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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

(twitter.com)
838 points turrini | 1 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.227s | source
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SilverSlash ◴[13 May 25 12:08 UTC] No.43971991[source]▶
The title made me think Carmack was criticizing poorly optimized software and advocating for improving performance on old hardware.

When in fact, the tweet is absolutely not about either of the two. He's talking about a thought experiment where hardware stopped advancing and concludes with "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

replies(6): >>43972062 #>>43972256 #>>43972299 #>>43973089 #>>43973903 #>>43985499 #
1. gwern ◴[14 May 25 15:10 UTC] No.43985499[source]▶
A subtext here may be his current AI work. In OP, Carmack is arguing, essentially, that 'software is slow because good smart devs are expensive and we don't want to pay for them to optimize code and systems end-to-end as there are bigger fish to fry'. So, an implication here is that if good smart devs suddenly got very cheap, then you might see a lot of software suddenly get very fast, as everyone might choose to purchase them and spend them on optimization. And why might good smart devs become suddenly available for cheap?