Fast Hardware, Slow Software#
My old low budget phone in my pocket has at least 8-10 times more power than my PC desktop back in high school and six times more of memory.
The puzzling thing is... They both feel equal...
Moore's law#
Hardware performance improved exponentially year by year but the same observation cannot be said about our software - quite the opposite - if not for fast hardware then the modern software inefficiency would be that much more obvious to us.
Programmers got more and more memory and lost all the discipline to not waste it. Something unacceptable in the previous era when wasting resources was prohibited due to hard constraints in the hardware.
Java ecosystem was notorious for high memory usage and terrible speeds - but the PR was so strong that it hijacked academia and a lot of stuff was written in it... even today.
Pocket Computers#
It is remarkable that we all can have personal computers in our pockets which would run circles around the average desktop computers a decade prior.
Despite that this phone of mine multiple times more powerful achieves the same ergonomics as a single core machine from cca 2005.
And I don't even utilize it to its full potential because some company introduced smudge phone and shortly after all phones and any other pocket device dropped hardware keyboards.
(I am still waiting for a Linux Phone)
Bloatware#
With my old PC I browsed the web, watched online videos on the still pre-google YouTube, played AAA games of the era (Half-Life 2, Doom 3), coded in Delphi and C, made documents with office suite, dabbled with 3ds Max...
(The hardware aged pretty quickly back then but I was using this particular PC successfully past its era... thanks to Linux.)
What's more, nowadays I need at least 20 times more performant machine to be able to reach the same ergonomics on my current desktop like in 2000s with just a single core and 2 GBs of memory.
Why is that?
Yes, the web then and now is not the same. Now every site runs thousands lines of javascript to just spin a wheel and abuse my computer with their code like my CPU and RAM belongs to them and not to me... All the while they violate my privacy and constantly spy on us. I hate modern Internet.
The point stands: I get the same value from both machines but one needed fraction of the raw power.
💩 ensh!ttification 💩#
This term was coined to describe the way online services degrades over time but I think that even without the original meaning it fits here: everything seems to be more sh!tty 💩💩💩
Do you remember Skype?
Microslop replaced it with something buggy, huge and slow which feels like booting another internet browser...
Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond parody” stage.
Software became more slow and more bloated with every passing year. Abstraction upon abstraction, layers of misdirections, plethora of dependencies just to avoid reinventing a wheel or to simplify development.
Even legit sites are running slop on my machine without asking and too many times browser tabs explode with hundreds (!) of megabytes in memory.
I have NoScript extension enabled by default and I allow the js to load and run only when I really cannot avoid it.
Add vibe-coded slop on top of all of it and I don't see any hope for improvement.