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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

Your argument against an open platform is "more open hardware is slower", as if that matters somehow. 99% of what you use in a day doesn't depend on a fast platform, and the remaining 1% is stuff that you should migrate away from or modern videogames (which arguably you should also move away from).

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> and the remaining 1% is stuff that you should migrate away from or modern videogames (which arguably you should also move away from).

Would you expound on this in greater detail? I am interested in your thoughts.

With some notable exceptions applications have become slower in a way that is just fundamentally unnecessary. Fifteen years ago you could do text editing, browsing the internet, chatting and possibly editing spreadsheets all in parallel on a machine that today would not be able to do anything with the same (but upgraded!) applications. This is not due to features that are "just more expensive" (though as said there are some notable exceptions, like probably decoding 4k video on youtube) but because the development process has migrated further and further away from any sort of performance concern as the platforms you could expect became faster.

That is not to say the computing landscape was fundamentally better fifteen years ago. I think it is almost the same. What has really improved is the general usability and stability of drivers (no more rebooting, random freezes and if you run linux your X server not working every other update), which is definitely something to be proud of. What has not improved is basically everything else and I'm really not sure why.

If I had to guess I would say it has something to do with managers the world over just not giving a shit about delivering something good, as long as it sells. As platforms have started having more headroom for bad software, "as long as it sells" has started to have a wider and wider performance profile. Landing us where we are today: with many of the same features, much less privacy and every other app packed with an entire browser "because it makes it easier to develop".

Even as recently as last year I had a more relaxed stance about this but I guess it has just been bothering me now that I have more time to think about the state of my work (and everyone else's).

Edit: I see now I responded to something slightly different than what was requested.

Modern (AAA) videogames should not be bought or played because they are produced by a sick and exploitative industry that really needs to die. Instead, we can prefer the indie games that work well with what they have: Generally a lower graphical budget that runs significantly better on hardware that is "out of date".

For office-type processing and messaging, there are generally application choices and tradeoffs that can be made for more performance instead of more eye candy. The average office worker (which I guess includes most people here) will not materially care that it doesn't look quite as good. Another upside is that as a company you don't need such an enormous budget for office hardware.

> the remaining 1% is stuff that you should migrate away from

I'm not following. Compiling and media editing depend on a fast platform, are you really suggesting people should avoid doing those tasks?

Photoshop (i.e. "image editing") and video editing software have existed for a long time. They have not become better, just heavier. There are still alternatives for those applications that run just as well on slower hardware, though obviously your movie edits might have to render overnight instead of in three hours. Nobody will die if that happens.

Edit: You mentioned compiling, which is not an incredibly salient point. If you're not doing linux kernel development (and even then...) you do not need a fast machine for this. Even the linux kernel compiles within a few minutes (maybe 5? It has been a few months since I tried this) on a raspberry pi 3b. For more contained projects (e.g. something you might write in lisp, rust or go) it'll take somewhere between one to twenty seconds.

what on earth are you talking about? time is made up of seconds, minutes, hours... etc. reducing wait time increases productivity. The larger and more complex a project becomes, the more these delays compound. A sub $1k laptop with the the computational power of a workstation that costs many times that, and isn't portable is an absolute game changer in many areas. If I worked for National Geographic or the New York times as a photographer and needed to preprocess several thousand images or 4/8k footage from the field so I could make print deadlines, 3 hours vs overnight means everthing.And more importantly, the amount of power consumed by the cycles is far from trivial. An x86 mobile workstation can't even complete certain render tasks on a single charge that the macbook air can do on less than a quarter of a battery charge.

As for compile times, believe it or not, lots of projects are written in something other than highly optimized C code and compile time is a real pain point. You don't always have a choice of what language or dependencies you work with.

Just because there is an alternative way to do something, or a way that takes longer doesn't mean its viable. Performance improvements matter, a lot. Power consumption improvements matter, a lot.

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