Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use
They are being written to be more efficient in inference, but the gains are being offset by trying to wring more capabilities out of the models by ballooning token use.
Which is indeed a form of Jevon's paradox
Costs have been dropping by a factor of 3 per year, but token use increased 40x over the same period. So while the efficiency is contributing a bit to the use, the use is exploding even faster.
I think we're meaning the same thing.
Yes, but have you considered if I just rephrase what you just said but from a slightly different perspective?
Jevon's Paradox is that when there's more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
More specifically, it's when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.
So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.
Also Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin to make extracting cotton less of a tedious and backbreaking process, which lead to a massive expansion in slavery plantations in the American South due to the increased output and profitability of the crop.
This happens not only with efficiency gains. There is risk overcompensation, which feels kinda the same. Cars that are more secure cause reckless driving, which in turn is the reason accidents happen more often, which eat into the safety gains.
I always felt American car companies were a really good example of that back in the 60s-70s when enormously long vehicles with giant engines were the order of the day. Why not bigger? Why not stronger? It also acted as a symbol of American strength, which was being measured by raw power just like today lol.
This also reminds me of the way video game programmers in the late 70s/early 80s had such tight limitations to work within that you had to get creative if you wanted to make something stand out. Some very interesting stories from that era.
I also love to think about the tricks the programmer of Prince of Persia had employed to get the "shadow prince" to work...
The tech debt problem will keep getting worse as product teams keep promising more in less time. Keep making developers move faster. I’m sure nothing bad will come of it.
Capitalism truly ruins everything good and pure. I used to love writing clean code and now it’s just “prompt this AI to spit out sloppy code that mostly works so you can focus on what really matters… meetings!”
so you can focus on what really matters… meetings! collecting unemployment!
Well, until you open a browser... or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.
Right now, my laptop doesn't have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.
Yeah, discotd is eating 1.5gb of ram. Actually crazy
I recently had occasion to run a headless Linux distrk and got my socks knowcked off when I ran top and saw idle RAM use at fucking 400 MB
Two possible and opposite interpretations of your comment:
- Modern Linux feels exactly as responsive or worse on modern hardware than old Linux used to feel on old hardware.
- Linux feels much more responsive and fast on modern hardware than it does on old hardware, unlinke other OSes.
Can't wait for the new evidence that Epstein is behind that too.
Actshually it's bandwidth censorship if you make something too heavy to be used then it won't get used. It is one of the things China is doing to separate their internet from the rest of the worlds, by having an internet so blazingly fast it is unbearable to goto the world wide web.
So yesh, the epstien class are making the news too slow for typical users to access. /maybe some sarcasm maybe not I'm not sure yet
EDIT: I have decided I was not being sarcastic. https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/...
Episodes of network throttling have been reported in countries like Russia, Iran, Egypt, and Zimbabwe, and many more, especially during politically sensitive periods such as elections and protests. In some cases, entire regions such as Iran’s Khuzestan province have experienced indiscriminate throttling, regardless of the protocol or specific services in use. Throttling is particularly effective and appealing to authoritarian governments for several reasons: Throttling is simple to implement, difficult to detect or attribute and hard to circumvent.```
When you become one with the penguin, though ... then you can begin to feel how much faster modern hardware is.
Hell, I've got a 2016 budget-model chromebook that still feels quick and snappy that way.
Sadly, it is not how it is for me. I've never (in last 20 years) experienced freezes that bad and that frequent as with my new beefy Linux PC.
Except the Linux userbase has been saying that exact thing for the past ten years, so again, has Linux also degraded in sync or, hear me out here, is this mostly a nostalgia thing that makes you forget the cludgy performance issues of the software you used when you were younger and things have mostly gotten snappier over time across the board?
As a current dual booter I'll say that Windows and Linux don't feel fundamentally different these days, for good and ill. Windows has a remarkably crappy and entirely self-inflicted issue with their online-search-in-Start-menu feature, which sucks but is toggleable at least. Otherwise I have KDE and Win11 set up the same way and they both work pretty much the same. And both measurably better than their respective iterations 10, let alone 15 or 20 years ago.
Windows and Linux don’t feel fundamentally different these days
Try Windows 11 vs. Linux on a shitty old laptop with a budget 2-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Then tell me Windows and Linux don't feel any different.
Everything bad people said about web apps 20+ years ago has proved true.
It's like, great, now we have consistent cross-platform software. But it's all bloated, slow, and only "consistent" with itself (if even). The world raced to the bottom, and here we are. Everything is bound to lowest-common-denominator tech. Everything has all the disadvantages of client-server architecture even when it all runs (or should run) locally.
It is completely fucking insane how long I have to wait for lists to populate with data that could already be in memory.
But at least we're not stuck with Windows-only admin consoles anymore, so that's nice.
All the advances in hardware performance have been used to make it faster (more to the point, "cheaper") to develop software, not faster to run it.
Already happening with Windows. Also supposedly with Nvidia GPU drivers, with some AMD execs pushing for the same now
And that us poors still on limited bandwidth plans get charged for going over our monthly quotas because everything has to be streamed or loaded from the cloud instead of installed (or at least cached) locally.
