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752 points dceddia | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.504s | source
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qsantos ◴[] No.36449864[source]
I am always frustrated with the usual answer to these kinds of demonstrations: “Yes, but these new apps are doing so much more. Also, security.”

Except, that they are not, not at the time they are launched at least. And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute power, with a hundredth of the latency for memory and storage.

Regarding security, it should have negligible effect in most cases. At least, effects should not be perceptible to the human mind.

It really is just a consequence of the way we develop software nowadays. We do not need to optimize programs to make them work at all, so we just do not. We work on new features, and we hire people who can churn new features.

And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time. So, instead of painstakingly developing a Web site, a native application, an Android app, and an iOS app, we just push Web apps everywhere.

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1. runeks ◴[] No.36456822[source]
> And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute power [...]

This doesn't sound right. Sure, GPUs are probably that much faster, but we certainly don't have the equivalent of a 60,000 MHz CPU.

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2. qsantos ◴[] No.36476844[source]
The clocks have not become a hundred-fold faster, I grant you that. But, combined with specialized instructions, the improvement of the instruction pipeline, the growing cache, the multiplication of shadow registers, the addition of hyperthreading, and the increasing number of cores, we probably do have a hundred time more computing power in a modern laptop.