[HN Gopher] Fast machines, slow machines (2023)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Fast machines, slow machines (2023)
        
       Author : amatheus
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2025-05-13 12:10 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jmmv.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jmmv.dev)
        
       | sshine wrote:
       | Back then, programmers had to care about performance. The field
       | of programming was less accessible, so the average skills to
       | reach the barrier to entry were higher. So people were, on
       | average, better programmers. The commercial incentives of today
       | to reach market with something half-assed and then never fix it
       | don't help.
       | 
       | In 2002 I ran OpenBSD on my laptop (thus sacrificing wifi). The
       | memory footprint of running X11, a browser, a terminal, and an
       | editor: 28MB
        
         | graemep wrote:
         | Browsers are the big problem. Security and compatibility push
         | upgrades to the latest, very heavy, ones.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | There was plenty of software that ran like absolute garbage
         | "back then" but OS's didn't.
        
       | coolcase wrote:
       | Are mobile devices slow/unresponsive. I haven't experienced that
       | unless I realllllly cheap out. Or after 4 years of OS updates on
       | Apple devices for some reason. Androids seem OK in this regard.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | I switched from android back to iOS last year. There seems to
         | be some sort of inherent latency in either android or Samsung's
         | UI that causes the UI thread to lag behind your inputs by a
         | noticeable amount, and for the UI thread to block app actions
         | in many cases.
         | 
         | Things like summoning a keyboard causing my 120hz galaxy phone
         | to drop to sub 10fps playing the intro animation for GBoard
         | were just rampant. All non existent in iOS
        
           | nottorp wrote:
           | But but ... Samsung has bigger numbers in the spec sheet! It
           | must be faster!
        
           | genewitch wrote:
           | I begin to wonder if all the commenters in this thread have
           | compromised devices. I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model
           | is, I bought it new six months ago) - my Linux machines are
           | fast (gentoo) and my windows 10 and 11 machines are fast. My
           | kid's computer is an i3 7350k and he plays roblox, Minecraft,
           | teardown on it with no issues. That computer is a couple
           | years older than he is at 9-10 years old. That computer's
           | twin is my nas backup with 10gbe running windows - the drive
           | array refused to work at any decent speed on Linux and I
           | didn't want jbod, I wanted RAID.
           | 
           | Some things are slow, like discord on windows takes ~12
           | seconds before it starts to pop in ui elements after you
           | double click. My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread
           | 128GB; but no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen
           | 3600s that run windows 11 fine.
        
             | maccard wrote:
             | Did you watch the videos linked in the article?
             | 
             | > I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it
             | new six months ago)
             | 
             | How quick is the Share menu on your samsung? On mine, it
             | takes about 3 seconds of repainting itself before it
             | settles down. On iOS there's about a 100ms pause and the
             | drawer pops up, fully populated. I found [0] which is a
             | perfect example of this sort of bloat.
             | 
             | > My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread 128GB; but
             | no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen 3600s that
             | run windows 11 fine.
             | 
             | My main computer is a 24 core i9 with 64GB ram on NVMe. It
             | runs windows fine. But, I saw exactly the same behaviour
             | out of the box on this machine (and on the machine I
             | replaced) as the linked article shows. I can compile, play
             | games, do AV transcoding. But using apps like slack or
             | discord is like walking through molasses, and even
             | launching lightweight apps like WIndows Terminal, and
             | Notepad have a _noticeable_ delay from button press to the
             | window appearing on screen. There 's just something a bit
             | broken about it.
             | 
             | [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-
             | fix-a...
        