I almost started a little rant about Ignaz Semmelweis before I got the joke. :P
Bloated electron apps are what makes Linux on desktop viable today at all, but you guys aren't ready for that conversation.
Yes, in that the existence of bloated electron apps tends to cause web apps to be properly maintained, as a side effect.
But thankfully, we don't actually have to use the Electron version, to benefit.
Unless it's Teams apparently, that's the last Electron app I want to install.
I can only think of a couple Electron apps I use, and none that are important or frequently used.
Note, I don't know how comprehensive this wiki list is, just quick research
From those, I'm only currently using a handful.
balenaEtcher, Discord, Synergy, and Obsidian
I'm pretty sure the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" thing has caused its share of damage from shit developers who took it to mean use memory with reckless abandon.
Would be nice if I could force programs to use more ram though. I actually have 100GB of DDR4 my desktop. I bought it over a year ago when DDR4 was unloved and cheap. But I have tried to force programs to not be offloading as much. Like Firefox, I hate that I have the ram but it's still unloading webpages in the background and won't use more than 6GB ever.
Decent sized for what?
Creative writing and roleplay? Plenty, but I try to fit it into my 16 GB VRAM as otherwise it's too slow for my liking.
Coding/complex tasks? No, that would need 128GB and upwards and it would still be awfully slow. Except you use a Mac with unified memory.
For image and video generation you'd want to fit it into GPU VRAM again, system RAM would be way too slow.
In most cases, you either optimize the memory, or you optimize the speed of execution.
Having more memory means we can optimize the speed of execution.
Now, the side effect is that we can also afford to be slower to gain other benefits: Ease of development (come in javascript everywhere, or python) at the cost of speed, maintainability at the cost of speed, etc...
So, even though you dont always see performance gains as the years go, that doesn't mean shit devs, it means the priority is somewhere else. We have more complex software today than 20 years ago because we can afford not to focus on ram and speed optimization, and instead focus on maintainable, unoptimized code that does complex stuff.
Optimization is not everything.
unoptimized code that does complex stuff.
You can still have complex code that is optimized for performance. You can spend more resources to do more complex computations and still be optimized so long as you're not wasting processing power on pointless stuff.
For example, in some of my code I have to get a physics model within 0.001°. I don't use that step size every loop, because that'd be stupid and wasteful. I start iterating with 1° until it overshoots the target, back off, reduce the step to 1/10, and loop through that logic until I get my result with the desired accuracy.
Of course! But sometimes, most often even, the optimization is not worth the development to get it. We're particularly talking about memory optimization here, and it is so cheap (or at least it was... ha) that it is not worth optimizing like we used to 25 years ago. Instead you use higher level languages with garbage collection or equivalents that are easier to maintain with and faster to implement new stuff with. You use algorithms that consume a fuck ton of memory for speed improvements. And as long as it is fast enough, you shouldn't over optimize.
Proper optimization these days is more of a hobby.
Now obviously some fields require a lot more optimization - embedded systems, for instance. Or simulations, which get a lot of value from being optimized as much as possible.
Unfortunately, a lot of dev studios tend to just build their games on the highest end systems they can and don't bother checking for lower-end hardware. For a lot of systems, there's plenty of programs that don't run "good enough". And sometimes I'll even have issies with M$ applications on decent workstation hardware. Notes and Teams are frustratingly slow to work with sometimes
I still remember playing StarCraft 2 shortly after release on a 300$ laptop and it running perfectly well on medium settings.
Looked amazing. Felt incredibly responsive. Polished. Optimized.
Nowadays it’s RTX this, framegen that, need SSD or loading times are abysmal, oh and don’t forget that you need 40gb of storage and 32gb of ram for a 3 hour long walking simulator, how about you optimize your goddamn game instead? Don’t even get me started on price tags for these things.
Software and game development is definitely a spectrum though, but holy shit is the ratio of sloppy releases so disproportionate that it’s hard to see it at times.
StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.
A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you'd expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don't just have 'colour textures', they're likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that's another three times. The voice acting isn't likely to be in a single language any more either, so there'll be several copies of all the sound files.
A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. 'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!
I do agree with you. I can't think of a single useful feature that's been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it's worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.
1080p is still the most common, though is 1440p is catching up very fast
BTW the demand for bigger screens and bigger resolutions is something I don't easily understand. I notice some difference between 1366x768 and 1920x1080 on a desktop, but the difference from further increase is of so little use for me I'd classify it as a form of bloat. If anything, I now habitually switch to downloading 480p and 720p instead of higher definition by default because it saves me traffic and battery power, and fits much more on a single disk easy to back up.
'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!
Not at all. For example, Rimworld saves all the map and world data in one big XML (which is bad btw, don't do that): about 2 million lines @75 MB, for a 30-pawns mid-game colony.
So you see, Data is not what uses space. But what uses space instead is, if you don't properly re-use objects/textures (so called "assets"), or even copy and repack the same assets per level/map, because that saves dev time.
Ark Survival Evolved, with "only" about 100 GB requirement, was known as a unoptimized mess back then.
Witcher 3 mod "HD Reworked Next-Gen" has barely 20 GB with 4k textures and high-res meshes. And you can't say that Witcher 3 is not a vibrant and big open world game.
