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Comment by MereInterest | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I am of the opinion that anything that was possible in computing 15 years ago should be perceptibly instant today. There are obvious exceptions such as cross-continent communication being limited by the speed of light, but as a general rule. Instead, we get software that's written as if Dennard scaling were still occurring.

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When I was a child, I had a reverent wonder for technology and all it might do in the future. Realisations like this replaced that with a dry cynicism. My inner child is disappointed.

When I was a child, I was thinking how amazing it would be if I could store all my games floppy disk on a single, network-accessible drive so that I could access them all without installing and swapping them all the time.

Nowadays I have a NAS that stores both the raw media and installation scripts for those games, and I have wine/dosbox/mame/mess startup scripts for many of them. Can't say that my inner child is disappointed about that, but building and curating that system took a lot more effort than I'd like to admit.

I don't buy games that require online activation, because I can't store and play them the same way. My inner child is very disappointed about that.

My desktop built in 2020 is perceptibly instant today. The slowest booting application is VSCode taking 2 whole seconds to start from cold.

None of the figures shown in the article have any relevance if one has a slight knowledge of their operating system and are not running on decades old technology.

I dunno, I think I disagree. I have much higher expectations of software. I have these expectations simply because most of what we do these days we could do decades ago, and using orders of magnitude fewer CPU cycles than the "state of the art" now (e.g. your example of VS Code). Most software falls far, far short of these expectations, which, IMO, is an ongoing embarrassment for the entire field.

Even your example of 2 whole seconds seems wayyy too slow to me. I don't even tolerate that sort of delay when working on my 10+ year old commodity hardware --- I've already tweaked my tools to be totally instantaneous so I can continue typing as soon as I release the short-cut key.

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