               | genewitch wrote:
               | No i was referring only to the comments here. The share
               | menu comes up real fast, there's no "delay", as soon as
               | the menu with "share" goes away, the bottom slides up and
               | the share panel appears, icons populated.
               | 
               | Is Slack also electron? a cursory search says discord is
               | electron. Now, firefox lags to start, too - compared to
               | edge, which is nearly instant to "launch". Brave is also
               | <1second to launch. I don't use "notepad", but i just ran
               | it, and while it's slower than the old notepad.exe, it's
               | much faster than notepad++ to come up - but i generally
               | launch that once and leave it running, same with firefox.
               | 
               | I don't use windows terminal, i use pwsh 7.5.x, and it's
               | <1 second to be ready for input. the window comes up real
               | fast, and then the text appears about that long again
               | later. I launched cmd.exe and it came up perhaps a bit
               | slower than pwsh, but not noticeably so.
               | 
               | this is what i am talking about, i don't notice
               | _anything_ slow on my computer, any of my computers,
               | really. This leads me to believe that either the people
               | who do experience slowness have a compromised system, or
               | some other issue. 5400 RPM data /boot drive, only using
               | electron apps (which are slow in general), or otherwise
               | misconfigured.
               | 
               | I haven't used Ubuntu desktop since they tampered with
               | the system menu/start menu, so i have _no idea_ what that
               | is like now. The server can be snappy, though - you just
               | have to configure networking and the like correctly. I 'm
               | not a fan of systemd; that colors my opinion of a lot of
               | linux systems. I use Gentoo and Devuan because they fully
               | support OpenRC, which i consider vastly superior for my
               | use cases. However, i do maintain a couple of ubuntu
               | based OSes for neighbors on HP EliteDesk SFF computers,
               | and they seem alright, 3-4x as fast as an rpi3/4 at
               | ubuntu desktop, as far as launch lag and boot times and
               | the like.
               | 
               | I think to put this to bed, we need to establish a
               | baseline or at least a list of applications to launch
               | while screen recording, and then literally count frames.
               | It would be funny if this was all perception and it
               | wasn't actually "slow", that is, "seconds to load" is
               | actually like 2 seconds, and not 12...
        
               | coolcase wrote:
               | My share is 1s. Didn't realise it was that slow. From the
               | UI interaction I wonder if it is on purpose to avoid an
               | accidental share.
        
           | keyringlight wrote:
           | FWIW I updated my phone to a relatively budget samsung
           | recently, and had a similar noticeable delay to bring up the
           | keyboard, installing 'simple keyboard' from F-droid seems to
           | have helped. I wouldn't be surprised if it is missing
           | features compared to the samsung/google ones where their
           | absence will annoy a power user, but for whatever subset I
           | use it works fine and doesn't appear as though my phone
           | hangs.
        
           | erinaceousjones wrote:
           | I do wonder if part of it is down to Android default
           | animation speeds.... Pixel 6 here, Gboard snappy enough.
           | Something I do on every android device I own though is go
           | into developer settings and change all the animation
           | durations to 0.5x. Makes stuff seem snappier. In reality I'm
           | sure it's dropping just as many frames as it async loads
           | garbage enterprise uncompressed asset icons or whatever, but
           | hey it shows up on screen _2x as fast!!!!_
           | 
           | Edit: oh, no, you have a point about the UI blocking stuff,
           | it's fine when apps are loaded and active but "cold booting"
           | a UI component definitely has lags in stupid places, android
           | UX feels like a web perform sometimes due to that.... Tap
           | button, go on holiday for a week, come back and it's
           | responded to the button press (while you were trying to do
           | something completely different and now you've pressed
           | _something else_ and you 're not sure what because _this
           | time_ the button you pressed closed the activity overlay 1ms
           | after)
        
         | jebarker wrote:
         | I have a top end Pixel phone running stock Android and
         | encounter latency all the time. All first start time is usually
         | a couple of seconds. Switching back to an open app is fast in
         | many cases but some still have to do a refresh (which I suspect
         | involves communication to servers, although that's still not
         | much of an excuse).
        