Excel is sooo much than it used to be in Office 97. And it's way better than any other spreadsheet software I've tried.
Speaking of, anyone know of any alternative that handles named tables the same as Excel? Built-in filtering/sorting and formulas that can address the table itself instead of a cell range?? Please?
I've been hosting grist for a while and it is quite nice. Wasn't able to move all the stuff from classic spreadsheets though
Then factorio dev blog comes in and spend months optimizing the tok of one broken gear in the conveyor belt to slightly improve efficiency.
Tbf, there's saves there that efficiency increase means a lot
It's the only game I have that will actually recover from when it hangs and freezes and then go back to working fine.
Comparing a 20 year old game with FMV sequences at 1080p is certainly a take 🤣.
The same? Try worse. Most devices have seen input latency going up. Most applications have a higher latency post input as well.
Switching from an old system with old UI to a new system sometimes feels like molasses.
I work in support for a SaaS product and every single click on the platform takes a noticeable amount of time. I don't understand why anyone is paying any amount of money for this product. I have the FOSS equivalent of our software in a test VM and its far more responsive.
Except for KDE. At least compared to cinnamon, I find KDE much more responsive.
AI generated code will make things worse. They are good at providing solutions that generally give the correct output but the code they generate tends to be shit in a final product style.
Though perhaps performance will improve since at least the AI isn't limited by only knowing JavaScript.
I still have no idea what it is, but over time my computer, which has KDE on it, gets super slow and I HAVE to restart. Even if I close all applications it's still slow.
It's one reason I've been considering upgrading from6 cores and 32 GB to 16 and 64.
Upgrade isn't likely to help. If KDE is struggling on 6@32, you have something going on that 16@64 is only going to make it last twice as long before choking.
wail till it's slow
Check your Ram / CPU in top and the disk in iotop, hammering the disk/CPU (of a bad disk/ssd) can make kde feel slow.
plasmashell --replace # this just dumps plasmashell's widgets/panels
See if you got a lot of ram/CPU back or it's running well, if so if might be a bad widget or panel
if it's still slow,
kwin_x11 --replace
or
kwin_wayland --replace &
This dumps everything and refreshes the graphics driver/compositor/window manager
If that makes it better, you're likely looking at a graphics driver issue
I've seen some stuff where going to sleep and coming out degrades perf
Hmm, I haven't noticed high CPU usage, but usually it only leaves me around 500MB actually free RAM, basically the entire rest of it is either in use or cache (often about 15 gigs for cache). Turning on the 64 gig swapfile usually still leaves me with close to no free RAM.
I'll see if it's slow already when I get home, I restarted yesterday. Then I'll try the tricks you suggested. For all I know maybe it's not even KDE itself.
Root and home are on separate NVMe drives and there's a SATA SSD for misc non-system stuff.
GPU is nvidia 3060ti with latest proprietary drivers.
The PC does not sleep at all.
To be fair I also want to upgrade to speed up Rust compilation when working on side projects and because I often have to store 40-50 gigs in tmpfs and would prefer it to be entirely in RAM so it's faster to both write and read.
I've seen some stuff where going to sleep and coming out degrades perf
I'll have to try some of these suggestions myself, as I've been dealing with my UI locking up if the monitors turn off and I wake it up too soon. Sometimes I still have ssh access to it, so thanks for the shell commands!
Have you tried disabling the file indexing service? I think it’s called Baloo?
Usually it doesn’t have too much overhead, but in combination with certain workflows it could be a bottleneck.
I have not, but also it's not slow immediately, it takes time under use to get slow. Fresh boot is quite fast. And then once it's slow, even if I close my IDE, browsers and everything, it remains slow, even if CPU usage is really low and there's theoretically plenty of memory that could be freed easily.
I have a 2 core, 2 thread, 4gb RAM 3855u Chromebook that I installed Plasma on, and it's usually pretty responsive.
I want to avoid building react native apps.
I love it
Well yeah, why would I learn html when I can learn React?!?
(/s but I actually did learn React before I had a grasp of semantic Html because my company needed React devs and only paid for React-specific education)
Windows 11 is the slowest Windows I've ever used, by far. Why do I have to wait 15-45 seconds to see my folders when I open explorer? If you have a slow or intermittent Internet connection it's literally unusable.
Even Windows 10 is literally unusable for me. When pressing the windows key it literally takes about 4 seconds until the search pops up, just for it to be literally garbage.
Found out about this while watching "Halt and Catch Fire" (AMC's effort to recreate the magic of Mad Men, but on the computer).
In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.
I am using windows like once a week at maximum and then it only takes about 10 minutes. So I kind of do not really care and am glad, that I do not need to use it more often.
Too many nuggies
Maybe if Windows quit pigging out on tendies and slimmed down it would be as baf
yeah
and like why does it crash? it worked fine on Windows 10
The Windows bloat each new generation is way out of control.
Thought leaders spent the last couple of decades propaganding that features-per-week is the only metric to optimize, and that if your software has any bit of efficiency or quality in it that's a clear indicator for a lost opportunity to sacrifice it on the alter of code churning.
The result is not "amazing". I'd be more amazed had it turned out differently.
Fucking "features". Can't software just be finished? I bought App. App does exactly what I need it to do. Leave. It. Alone.
