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In some meaningful ways they are measurably slower.

Great article. This is the kind of web design that I like.

Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.

Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.

Yes and no. Faster hardware doesn’t solve pathologically broken algorithms :)

Worth's law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Yep, and its nothing new :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

*Wirth

Reminds me of this story about every app being sluggish on a relatively new machine, compared to equivalent apps running on a 20+ year old machine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)