pjvsvsrtrxc

Seamless mode still exists in Virtualbox 6.1 which is the latest version.

(Windows did just crash when I was testing it but, as it also crashed twice before I got that far, I don't think it's related)

The pollution from such a car is undeniably an externality. Just Google "is pollution an externality".

The less efficient engine itself is not because it is priced in. Because the government made them put it on the window of every single car sold.

Servers are expensive, too. Humans waiting on servers to process something is even more expensive. No software runs in a vacuum; someone is waiting on it somewhere.

Adding more servers doesn't generally make things faster (latency). It only raises capacity (bandwidth). It does, however, generally cost quite a bit on development. Just about the only thing worse than designing a complex system is designing a complex distributed system.

> I think a lot of this is actually somewhat misremembering how slow computers used to be

Suffice to say: I wish. I have a decently powerful computer now, but that only happened a few years ago.

> We used to use spinning hard disks, and we were so often waiting for them to open programs.

Indeed, SSDs are much faster than HDDs. That is part (but not all) of how computers have gotten faster. And yet we still wait just as long or longer for common applications to start up.

> the iPhone and iPad actually comes to mind as devices that perform well and are practically always snappy

Terribly written programs are perfectly common on iP* and can certainly be slow. But you're right, having a high-end device does make the bloat much less noticeable.

Yes, it is.

> ex·ter·nal·i·ty: a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved

The buyer is an "other part[y]" from the seller's (edit: or better yet, developer, who might just be contracted by the ultimate seller...) perspective, and performance is basically impossible to quantify, therefore price.

Moreover, even if you want to limit externalities to being completely third-party... sure: Pollution. More electrical generation capacity needed.

Linux windows get just as many (run xev from a terminal and do the same thing). Our modern processors, even the crappiest Atoms and ARMs, are actually really, really fast.

> If you're like me then development time is expensive. Is optimizing a function really the best use of that time? Sometimes yes, often no.

Almost always yes, because software is almost always used many more times than it is written. Even if you doubled your dev time to only get a 5% increase of speed at runtime, that's usually worth it!

(Of course, capitalism is really bad at dealing with externalities and it makes our society that much worse. But that's an argument against capitalism, not an argument against optimization.)

The problem is that performance for most common tasks that people do (f.e. browsing the web, opening a word processor, hell even opening an IM app) has gone from "just okay" to "bad" over the past couple of decades despite our computers getting many times more powerful across every possible dimension (from instructions-per-clock to clock-rate to cache-size to memory-speed to memory-size to ...)

For all this decreased performance, what new features do we have to show for it? Oh great, I can search my Start menu and my taskbar had a shiny gradient for a decade.

Huh?

"10 compilers, IDEs, debuggers, package managers" what are you talking about? (Virtually) No one uses ten different tools to build one application. I don't even know of any C++-specific package managers, although I do know of language-specific package managers for... oh, right, most scripting languages. And an IDE includes a compiler and a debugger, that's what makes it an IDE instead of a text editor.

"and at the end of the day LLVM compiles 30min and uses tens of GBs of RAM on average hardware" sure, if you're compiling something enormous and bloated... I'm not sure why you think that's an argument against debloating?

Yes, writing software in C/C++ is harder. It's a darn good thing most software is used much more frequently than it is written, isn't it?

And yet, even with all the evidence that modern, heavily-bloated software development is AWFUL (constant bugs and breakage because no one writing code understands any of the software sitting between them and the machine, much less understands the machine; Rowhammer, Spectre, Meltdown, and now Hertzbleed; sitting there waiting multiple seconds for something to launch up another copy of the web browser you already have running just so that you can have chat, hi Discord)... you still have all the people in the comments below trying to come up with reasons why "oh no it's actually good, the poor software developers would have to actually learn something instead of copying code off of Stack Overflow without understanding it".

> But here's the thing: it's cheaper to waste thousands of CPU cores on bad performance than to have an engineer spend a day optimizing it.

No, it really isn't. It's only cheaper for the company making the software (and only if they don't use their software extensively, at that).