No, never! Tech corps (both devs and app stores) brainwashed people into thinking "no updates = bad".
Recently, I have seen people complain about lack of updates for: OS for a handheld emulation device (not the emulator, the OS, which does not have any glaring issues), and Gemini protocol browser (gemini protocol is simple and has not changed since 2019 or so).
Maybe these people don't use the calculator app because arithmetic was not updated in a few thousand years.
A big part of this issue is mobile OS APIs. You can't just finish an android app and be done. It gets bit rot so fast. You get maybe 1-2 years with no updates before "this app was built for an older version of android" then "this app is not compatible with your device".
It's kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize "premature optimization", when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary. A related problem is that programmers often have top-of-the-line gear, so code that works acceptably well on their equipment is hideously slow when running on normal people's machines. When I was managing my team, I would encourage people to develop on out-of-date devices (or at least test their code out on them once in a while).
Optomisation often has a cost, weather it's code complexity, maintenance or even just salary. So it has to be worth it, and there are many areas where it isn't enough unfortunately.
And that lazy mentality just passes the cost to the consumer.
How is that mindset lazy? Unhappy customers also have a cost! At my last job the customer just always bought hardware specifically for the software as a matter of process, partly because the price of the hardware compared to the price of the software was negligible. You literally couldn't make a customer care.
Your spelling is terrible
Oops, forgot the AI step
Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something's written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don't know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can't know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it's only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn't matter either way, but if it's used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.
Also, it's common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn't expect to be slow (otherwise they'd have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.
It’s kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize “premature optimization”, when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary.
I will forever be salty about that one time I blamed of premature optimization for pushing to optimize a code that was allocating memory faster than the GC could free it, which was causing one of the production servers to keep getting OOM crashes.
If urgent emails from one of the big clients who put the entire company into emergency mode during a holiday is still considered "premature", then no optimization is ever going to be mature.
That and we have a resume system where instead of showing something functional you list the names of bloat libraries you know how to use. Thus everyone wants to use a bloat library for every project, and it is considered professional to do so.
Now I need to wait 10 seconds for something to hydrate when by past metrics your code was considered bad if it wasn't still within 0.05s.
What's the worst is when youtube videos are trying to initialize the page while the video is trying to play right away with the page still in a funky state. It's like we married two different eras metrics for what matters and made something truly awful. Demand for immediacy + frameworks that won't deliver it.
I sure hope the tags are wholesom... OH NO.
I hate that our expectations have been lowered.
2016: "oh, that app crashed?? Pick a different one!"
2026: "oh, that app crashed again? They all crash, just start it again and cross your toes."
That would be incredibly ironic given that they completely fucking gave up on mobile devices when the iPhone came out.
Windows Phone was around in mid-2010s, at least 7 years after iPhone release. But it was not hyped enough: companies did not care to develop apps for it, customers didn't want a smartphone without X Y Z apps (same argument i see now about mobile linux or even custom ROMs). The phones had nice and fast UI though, and some had very good cameras.
Windows Phone was great. I'd done Windows Mobile since 2005 and it was nice to be able to continue developing with C#/.NET and Visual Studio (back when it was still good) in a more modern OS. One thing that really spoiled me permanently was being able to compile, build and deploy the app I was working on to my test device effectively instantaneously -- like, by the time I'd moved my hand over to the device, the app was already up and running. Then I switched to iOS where the same process could take minutes, also Blackberry where it might take half an hour or never happen at all.
Funny thing: RIM was going around circa 2010/2011 offering companies cash bounties of $10K to $20K to develop apps for Blackberry, since they were dying a rapid death but were still flush with cash. Nobody that I know of took them up on the offers. I tried to get my company to make a Windows Phone version of our software but I was laughed at (and deservedly so).
PC games are software.
Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.
Proton can only do so much.
... and Metal basically can't do that that much.
Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.
They haven't really.
They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.
Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.
I guess the counter argument for games is load times have dramatically improved, though that’s less about software development than hardware improvements.
If we put consoles in the same bracket as computers, the literally instant quick-resume feature on an Xbox (for example) feels like sci-fi.
Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.
You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.
You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.
Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?
You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.
RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.
Moore's Law is not only dead, it has inverted.
Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.
With respect to OP's post, they say "you can't even tell the computers we are on are 15x faster...", and I reckon that quick resume etc, is an example of "you absolutely can tell that we now have extremely fast hardware" when compared to what came before, irrespective of the quality of the software.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just picking apart the blanket "computers feel the same as they did a decade ago". Some computers might feel the same, and a lot of software might be unoptimised, but there's a good selection of examples where that's not the case.
Mint Xfce on my 2015 laptop compared to its previous system was the difference between usable and waiting 10 minutes for it to even boot, and things like gaming, VMs, comically large spreadsheets (surprisingly the memory hog), etc., were an eternal challenge on it. On my current laptop, I have the luxury of picking the systems by aesthetics and non-optimization functions instead. And to compare, I've run even the same updates on the two laptops, as the older one still works.