       | seritools wrote:
       | > Notepad had been a native app until very recently, and it still
       | opened pretty much instantaneously. With its rewrite as a UWP
       | app, things went downhill. The before and after are apparent, and
       | yet... the app continues to be as unfeatureful as it had always
       | been. This is extra slowness for no user benefit.
       | 
       | We now have HUGE (/s) advancements in Notepad, like tabs and
       | uh... Copilot
        
         | chromehearts wrote:
         | Don't forget dark mode!
        
           | M95D wrote:
           | I remember Windows 3.1 where I could change not only the
           | color of the buttons, but the color of the light and shadow
           | edge.
        
       | jonathanlydall wrote:
       | I've recently noticed this on an especially well used app I have
       | on my iPhone 14 with a stupid animation which regularly annoys
       | me.
       | 
       | Google Authenticator's filter box, when you tap it there is a
       | very noticeable delay after tapping the filter box and the
       | keyboard showing.
       | 
       | And what makes it worse is that if you switch away from the app,
       | it auto clears the filter.
       | 
       | This isn't a complex app and it's slow at doing a use case easily
       | performed millions of times a day.
        
         | throwaheyy wrote:
         | This is why I do not use any google apps and deleted my google
         | anccount. Their shitty software pisses me off.
         | 
         | Every time I try to use it, the UI elements shift around as I
         | try an action as simple as activating a search box. But it is
         | just laggy enough that you click on something a second time,
         | since it apparently didn't activate the first time. But by then
         | it's shifted everything around and you are either cancelling
         | what you were doing, or you are taken off into some new
         | workflow you didn't want.
         | 
         | The absolute WORST is when you focus the search box and it
         | shifts to the top of the screen. With lag, you click on the
         | search box again, but now where it was is a list of completion
         | suggestions and you are taken off to some search result page
         | you never asked for.
         | 
         | It's fucking infuriating and I won't entertain it.
        
       | maccard wrote:
       | The author mentions rewriting core applications in C# on windows
       | but I don't think this is the problem. Write a simple hello world
       | app in c#, compile it and see how long it takes to run vs a rust
       | app or a python script - it's almost native. Unity is locked to a
       | horrifically ancient version of mono and still manages to do a
       | lot of work in a small period of time. (If we start talking
       | JavaScript or python on the other hand...)
       | 
       | I agree with him though. I recently had a machine that I upgraded
       | from Win10 to Win11 and it was like someone kneecapped it. I
       | don't know if it's modern app frameworks, or the OS, but
       | something has gone horribly wrong on macOS and windows (iOS
       | doesn't suffer from this as much for whatever reason IME)
       | 
       | My gut instinct is an adjustment to everything being
       | asynchronous, combined with development on 0 latency networks in
       | isolated environments means that when you compound "wait for
       | windows defender to scan, wait for the local telemetry service to
       | respond, incrementally async load 500 icon or text files and have
       | them run through all the same slowness" with frameworks that
       | introduce latency, context switching, and are thin wrappers that
       | spend most of our time FFI'ing things to native languages, and
       | then deploy them in non perfect conditions you get the mess we're
       | in now.
        
         | lelanthran wrote:
         | > incrementally async load 500 icon or text files and have them
         | run through all the same slowness"
         | 
         | This really shouldn't be slower when done asynchronously
         | compared to synchronously. I would expect, actually, that it
         | would be faster (all available cores get used).
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | > I would expect, actually, that it would be faster (all
           | available cores get used).
           | 
           | And I think this assumption is what's killing us. Async !=
           | parallel for a start, and parallel IO is not guaranteed to be
           | fast.
           | 
           | If you write a function:                   async
           | Task<ImageFile> LoadFile(string path)         {
           | var f = await load_file(path);             return new
           | ImageFile(f);         }
           | 
           | And someone comes along and makes it into a batch operation;
           | async Task<List<ImageFile>> LoadFiles(List<string> paths)
           | {             var results = new List<ImageFile>();
           | foreach(var path in paths) {                 var f = await
           | load_file(path);                 results.Add(ImageFile(f));
           | }             return results;         }
           | 
           | and provides it with 2 files instead of 1, you won't notice
           | it. Over time 2 becomes 10, and 10 becomes 500. You're now at
           | the mercy of whatever is running your tasks. If you yield
           | alongside await [0] in an event loop, you introduce a loop
           | iteration of latency in proceeding, meaning you've now
           | introduced 500 loops of latency.
           | 
           | In case you say "but that's bad code", well yes, it is. But
           | it's also very common. When I was reading for this reply, I
           | found this stackoverflow [0] post that has _exactly_ this
           | problem.
           | 
           | [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5061761/is-it-
           | possible-t...
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | Why would someone put an await inside a loop?
             | 
             | Don't get me wrong... I believe you have seen it, I just
             | can't understand the thought process that led to that.
             | 
             | In my mind, await is used when you want to use the result,
             | not when you store it or return it.
        
