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Comment by rootnod3 | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly agree with the turbo bloat problem. Machines are so much more powerful nowadays, but most programs feel actually slower than before.

Very cool project. And the website design is A+

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> but most programs feel actually slower than before

I feel like this is only true for people who happened to luck out with slightly overpowered hardware in very specific time periods.

As someone who used pretty average hardware in the windows 98/2000/xp era as a teenager even a low end modern laptop with an ssd running Windows 10/11/KDE/Gnome/Whatever is massively more responsive even running supposedly bloated webapps like vscode or slack.

Well... I recommend you to try an old Amiga 1200 . You will find a big surprise how this 20 Mhz machine it's highly responsive, and boots faster that any current machine with Windows 10/11. However, it would not look fancy to our current eyes.

Loading times from floppies wasn't even remotely quick.

Launching a game off a floppy was much faster than opening the bloatware that is steam and then downloading gigabytes of bloat.

That's why, back in the day, we bought hard drives. I still fondly remember my first 52MB hard drive, which consisted of a huge plastic enclosure the shape of the Amiga that attached to the expansion port off the side.

I had this one: https://www.jaruzel.com/blog/amiga-500--fun-with-storage. The official Commodore one was much uglier and, from memory, only 20MB.

> 20 Mhz machine

14 MHz !

I don't understand the term "turbobloat", never heard it before (and I've made games), the author doesn't define it and a quick search returns the submission article on Kagi, while nothing relevant at all on Google.

So, what does it mean? Just "very bloated"?

Edit: Reading around on the website and seeing more terms like "Hyperrealistic physics simulation" makes me believe it just means "very bloated".

I took it to mean "increasingly bloated over time relative to hardware, phased in a funny, irreverent way." It's a vibe thing, not a definition thing.

I don’t think it is a real word. “Turbo” means “very” or more accurately “extremely,” but is typically only used in a positive context, e.g. turbocharged. That makes the turbobloated neologism ironic and funny.

It’s funny that the "turbo-" prefix is simply derived from the word "turbine", as in a turbocharger works by means of a turbine, similarly "turbojet" or "turboprop" or "turbopump", but has turned into an augmentative prefix due to the connotations, and also because of the parallelization of "turbocharger" with the earlier term "supercharger", meaning a charger powered mechanically by the crankshaft.

Ontologically, it implies the existence of Turbobloat 3000.

Because of that factor, I'm not quite sure what's going on with the article or comments here altogether.

If you gave it to me in a cleanroom and told me I had to share my honest opinion, I'd say it was repeating universally agreeable things, and hitching it to some sort of solo endeavor to wed together a couple old 3D engines, with a lack of technical clarity, or even prose clarity beyond "I will be better than the others."

I assume given the other reactions that I'm missing something, because I don't know 3D engines, and it'd be odd to have universally positive responses just because it repeats old chestnuts.

If bufferbloat is increased latency caused by excessive use of increasingly available RAM, then turbobloat is increased latency caused by excessive use of increasingly available CPU.

Certain vintage hardware had a "turbo" button to unleash the full speed of the newer CPUs. The designers blind to the horrors of induced demand.

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