App launch time can be annoyingly slow on mac if you're not offline or blocking the server it phones home to
it can be the difference between one bounce or seven bounces of the icon on my end
All of them. The device has to phone home to apple to ask permission to run them.
to test close app (really shut, make sure dot on icon isnt glowing) then open and measure time
close app and then disconnect from the internet and launch again
the speed difference depends on how overloaded apples servers are.
I’ve not come across this but I’ll check it out. Is that App Store apps only?
I think probably 90% of the apps I’ve installed have been through the homebrew package manager which likely means they don’t do any phoning home, but I’ll check out the pre-installed stuff and see if I can replicate.
And Android
You do really feel this when you're using old hardware.
I have an iPad that's maybe a decade old at this point. I'm using it for the exact same things I was a decade ago, except that I can barely use the web browser. I don't know if it's the browser or the pages or both, but most web sites are unbearably slow, and some simply don't work, javascript hangs and some elements simply never load. The device is too old to get OS updates, which means I can't update some of the apps. But, that's a good thing because those old apps are still very responsive. The apps I can update are getting slower and slower all the time.
It's the pages. It's all the JavaScript. And especially the HTML5 stuff. The amount of code that is executed in a webpage these days is staggering. And JS isn't exactly a computationally modest language.
Of the 200kB loaded on a typical Wikipedia page, about 85kb of it is JS and CSS.
Another 45kB for a single SVG, which in complex cases is a computationally nontrivial image format.
Probably just the browser itself, considering how bloated they're getting. It's not super surprising, considering the apps run about as fast (on a good day) as it did 5-10 years ago on a new phone, it's gonna run like dogshit on a phone from that era.
I can't update YouTube on my iPad 2 that I got running again for the first time in years. It said it had been 70,000~ hours since last full charge. I wanted to use it to watch videos on when I'm going to bed. But I can't actually login to YouTube because the app is so old and I seemingly can't update it.
I was using the web browser and yeah I don't remember it being so damn slow. It's crazy how that is.
Is your iPad on iOS 9.3.5? It is infamously slow.
It is possible to downgrade it to 8.4.1 (faster, partially more broken) or even 6.1.3 (fast and old school, many apps don't work, but there are apps in Cydia to fix stuff).
Biggest issue I encountered is sites requiring TLSv1.3 for HTTPS encryption, and browsers simply do not support that.
I have an old YouTube app on my iPad, and it still works fine. One of the more responsive apps on the device. I get nagged nearly every time I use it to update to the newest YouTube release, but that's impossible. I'd first have to upgrade my OS, and Apple no longer releases new OSes for this generation of iPads. So, I'm stuck with an old YouTube, which mostly works fine, and an occasional nag message.
I'm sure within a year or two mine will be like yours and YouTube will simply no longer work. But, for now it's in a relatively good spot where I can use a version of YouTube designed for this particular hardware that doesn't feel sluggish.
They often are worse, because everything needed to be an electron app, so they could hire the cheaper web developers for it, and also can boast about "instant cross platform support" even if they don't release Linux versions.
Qt and GTK could do cross platform support, but not data collection, for big data purposes.
I don't know why electron has to use so much memory up though. It seems to use however much RAM is currently available when it boots, the more RAM system has the more electron seems to think it needs.
Chromium is basically Tyrone Biggums asking if y'all got any more of that RAM, so bundling that into Electron is gonna lead to the same behavior.
Ib4 "uNusEd RAm iS wAStEd RaM!"
No, unused RAM keeps my PC running fast. I remember the days where accidentally hitting the windows key while in a game meant waiting a minute for it to swap the desktop pages in, only to have to swap the game pages back when you immediately click back into it, expecting it to either crash your computer or probably disconnect from whatever server you were connected to. Fuck that shit.
I don't want my PC wasting resources trying to guess every possible next action I might take. Even I don't know for sure what games I'll play tonight.
I mean I have access to a computer with a terabyte of RAM I'm gonna go ahead and say that most applications aren't going to need that much and if they use that much I'm gonna be cross.
Yeah, my Xperia 1 (Android 3.1) still runs fluid with it's 100 MB of RAM and storage. While my Leaf2 e-reader lags in a uptodate LineageOS, despite having 10x more CPU and 20x more RAM.
Had to install (an old mind you, 2019) visual studio on windows...
...
...
First it's like 30GB, what the hell?? It's an advanced text editor with a compiler and some ..
Crashed a little less than what I remember 🥴😁
VS Code is considered a highly extensible text editor that can be used as an IDE, especially for web based tools, but it isnt an IDE. It's more comparable to Neovim or Emacs than to IntelliJ in terms of the role it's supposed to fill. Technically. VS Code definitely is used more as an IDE by most people, and those people are weak imo. I'm not one to shill for companies (i promise this isnt astroturf) but if you need to write code Jetbrains probably has the best IDE for that language. Not always true but moee often than not it is imo.
Ooh, a flame war 🔥🔥🔥 ! It has been so long since I was involved in one, thank you 🙋🏻♀️! 😊
Who uses visual code to something else than writing and launching vode? I only uses it for C#/Godot on Linux but it has all the bells and whistles to make it an IDE IMO (BTW anyone who doesn't code in C/C++ is weak ofc ☺️! 🔥).
Let me just add that jetbrains (at least pycharm) have started their enshittification death cycle, and I'm looking for a lightweight python IDE that doesn't hallucinate (but lets you use venm and debug), if you have any ideas I'm listening!
