Actually I can, because I use Linux.
Though an install is like 8gb now, instead of 700mb.
Which is not even true. If you want small you can get it.
Unreal Engine is one of biggest offenders in gaming.
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.
I came from C and C++ and had learned that parallelism is hard. Then I tried parallelism on Rust in a project of mine and it was so insanely easy.
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!
Browsers are not the same as they where. They are basically bikers ring systems in themselves now.
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.
The faster single core out of order execution performance on newer x86 CPUs lets it work on that higher bandwidth of data too.
The modern web is an insult to the idea of efficiency at practically every level.
You cannot convince me that isolation and sandboxing requires a fat 4Gb slice of RAM for a measly 4 tabs.
It is crazy that I can have a core 2 duo with 8 gig of RAM that struggles loading web pages
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.
china is making webpages that are less than 20 megabytes…but at what cost?
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.
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??
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.
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.
More like:
You paid for more RAM, so I’ll use whole amount of RAM.
– All software developers
Was it a Raspberry Pi?
It was a s. 754 Sempon at a time when people were already running Core 2 Duos ans Quads.
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.
The program expands so as to fill the resources available for its execution
– C.N. Parkinson (if he were alive today)
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.
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.
I don’t agree. It’s both. I’ve opened basic no JS sites on old tablets to test them out and even those pages BARELY load
What caused the latency in that case?
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.
Computer speed feels about the same as it was years ago.
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.
arithmetic was not updated in a few thousand years.
Oh boy, don’t let a mathematician hear this.
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”.
“More AI features”? Of course we can implement more AI features for yo.
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).
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.
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.
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.
In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.
The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.
Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.
Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.
How is that mindset lazy?
Are you really asking how it’s lazy to pass unoptimized code to a customer and make their hardware do all the work for you because optimization was too costly?? Like I get that you are in an Enterprise space, but this mentality is very prevalent and is why computers from today don’t feel that much faster software wise than they did 10 years ago. The faster hardware gets, the lazier devs can be because why optimize when they’ve got all those cycles and RAM available?
And this isn’t a different at you, that’s software development in general, and I don’t see it getting any better.
It’s not just software development, it’s everywhere. Devices are cheap, people are expensive. So it’s not lazy, he’s being asked to put his expensive time into efforts the customer actually wants to pay for. If having him optimize the code further costs way more than buying a better computer, it doesn’t make sense economically for him to waste his time on that.
Is that yet another example of how the economy has strange incentives? For sure, but that doesn’t make him lazy.
I never called them lazy, I stated that the mentality is lazy, which it is. Whether or not that laziness is profit driven, it still comes down to not wanting to put forth the effort to make a product that runs better.
Systemic laziness as profit generation is still laziness. We’re just excusing it with cost and shit, and if everyone is lazy, then no one is.
If cost is a justification for this kind of laziness, it also justifies slop code development. After all, it’s cheaper that way, right?
Exactly the mindset responsible for the state of modern software.
Your spelling is terrible
Bro just denied bro’s lemmy comment pull request
Oops, forgot the AI step
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.
It took me a long time to figure out that “GRTT” is “Graded Modal Type Theory”. Letting others know, if they want to look into it further.
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 one of us ever wins the lotto we better get on funding that
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.
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 🥴😁
First it’s like 30GB, what the hell??
Just be grateful it’s SSD and not RAM.
Visual Studio is the IDE. VS Code is the text editor.
OP was clearly using a rhetorical reduction to make a point that VS is bloated.
Visual code is another project, visual studio is indeed an IDE but it integrates it all. Vscode is also an integrated development environment. I don’t really know what more to say.
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
For data science, Spyder is good. Otherwise I also use pyzo as a lightweight IDE.
I wanna clarify that when i say VS Code I’m talking about Visual Studio Code. I was only commenting on the difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code because you said you downloaded Visual Studio and was confused why a text editor was 30gb, and it’s possible you downloaded the IDE rather than the text editor. I apologize if you thought i was talking about Visual Code; I wasn’t.
And i agree that JetBrains has started to enshittify but I also think their enshittification has been pretty slow because they sell professional tools that still have to perform the basic functionality of an IDE. And for the modt part I’ve been able to disable all AI features save the ones I’m required to use at work (yay AI usage metrics ;-;)
“Let them eat ram”
