5 ms·
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cy
by mysterydip 4mo ago
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
- jy14898 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)#May's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- baron816 4mo agoThe tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
- AceJohnny2 4mo ago> instead of unobservably better performance That's... quite the choice of words there
- alex7o 4mo agoThe problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example
- vlan0 4mo agoWhich is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality. It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
- drnick1 4mo agoOh, you mean those shitty Web UI frameworks with worse performance on modern hardware than native GUI programs from 1995? Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
- fartcoin67 4mo agoI'd love if everyone that made noise about this would put their money where their mouth is and just do it. Make better alternatives to the slow bloated shitty software you decry, and reap the inevitable benefits since it's what users actually care about.
- SiempreViernes 4mo agoOh no, the devs back then were for sure taking all the shortcuts they could, there just weren't as many ways to leave problems for the users compute to solve.
- brookst 4mo agoC API was a shortcut. Extensive use of C was a sign of a lazy programmer who wouldn't send the time to write in assembly, which was much more efficient and performant.
- SteveNuts 4mo ago> instead of unobservably better performance. It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train. The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
- AlexandrB 4mo ago> work on things users care about Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
- dijit 4mo ago[dead]
- Oreb 4mo ago> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
- betaby 4mo ago"What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh Away"
- simondotau 4mo agoIt’s not Bill any more, it’s developers choosing to use Electron as an app development platform. It all seemed fine when 64 GB of RAM was cheap.
- jurgenburgen 4mo agoSometimes abstractions make performance better too. We can’t all be experts of everything so using a well-optimized library is a boon.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoEven beyond the library scope. I suspect most complaints in this regard are around electron/web tech, but a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint. There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
- iririririr 4mo agonot even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about. your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc) your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
- j1elo 4mo agoIf the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free... All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
- dofm 4mo agoTo be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices. Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
- alsetmusic 4mo ago> To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling. But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
- dofm 4mo agoThe Neo is absolutely Apple's best-selling Mac; they've been caught off-guard in an epic way. (You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
- 4mo ago
- throw0101d 4mo ago> but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks "what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away." * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- nradov 4mo agoIt's interesting to contrast this with the attitude taken by the FFmpeg open source developers. They still hand write assembly code because performance and power efficiency is so critical that every clock cycle counts. https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_code_handwritten_ https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...
- 35mm 4mo agoYes, when you're used to using the modern web with all its bloat it can be a huge surprise when you build something in C or Rust - everyday computers are actually incredibly powerful.
- mensetmanusman 4mo agoSomething being easier is not a waste, it’s literally the purpose of every technology.
- ac29 4mo agoI did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.
- LoganDark 4mo agoShouldn't that all fit into less than 64k?
- eloisant 4mo agoAlso it's no longer a toy for hobbyist but a necessary tool to participate in society
- frollogaston 4mo agoYeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line in person was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.
- joe_mamba 4mo agoThe problem isn't the necessity of a computer to participate in society, as those are everywhere in public for free(My library and unemployment office has PCs free to use), it's the mandatory need for smartphones, as the library has no public smartphone to borrow you.
- daishi55 4mo ago[flagged]
- frollogaston 4mo agoI'm fine with Electron, not so fine with basic websites being so bloated now that even a modern computer lags on them. Those were achievable in the past.
- AlecSchueler 4mo ago> This is such a reddit take You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.
- Barbing 4mo agoI found it interesting commentary… must’ve been because I wasn’t its target! Maybe “common myth I’ve noticed spread on reddit” would work.
- aspenmayer 4mo agoIt’s not really helpful in furthering good discussion, though, and it assumes too much. To compare a reply to being akin to/belonging on Reddit is to say that it is low-effort or not intellectually rigorous, but this critique is self-defeating because it is itself low-effort and is usually not substantiated or justified, so it just rubs people on HN the wrong way. This is especially true when it nearly bumps up against the part of the HN guidelines which admonish us to not compare HN itself to Reddit. When saying an individual comment belongs on Reddit or is like those on Reddit, that is against the guidelines’ spirit in the small scale the same way as saying HN proper is becoming like Reddit is against the guidelines by the book in the large scale, so I don’t really think the comparison is helpful or defensible. It adds little to nothing to the discussion it accompanies, but rather undercuts it. When stated absent any other discussion, it’s nearly impossible to read it as anything but a bad faith swipe and/or flamebait.
- 4mo ago
- dirkc 4mo agoI'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder. Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
- dimitrios1 4mo ago"Hey Opus, migrate this site from jekyll to astro" doesn't work?
- martinjc 4mo agoFully agree with you. I am a frontend developer. On my work machine spotify uses maybe 300mb of memory, but on my home pc with opensuse? Image what it uses... 1.1GB.. The same as my brave browser with 4 tabs open. What is going on.
- simondotau 4mo agoBecause so much modern software is a web browser. The application bundles in its own version of Chromium. Built natively, the same app could use an order of magnitude less memory, while being functionally identical.
- martinjc 4mo agoThat doesn't explain the discrepancy
- veqq 4mo agoI mean, why even use spotify?
- martinjc 4mo agoI like music, and i have a diverse taste.
- dimitrios1 4mo agoI imagine your work machine, just like mine and everyone I've ever had, has application level limits to how much resources it can consume, spotify picks up on the limits, and adjusts accordingly? As to what its doing with all those extra resources on your linux box... shrug maybe using your laptop to train its models or mine crypto?
- Grombobulous 4mo agoSomething I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again. There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
- dijit 4mo agoApple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes. Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle. So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”. Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
- Grombobulous 4mo agoThis subject gives me sudden nostalgia for the times when Steve Jobs was talking about the front side bus during Apple keynotes. I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.
- frollogaston 4mo agoIt's been nice that they don't have to play the specs game. Back when pixels were scarcer, it was like iPhone 4 720p video recording vs Nexus or whatever 1080p video, yet the iPhone's video was clearly better quality. Or the Apple Silicon chips have faster RAM and disk access that don't really get noticed in spec sheets or benchmarks.
- xigoi 4mo ago> 12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity Or 3 modern Electron apps.
- elektronika 4mo agoDo you really think we'll have optimization in an era of metrics encouraging developers to approach shipping a million lines of code a month?
- d675 4mo agoa single leetcode tab is taking up up to 700mb of memory...
- SchemaLoad 4mo agoAs a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently. If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
- HerbManic 4mo agoOn one of my machines I run Trisquel Linux (one of the FSF approved distros). In part is because in order to running fully FSF approved hardware, a Lenovo T400 is the top end. It is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. With that, it is still a very functional unit as a lot of the bloat hasn't crept in outside of the browser.