Cheers
PCs aren't faster, they have more cores, so they can do more at a time, but it takes effort to optimize for parallel work. Also the form factor keeps getting smaller, more people use laptops now and you can't cheat thermal efficiency.
My first PC ran at 16MHz on turbo.
PCs today are orders of magnitude faster. Way less fun, but faster.
What's even more orders of magnitude slower and infinitely more bloated is software. Which is the point of the post.
It's almost impossible to find any piece of actually optimised software these days (with some exceptions like sqlite) to the point that 99% percent of the software currently in use can be considered unintentional (or intentional) malware.
Particularly egregious are web browsers, which seem designed to waste the maximum possible amount of resources and run as inefficiently as possible.
And the fact that most supposedly desktop software these days runs on top of one of those pieces ofintentional (it's impossible to achieve such levels of inefficiency and bloat unintentionally, it requires active effort) malware obviously doesn't help.
Turbo slowed your processor down though
Only on some and name brand PC's which used it for compatibility. For home built or local store, the turbo would overclock. I remember telling a friend, that although their 16mhz could run at 20, to not do it because it would compromise longevity! Ha! Mind you the cpu's in those days didn't have heat sinks but still- Oh no your 386 might not work in 20 years from running too hot!
Wow so it actually did have some turbo behind it. Fascinating, thanks
What do you mean pc's aren't faster? Yes they have more cores, they also clock higher (mostly) and have more instructions per clock. Computers now perform way better than ever before in every single metric most tasks, even linear ones, could be way faster
It's all about memory latency and bandwidth now which has improved greatly PC's are still getting faster. There is a new RAM standards being pushed right now CAMM2 is really exciting it pushes back the need for soldered memory.
I paid for the whole amount of RAM, I'm gonna use the whole amount of RAM.
/s
Joke aside, the computer I used a little more than a decade ago used to take 1 minute just to display a single raw photo. I'm a liiiittle better off now.
Was it a Raspberry Pi?
sory for making you feel old..er.
i7 4th gen/ haswell was 13 years ago. I still use it.
that sempron is probably more than 17 years ago.
I had an athlon xp 2000+, single core. OC to 2666MHz with proper thermals
I got that PC in high school and had to run it a bit afterwards because I didn't have the money for a new one. When eventually I got around to replacing it, I got an X99/Haswell-E system and it was a night and day difference.
used to take 1 minute just to display a single raw photo
See, that’s a great example!
RAW processing (at least in that context) hasn’t really changed in 10 years. It’s probably the same code doing all the heavy lifting.
But most software doesn’t have that benefit.
Vista honestly wasn't as bad as we all said/remember, but it was the start of Windows optimization downturn. It worked great on top of the line systems with tons of power, and was the best looking Windows Microslop ever developed.
It just happened to also coincide with the start of netbooks and low power computers going mainstream, and marketing thought that the F1 requiring OS should also be sold on a 3 door hatchback with 60 horsepower.
Your mileage with Vista was wildly hardware-dependent. Prior to Vista, if you could run one version of Windows, the next version would run just about as well.
The Indexer and Glass were memory hungry. If you gave it a decent amount of ram, it could look like a dream while it did. If you turned off Aero on an under-specced machine, it could also run pretty well, but if you turned off Aero, you didn't have much of a reason not to just run 98se.
The other shoe was drivers. Noone was ready for WDDM and a LOT of the small to mid-sized hardware vendors emergency released slow, buggy, memory-hungry drivers that just made Vista feel horrible.
I had some off-the-shelf compaqs that ran beautifully, My dual P3/scsi workstation with tons of ram, ran like hot garbage.
God, I almost trauma blocked the driver situation for that first year or three. My q6600 and 8gb of ram ran like greased lightning, and disabling Aero made it even more responsive than 98SE or XP. (I am a latency and user experience fluidity whore though, so sacrificing eye candy for performance was and still is A-OK with me). The Aero design language was still killer even with the bells and whistles turned off.
The main reason to jump from XP (or 98) was the 64 bit jump and breaking the 4gh ram limit. XP x64 was kinda hot garbage, also due to driver issues if I recall correctly.
I bought a desktop PC for a little over 2k in late 2011, and still use it. I'm a back-end developer, and certainly I would like to be able to upgrade my 16 GB RAM to 32 GB in an affordable way.
Other than that, it's perfectly fine. IDE, a few docker containers, works.
And modern gaming is a scam anyway. Realistic graphics do not increase fun, they just eat electricity and our money. Retro gaming or not at all.
Imagine how things were if they were built to be maintained for 15+ years.
wow, you are right! I didn't bother to check this whole time of needless suffering, but for what I earn with it in less than an hour I could probably buy 2x8 GB DDR-3, lol!
It just seemed a fair assumption that it would be insanely expensive ...
The whole industry needs rebuilt from the foundations. GRTT with a grading ring that tightly controls resources (including, but not limited to RAM) as the fundamental calculus, instead of whatever JS happens to stick to the Chome codebase and machine codes spewed by your favorite C compiler.
Sorry. I didn't pick the acronym, it comes from the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.13163.pdf I'm not sure why there's no "M" in the acronym, but I should probably spell things out when I actually want collaborators.
