved, but the software ate all the gains, so really things stayed pretty much the same for years. The primary advantage of faster CPUs, more RAM, and better GPUs in PCs has been to make it less developer-intensive to write software. Where you needed a team of 10 before, now one dev with Electron or Tauri can knock-up a basic business app on their own. Alternatively we just run the software in a browser (again, the primary advantage being to the developers, not the user) and need hardware to run 'browser + suboptimal app' instead of 'optimized app'. Essentially modern dev is doing what Visual Basic did in the 1990s, only more so. The impact of that is we buy faster computers to run slower software at a reasonable speed. The thing is though, this is all a massive win. The supply of software is by far the most important part of tech. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is if the app you need doesn't exist. We shouldn't change it.

yawpitch 5mo ago

In the old days, the rich didn’t think it was a good idea to burn the atmosphere to produce plausibly deniable child porn.

pixel_popping 5mo ago
What did I just read? Which rich person is thinking this?
- yawpitch 5mo ago
  Elon (definitely), Sam (albeit obliquely), Donald (nepotistically), Jeffrey (previously), Peter (apocalyptically)… really it’s take your pick, or propose one who isn’t.
  - ManlyBread 5mo ago
    Orange man mentioned out of the blue, wow it's like I am really on reddit.com!
    - yawpitch 5mo ago
      Out of the blue usually means “unexpected”… when asked for a list of rich people with interests in the intersection between generative AI and inappropriate sexualization of the underaged, can the good doctor’s name possibly be anything but expected?
      - ManlyBread 5mo ago
        Really now? You saw a thread about computing being better in the past and your mind immediately jumped to a bunch of "rich child porn producers". Does that sound normal to you? Because to me it sounds like reading something written by a terminally online person who has no idea how unhinged it sounds to regular people.
        yawpitch 5mo ago
        Funny, you seem to have [mis]read the thread as somehow being about computing being better in the past, when it’s actually about the trend being worse in the present and foreseeable future. Computers aren’t getting faster or cheaper today not because we’ve passed peak computer, but because we’ve collectively decided to let billionaires chase the next AI winter. An economic bubble that represents a colossal societal self-own — the actual effect of which is to generate enormous environmental and economic hardship in exchange for a very small real productivity gain, nothing even vaguely resembling AGI, and an unbelievably large amount of misogynistic wank material — coupled with the geo-political instability and violence required to stoke that fever is the actual reason compute isn’t following the trajectory of the past. Could I have used a less sarcastic way of voicing the basic point that allowing the capitalists to capture and secure all the means of production drives up the cost of those means while simultaneously pushing down the quality of the capital, the product, and the lived conditions of the capitalist’s feed stock, sure… but then I’d really be spending too much time and energy on this throwaway thread (and, ironically, on producing more waste energy for less valuable compute time).
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

nemosaltat 5mo ago

I got my first MacBook in ‘06, the mid-range white one, when the black one was the max spec’. It was $899 with a .edu, and ~$960 with tax then, I might be off by a little, someone can check OWC. In the last 2 months, I walked out of my local Target with a neo for just under $750 with Apple care (there was a special) so, cheaper, faster across most metrics a consumer cares about, plus longer battery life, lighter, aluminum over plastic, a USB-C shaped hole that will mostly somewhat work with something you have. However, if you mean cheap in the sense that if it breaks I’m at the mercy of someone else. Yes. My ‘06 MBB had a data-doubler, and SSD upgrades, and maxed RAM, and I can and did replace and maintain many of its parts myself. Plus, firewire with target disk mode to just clone it onto another machine with SuperDuper that just don’t exist in the same way.

late_night_fix 5mo ago

Cheaper and faster felt predictable.Now every new chip launch comes with the fine print and hype.

dvirdung 5mo ago

Not sure they were becoming cheaper all the time.. prices flattened out around year 2000 I would say, but speed are still improving I would say. Software and OS is a factor in this also of course..

mikewarot 5mo ago

Programming peaked about the time of Visual Basic 6, Microsoft Office, and Borland's Delphi. Normal folks, especially domain experts, could use a GUI form designer, then add a few methods to wire up the behavior they needed. We haven't had anything close since the Web came, and replaced the clean Win32 interface on a single system with an ever churning mess of mostly usable, but intermittent and unreliable, network layers, http protocols, and way too much javascript. Then of course there was the enshittification of IE6, and the browser wars, the demise of flash, and the rest of it. All that extra code and muck served to eat up performance and all the hardware and network bandwidth that could be thrown at it.