               | maccard wrote:
               | The same can be asked about any number of things - why
               | would someone ever not free their memory, use a dynamic
               | allocation, not use a lock, use an orm, not use an orm.
               | 
               | > I just can't understand the thought process that led to
               | that.
               | 
               | Bluntly, it's not understanding the tools and
               | fundamentals. Your original reply assumed that it would
               | use all cores, for example. To me that's obviously not
               | true but I'm sure there's 10 things you could list off
               | that are obvious to you but I'd get wrong -
        
             | achandlerwhite wrote:
             | well I mean you'd use await foreach and IAsyncEnumerable
             | equivalent... async would mean the UI would not be blocked
             | so I agree with the original commenter you replied to.
        
         | CelestialMystic wrote:
         | It depends how the application is written in C#. A lot of
         | Modern C# relies on IoC frameworks. These do some reflection
         | shenanigans and this has a performance impact.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | This is literally what I said:
           | 
           | > The author mentions rewriting core applications in C# on
           | windows but I don't think this is the problem. Write a simple
           | hello world app in c#, compile it and see how long it takes
           | to run vs a rust app or a python script - it's almost native
           | <...>
           | 
           | > My gut instinct is an adjustment to everything being
           | asynchronous, combined <...> with frameworks that introduce
           | latency, context switching, and are thin wrappers that spend
           | most of our time FFI'ing things to native languages, and then
           | deploy them in non perfect conditions you get the mess we're
           | in now.
        
         | nottorp wrote:
         | > Unity is locked to a horrifically ancient version of mono and
         | still manages to do a lot of work in a small period of time
         | 
         | Unity is the great battery killer!
         | 
         | The last example I remember is that I could play the first xcom
         | remake (which had a native mac version) on battery for 3-4
         | hours, while I was lucky to get 2 hours for
         | $random_unity_based_indie with less graphics.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | In my defence, I never said it was efficient! Games always
           | suck for battery because they're constantly rendering.
        
             | M95D wrote:
             | They don't need to. Enable v-sync.
        
             | Narishma wrote:
             | > Games always suck for battery because they're constantly
             | rendering.
             | 
             | Only the badly designed ones.
        
         | bluedino wrote:
         | I agree that these are very simple cases, and it's like
         | benchmarking compiliation or execution of _helloworld.cpp_
         | 
         | It would be interesting to see something like:
         | 
         | - cold boot
         | 
         | - load Windows
         | 
         | - load Office
         | 
         | - open a 200 page document
         | 
         | - create pdf from said document
         | 
         | - open 5000 row spreadsheet
         | 
         | - do a mail merge
         | 
         | - open 150,000 record database
         | 
         | - generate some goofy report
         | 
         | Do people still do mail merge? Not sure.
        