While I'm dropping links, I will also drop https://github.com/granule-project/ where Gerty and Granule live and where real research is done.
If someone wants to collab, I've been writing various codes around it: https://gitlab.com/bss03/grtt
Right now, it's a bunch of crap. But, it's published, and I occasionally try to improve it.
Also, Granule and Gerty are actual working implementations, tho I think some of the "magic" is in the right grading ring for the runtime, and they and more research oriented, allowing for fairly arbitrary grading rings.
For my home PC, sure. Running some windows apps on my Linux machine in wine is a little weird and sluggish. Discord is very oddly sluggish for known reasons. Proton is fine tho.
But for my work? Nah. My M3 MacBook Pro is a beast compared to even the last Intel MacBook. Battery is way better unless you’re like me and constantly running a front end UI for a single local service. But without that, it can last hours. My old one could only last 2 meetings before it started dying.
Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.
Apple has done pretty well, but they aren't immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.
The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.
phones.
Using a smartphone from 5 years ago with modern updates feels worse than the first iPhone.
Which is not even true. If you want small you can get it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Whenever efficiency increases consumption increases. Better steam engines mean more coal consumption. Faster cheaper RAM means more RAM consumption.
Unreal Engine is one of biggest offenders in gaming.
That's... not really true, and not what that link shows. Those latency tests still show then-modern devices topping the list. They're arguing that some then-modern low end devices have more button-to-screen latency than older hardware (which they would, given he's comparing to single-threaded, single-tasking bare metal stuff from the 80s spitting signals out to a CRT to laptops with integrated graphics). And they're saying that at the time (I presume the post dates from 2017, when the testing ends), this wasn't well understood because people were benching the hardware and not the end to end latency factoring the I/O... which was kinda true then but absolutely not anymore.
I'd get in the weeds about how much or little sense it makes to compare an apple 2 drawing text on a CRT to typing on a powershell/Linux terminal window inside a desktop environment, but that'd be kind of unfair. Ten years ago this wasn't a terrible observation to make with the limited tools the guy had available, and this sort of post made it popular to think about latency and made manufacturers on controllers, monitors and GPUs focus on it more.
What it does not show, though, is that an apple 2 was faster than a modern gaming PC by any metric. Not in 2017, and sure as hell not in 2026, when 240Hz monitors are popular, 120Hz TVs are industry-standard, VRR is widely supported and keyboards, controllers, monitors and GPU manufacturers are obsessed with latency measurements. It's not just fallacious, it's wrong.
Uh, that's a bit off to be fair.
Our computers are 15x faster than they were about 15-20 years ago, sure...
But 1, the speed is noticeable and 2, not all the new performance is utilised 100%.
Sure, operating systems have started utilising the extra hardware to deliver the same 60-120fps base experience with some extra fancy (transparency with blur, for example, instead of regular transparency), but overall computer UX has plateaued a good decade and half ago.
The bottleneck is not the hardware or bad software but simply the idea of "why go faster when going this speed is fine, and we now don't need to use 15-30% of the hardware to do it but just 1-2%".
Oh and the other bottleneck is stupidity, like letting long running tasks onto the main/UI thread, fucking up the experience. Unfortunately, you can't help stupid.
Computer speed feels about the same as it was years ago.
That's not "programmer_humor", that's an absolute fact. Had to go on an ancient laptop here for an old lost file recently, it was WAY faster than a new ultra speedy decked out recent build Win12 machine. WTAF??
Dunno this paradox theory, but the impression I get is that when you're part of the process, it's harder to notice changes. But if putting the two devices side by side, trying to run the same systems, programs, etc., the difference is glaring. And from tests I did, if the software doesn't work on either of the devices, slapping a VM on the newer one to test older programs still tells quite a lot.
This entire thread is a perfect example of the paradox folks keep mentioning:
Nobody in both 🧵s pointed out that Ocean used Mastodon to post the banter with.
Plenty more optimized federated slop software in the market.
I am also on Jabber, if it means anything to Zoomies.
I dislike a lot the framing of this.
Yes, the average software runs much less efficient. But is efficiency what the user want? No. It is not.
How many people will tell you that they stick to windows instead of switching to linux because linux is all terminal? And terminal is quicker, more efficient for most things. But the user wants a gui.
And if we compare modern gui to old gui... I don't think modern us 15x worse.
But the user wants a gui.
Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we've had smooth GUI experiences since Apple's 1980s OS. This isn't the primary load on the system.
Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn't ask for.
It's a black hole of bloatware.
TVs became SmartTVs and now need the internet to turn on. The TVs need an OS now to internet to do TV.
Antennae broadcast TV seems like an ancient magic.
We've deprecated a lot of the old TV/radio signal bandwidth in order to convert it to cellphone signal service.
But, on the flip side, digital antennae can hold a lot more information than the old analog signals. So now I've got a TV with a mini-antennae that gets 500 channels (virtually none of which I watch). My toddler son has figured out how to flip the channel to the continuous broadcast of Baby Einstein videos. And he periodically hijacks the TV for that purpose, when we leave the remote where he can reach.
So there's at least one person I can name who likes the current state of affairs.
