Damn, this website is heavy. Found a PDF if anyone - https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/8599749745010a4...
The coming years will see the current RAM shortage followed by a war between local AI models and vibe-coded shitware “productivity” software for memory on our devices. Especially fun will be when vibe coding crap hits corporate security software, which is already often so bad it looks more like sabotage than security. Imagine when it gets, from both angles (using models for threat detection; vibe-coded shitware) another large multiplier on its resource use.
Game development suffers greatly from this, too. So many games run like dogshit and some take literally 100+ GB more disk space than they need to (with the counterfactual proven when a dev eventually "optimizes" their game 3 years later by doing some really trivial thing, like what hapened with Helldivers 2 and some other game I can't recall). There is a whole generation of "Unity devs" and "Unreal devs" who work no-code or as close to it as possible, only being able to develop games through a GUI and light scripting, with even the latter usually involving copy-pasting existing scripts written by other people and tweaking the numbers.
In some ways this is a good thing, of course. There are a lot of useful software and fun games in the world that would not have been created if software development were not accessible. But with the cost to performance and security breaches becoming the absolute norm, I do really wish there was a culture for developers to continue improving, to continue learning, instead of a culture of learning the very top of the stack, declaring it good enough, and becoming a "React dev" for the rest of their career instead of becoming "a programmer" who can use more than one abstraction.
With open source it's not even about incentives. I still put effort into the software I make on my own time because I create the kind of software I want to see in the world, ie. software that doesn't feel miserable to use. It's simply about culture. People build up assembly and lower-level abstractions in general to be the scary monster in their closet, and not something they could actually learn if they just tried.
for Google and other hyperscalers, not for mom and pop shops and electron apps.
> There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
Nonsense. You seriously think there’s some arcane knowledge in optimizing things? Sure, if you’re pushing microseconds and optimizing network stack just to squeeze last drops out of it. But majority of software runs stupid quadratic loops, overuses map/filter/reduce, instantiates too much and is bloated with useless features. It takes one capable programmer to optimize this mess to roughly 90-98% of what’s possible. It takes world class to squeeze last 2%, but majority of software doesn’t need or care about it.
You can neither prove or disprove this statement. Just my 10c: I’m working in payments and not a stranger to optimization of both native and managed code. I can easily improve our POI performance by at least 20-30% across different metrics in a span of couple of weeks. Why don’t I do that? Because not only management wouldn’t praise me, but they would actively work against me because it’s not a priority.
It's self-evident from interacting with a wide range of developers, but I suppose I can prove it no more than I can prove to you the sky is blue. I'm not saying there aren't cases like yours of "I could optimize it, but I'm not being paid to". But there are also many, many cases of "Are you crazy? I would have to spend my entire life learning about CPUs, compilers, assembly, and programming languages! Get real, nobody can do that unless they're a 1% genius" for things that they could absolutely learn to do if they just tried instead of living in fear of it.
You have to play it for a minute before it lets you dismiss the ad and continue doing whatever you were doing.
Then your comment made me curious, and I clicked. What the actual fuck.