       | anself wrote:
       | Too much developers relying on bloatware, not enough "implement
       | it yourself" because in reality every hash map doves a unique
       | problem that a Palin hash map is not necessarily suited for.
       | Embrace NIH
        
       | maeln wrote:
       | More than CPU speed, I think the increase in storage and RAM is
       | to blame for the slow decay in latency. When you have only a few
       | Kb/Mb of RAM and storage, you can't really afford to add much
       | more to the software than what is the core feature. Your binary
       | need to be small, which lead to faster loading in RAM, and do
       | less, which means less things to run before the actual program.
       | 
       | When size is not an issue, it's harder to say no when the
       | business demand for a telemetry system, an auto-update system, a
       | crash handler with automatic report, and a bunch of features, a
       | lot of which needs to be initialized at the start of the program,
       | introducing significant latency at startup.
        
         | RetroTechie wrote:
         | It's also complexity - added more than necessary, and @ a
         | faster pace than hardware can keep up with.
         | 
         | Take font rendering: in early machines, fonts were small
         | bitmaps (often 8x8 pixels, 1 bit/pixel), hardcoded in ROM. As
         | screen resolutions grew (and varied between devices), OSes
         | stored fonts in different sizes. Later: scalable fonts, chosen
         | from a selection of styles / font families, rendered to sub-
         | pixel accuracy, sub-pixel configuration adjustable to match hw
         | construction of the display panel.
         | 
         | Yeah this is very flexible & can produce good looking fonts (if
         | set up correctly). Which scale nicely when zooming in or out.
         | 
         | But it also makes rendering each single character a _lot_ more
         | complex. And thus eats a lot more cpu, RAM  & storage than 8x8
         | fixed size, 1bpp font.
         | 
         | Or the must-insert-network-request-everywhere bs. No, I _don
         | 't_ need search engine to start searching & provide suggestions
         | after I've typed 1 character & didn't hit "search" yet.
         | 
         | There are _many_ examples like the above, I won 't elaborate.
         | 
         | Some of that complexity is necessary. Some of it isn't, but
         | lightweight & very useful. But much of it is just a pile of
         | unneeded crap of dubious usefulness (if any).
         | 
         | Imho, software development really _should_ return to 1st
         | principles. Start with a minimum viable product, that only has
         | the _absolute_ necessary functionality relevant to end-users.
         | Don 't even bother to include anything other than the absolute
         | minimum. Optimise the heck out of that, and presto: v1.0 is
         | done. Go from there.
        
           | marcosdumay wrote:
           | > But it also makes rendering each single character a lot
           | more complex.
           | 
           | Not millions of times more complex.
           | 
           | Except for some outliers that mess up everything (like
           | anything from Microsoft), almost all of the increased latency
           | between keypress and character rendering we see on modern
           | computers comes from optimizing for modularity and
           | generalization instead of specialized code for handling the
           | keyboard.
           | 
           | Not even our hardware reacts fast enough to give you the
           | latency computers had in the 90s.
        
             | Borg3 wrote:
             | Im not really sure what are you talking about ;) HW become
             | much much much faster. Mostly in speed of computing, but
             | latency also dropped nicely. The letency bloat you see its
             | 99% of software (OS). I still run Win2003 on modern
             | desktop, and it flies! Really, booting/shutdown is quick.
             | Im on spinning rust, so first start of webbrowser is
             | slowish a bit, but once cached, its like 200ms-500ms
             | depending on version (more modern = slower).
        
           | zokier wrote:
           | I'm not sure your font rendering is very good example here.
           | Windows has used vector fonts since 90s and ClearType since
           | Windows XP. That is nearly 25 years ago. And it wasn't really
           | much of a performance issue even back then.
        
             | RetroTechie wrote:
             | Correct. Modern font rendering likely falls into that "more
             | complex, but lightweight / useful" category.
             | 
             | My point was it's much more complex even though it does
             | _essentially_ the same thing (output character to screen).
             | 
             |  _> > There are many examples like the above_
             | 
             | Death by a 1000 cuts! Probably much worse offenders out
             | there that deserve being attacked.
        