I always have to remind myself being able to stream audio from a cellphone while driving across a city is also a pretty crazy development.
I am not saying linux is terminal. I am saying that people tell you that linux is all terminal and that they want a gui.
Linux gui is much prettier than Windows anyway.
There isn't anything fundamentally slower about using a GUI vs just text in a console. There's more to draw but it scales linearly. The drawing things on the screen part isn't the slow bit for slow programs. Well, it can be if it's coded inefficiently, but there are plenty of programs with GUIs that are snappy... Like games, which generally draw even more complex things than your average GUI app.
Slow apps are more likely because of an inefficient framework (like running in a web browser with heavy reliance on scripts rather than native code), inefficient algorithms that scale poorly, poor resource use, bad organization that results in doing the same operation more times than necessary, etc.
The terminal is quicker. Not because of the image is drawn more quickly but because it is more efficient to do anything.
Can you elaborate on that? I disagree but would like to understand why you think that. Maybe you're referring to something I wouldn't disagree with.
E.g. From the terminal, I open a known file far more quickly then through an gui. Even if I want to use a gui for the file, issuing the opening command is quicker in the terminal.
GUIs often require the user to scan the interface to find the relevant information as the developer didn't know what you are actually searching.
With a terminal, the user can be much more precise in what they seeking and consequently, less information is provided and less information needs to be scanned by the user.
The average user doesn't want to remember and type a specific phrase to do something though. Even if it is "faster" and more "efficient", the user want to be guided towards the information. The user wants a good user experience, not a fast/efficient one.
Pretty and guided, that is what the average user wants. Modern software is pretty and guided, not efficient and fast. Yes, developer became lazy in optimisation and like to use some big framework to save dev time. But the user also wanted it that way by wanting pretty GUIs because that is easier with the big frameworks.
Technically true, but there's a threshold on responsiveness. If both user interfaces respond in milliseconds, it doesn't matter if one is more efficient
It does because it highlights that instead of being excited to "have to use the terminal" as it is more "efficient" but instead they prefer the "slower" prettier gui. The user want the stupid animations and the flashy nonsense. The user doesn't want quick software. They want pretty software.
The problem is not so much badly written programs and websites in terms of algorithms, but rather latency. The latency of loading things from storage, sometimes through the internet is the real bottleneck and why things feel so slow.
even with mothern ssds, things sometimes feel slower than what they were with hdds with time accurate software, windows 7 was snappy even on a hdd, windows 11 is slow and sluggish everywhere
That's some nonsense, though.
For one thing, it's one of those tropes that people have been saying for 30 years, so it kinda stops making sense after a while. For another, the reason it doesn't make sense is it doesn't account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.
In 2016 I had a 970 that's still in an old computer I use as a retro rocket, and I can promise you that wonderful as that thing was, I couldn't have been playing Resident Evil this week on that thing. So yeah, I notice.
And I had a Galaxy S7 then, which is still in use as a bit of a display and I assure you my current phone is VERY noticeably faster, even discounting the fact that its displaying 120fps rather than 60.
Old people have been going "things were better when I was a kid" for millennia. I'm not assuming we're gonna stop now, but... maybe we should.
it doesn’t account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.
We know they do more, but most of that “more” is bullshit bloat and sloppy engineering, neither of which we asked for.
When I boot up Windows 11 and start no programs, somehow there’s already over 8Gb RAM already consumed, the CPU shows 8% utilisation, there’s 244 processes running, and it still took every bit as long to get there as my Windows 7 machine from 2011. That’s what the rest of us are talking about.
When was the last time you booted a 2011 machine? Because man, is that not true.
And that's a 2016-2017 era PC.
Windows 7 didn't even have fast boot support at all. I actively remember recommending people to let their PCs sit for a couple of minutes after booting so that Windows could finish whatever the hell it was trying to do in the background faster instead of clogging up whatever else you were trying to do.
Keeping my old hardware around compulsively really impacts my perception of this whole "things were better when I was a teenager" stuff.
Then you're either lying about it or haven't booted a newer PC. Fast Boot was a back of the box feature for Windows 8 for a reason. It was becoming a huge meme at the time how slow Win7 was to boot.
If your 2020s PC with Windows 11 is taking 45 seconds to boot on the Windows logo like Win 7 does (as seen in the benchmarks above) then you need some tech support because something is clearly not working as expected. I don't think even my weaker Win11 machines take longer than 10 secs from boot starting to the password screen.
That may be true anyway, because the tiny hybrid laptop I'm using to write this is reporting 2-5% CPU utilization even with a literal hundred tabs open in this browser. So... yeah, either you have a knack for hyperbole or something broken.
@programming.dev
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
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@programming.dev
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
- If the mod doesn't find it funny, you're banned. Ha-ha!... For real: do not use the community for "statements". There are other places for such content. Keep it chill and funny.
go to feed...
For anyone unsure: Jevon's Paradox is that when there's more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use (see DeepSeek), but instead AI companies just buy up all the GPUs and shove more compute in.
For the expansive bloat - same goes for phones. Our phones are orders of magnitude better than what they were 10 years ago, and now it's loaded with bloat because the manufacturer thinks "Well, there's more computer and memory. Let's shove more bloat in there!"
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