       | drob518 wrote:
       | Startup time has always been a bit of a sketchy metric as modern
       | OSs and languages do a lot of processing on application launch.
       | Some scan for viruses. On Macs you have checks for x86 vs Apple
       | silicon and loading of Rosetta if required. Managed runtime
       | environments have various JITs that get invoked. And apps are now
       | huge webs of dependencies, so lots of dynamically linked code
       | being loaded. A better metric is their performance once
       | everything is in memory. That said, I still think we're doing
       | poorly at that metric as well. As resources have ballooned over
       | the last decade, we've become lazy and we just don't care about
       | writing tight code.
        
         | kreco wrote:
         | Why not both?
         | 
         | The applications are launched at startup time _because_ they
         | have runtime startup slowness. The applications have startup
         | slowness _because_ of the JIT runtime /deps/.dll.
         | 
         | At the end of the day, end users pay for the cost of developer
         | convenience (JIT and deps most of the time, even thought there
         | are some case where dynamic linking is alright) because they
         | don't do native apps.
         | 
         | Offloading everything at startup is a symptom IMO.
         | 
         | Replying to your specific point about virus scans. For some
         | (naive) reason, I expect them to run a single time against a
         | binary app that is never changed. So in theory it shouldn't
         | even be a problem, but the reality says otherwise.
        
           | cesarb wrote:
           | > Replying to your specific point about virus scans. For some
           | (naive) reason, I expect them to run a single time against a
           | binary app that is never changed.
           | 
           | Playing devil's advocate: the executable might not have
           | changed, but the database of known virus signatures changes
           | daily or more often. Either every single executable would
           | have to be re-scanned every time the database updates, or the
           | executable has to be lazily scanned on load.
        
       | vanschelven wrote:
       | Similarly (linked in a footnote): http://danluu.com/input-lag/
        
       | jmmv wrote:
       | Original author here! Thanks for (re)sharing. We previously
       | discussed this at length in
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983.
       | 
       | I think this article has "aged well" in the sense that... nothing
       | has changed for the better :( Since I wrote it, I did upgrade my
       | machine: I now have a 24-core 13th Gen i7 laptop with a fast NVMe
       | drive and... well, Windows 11 is _still_ visibly laggy
       | throughout. Comparing it to KDE on the same machine is like night
       | and day in terms of general desktop snappiness (and yes, KDE has
       | its own bloat too, but it seems to have evolved in a more
       | "manageable" manner).
       | 
       | I've also gotten an M2 laptop for work since then, and same issue
       | there: I remember how transformative the M1 felt at launch with
       | everything being extremely quick in macOS, but the signs of bloat
       | are _already_ showing up. Upgrading anything takes ages because
       | every app is a monster that weighs hundreds of MBs, and reopening
       | apps after a reboot is painfully slow. Still, though, macOS feels
       | generally better than Windows on modern hardware.
       | 
       | About the article itself, I'll say that there was a complaint
       | back then (and I see it now here too) about my blaming of .NET
       | rewrites being misplaced. Yes, I'll concede that; I was too quick
       | to write that, and likely wrong. But don't let that distract
       | yourself from the rest of the article. Modern Notepad is
       | inexplicably slower than older Notepad, and for what reason? (I
       | honestly don't know and haven't researched it.)
       | 
       | And finally, I'll leave you with this other article that I wrote
       | as a follow-up to that one, with a list of things that I feel
       | developers just don't think about when writing software, and that
       | inevitably leads to the issues we see industry-wide:
       | https://jmmv.dev/2023/09/performance-is-not-big-o.html
        
         | thenthenthen wrote:
         | I just got a second hand M1 Air, upgrading from 10 year old
         | MacbookPro... wow. The animations on the new MacOS are slow as
         | hell tho. Any way to speed them up? On iOS is it a breeze (no
         | jailbreak): https://cowabun.ga/ (Choose: CowabungaLite)
        
           | tedunangst wrote:
           | The only slow animation I noticed is the genie effect when
           | minimizing, but you can switch to a zoom effect and it's
           | fastish.
        
       | pjdesno wrote:
       | My take on it - performance decays when engineering management
       | doesn't prioritize it.
       | 
       | Modern example: Laptops boot in seconds. My servers take about 5
       | minutes to get to Linux boot, with long stretches of time taken
       | by various subsystems, while Coreboot (designed to be fast) boots
       | them nearly as quickly as a laptop.
       | 
       | Old example: early in my career we were developing a telecom
       | system with a 5 min per year (5 9s) downtime target. The
       | prototype took 30 minutes to boot, and engineers didn't care
       | because management hadn't told them to make it boot faster. It
       | drove me nuts. (a moot point, as it eventually got cancelled and
       | we all got laid off)
        
       | yobbo wrote:
       | I suspect (in a common pattern) the main thing that blocks making
       | performance a priority is that it equates to reordering various
       | ranks among developers and product managers.
       | 
       | When performance supersedes "more features", developers are
       | gatekeepers and manager initiatives can be re-examined. The
       | "solution" is to make performance a non-priority and paint
       | complainers as stale and out-of-fashion.
        
         | smilliken wrote:
         | Or you can have technical managers that understand what they
         | are managing.
        
         | RetroTechie wrote:
         | Probably more common is that software isn't developed with end-
         | users as #1 priority; it's developed to advance business goals.
         | 
         | Those 2 goals align about as often as planets in our solar
         | system.
         | 
         | To some degree this is true for open source software as well.
         | Developers may choose to work on features they find interesting
         | (or projects done in a language they feel comfortable with),
         | vs. looking at user experience first. Never mind that
         | optimizing UX is hard (& fuzzy) as it is.
         | 
         | Or all the work done on libre software to cater to various
         | corporate interests. As opposed to power users fixing &
         | improving things for _their_ needs.
        
       | jebarker wrote:
       | So is there any hope for improvement?
       | 
       | Personally I've decided to just vote with my feet and avoid using
       | poor performing software as much as possibl, but that's
       | frequently impractical or not worth the cost of missing out. I
       | also doubt this will change the behaviors of companies as we see
       | with, for example, TV advertising that they give no shits about
       | degrading the consumer experience over the long term.
       | 
       | There doesn't seem much hope on the technical side either as
       | software complexity is only increasing.aybe longer term AI has a
       | role to play in auto-optimization?
        
       | moffkalast wrote:
       | > How does this all happen? It's easy to say "Bloat!"
       | 
       | Bloat!
       | 
       | It was pretty easy indeed.
        
       | chrsw wrote:
       | "Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell." --Det.
       | William 'Bunk' Moreland
        
       | bluedino wrote:
       | Wasn't there some common Windows 10 bug a while back where
       | Command Prompt would take forever to load because of DNS lookups
       | or some crap?
       | 
       | These days you aren't just opening a 64k executable (notepad),
       | you're calling back to the mothership, recording usage data, blah
       | blah
        
       | bigstrat2003 wrote:
       | I think that the author is spot on about the cause of the
       | problem: software developers (meaning the organizations that
       | produce software, not necessarily the individuals writing code)
       | prioritize selfish goals like ease of development or profits over
       | the quality of the product. This has resulted in a lot of
       | software being quite terrible. Not just slow (though definitely
       | slow), but also buggy and crammed full of features that users
       | hate (but which make the developer money). The only market that
       | seems to reliably produce quality software any more is the open
       | source community, because they are making the software that they
       | themselves use and their incentives are aligned with users.
        
         | Pet_Ant wrote:
         | > software developers ... prioritize selfish goals like ease of
         | development or profits over the quality of the product.
         | 
         | What is an unspoken assumption in this type of complaint is
         | that the software would still have gotten written if it had to
         | be more handwritten. The amount of projects I've seen beached
         | on an outdated version of Spring because they neglected
         | upgrading even patch releases convinces me that more effort is
         | just not tenable.
        
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