Programmer Humor

Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use

They are being written to be more efficient in inference, but the gains are being offset by trying to wring more capabilities out of the models by ballooning token use.

Which is indeed a form of Jevon's paradox

Jevon's Paradox is that when there's more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.

More specifically, it's when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.

So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.

I always felt American car companies were a really good example of that back in the 60s-70s when enormously long vehicles with giant engines were the order of the day. Why not bigger? Why not stronger? It also acted as a symbol of American strength, which was being measured by raw power just like today lol.

This also reminds me of the way video game programmers in the late 70s/early 80s had such tight limitations to work within that you had to get creative if you wanted to make something stand out. Some very interesting stories from that era.

I also love to think about the tricks the programmer of Prince of Persia had employed to get the "shadow prince" to work...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54

What really matters isn't meetings, it's profits.

Well, until you open a browser... or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn't have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

The 49MB Web Page

It is crazy that I can have a core 2 duo with 8 gig of RAM that struggles loading web pages

I'm dreading when poorly optimized vibe coding works it's way into mainstream software and create a glut of technical debt. Performance gonna plummet the next 5 years just wait.

And that us poors still on limited bandwidth plans get charged for going over our monthly quotas because everything has to be streamed or loaded from the cloud instead of installed (or at least cached) locally.

Would be nice if I could force programs to use more ram though. I actually have 100GB of DDR4 my desktop. I bought it over a year ago when DDR4 was unloved and cheap. But I have tried to force programs to not be offloading as much. Like Firefox, I hate that I have the ram but it's still unloading webpages in the background and won't use more than 6GB ever.

StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.

A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you'd expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don't just have 'colour textures', they're likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that's another three times. The voice acting isn't likely to be in a single language any more either, so there'll be several copies of all the sound files.

A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. 'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!

I do agree with you. I can't think of a single useful feature that's been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it's worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.

I work in support for a SaaS product and every single click on the platform takes a noticeable amount of time. I don't understand why anyone is paying any amount of money for this product. I have the FOSS equivalent of our software in a test VM and its far more responsive.

Even Windows 10 is literally unusable for me. When pressing the windows key it literally takes about 4 seconds until the search pops up, just for it to be literally garbage.

Fucking "features". Can't software just be finished? I bought App. App does exactly what I need it to do. Leave. It. Alone.

It's kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize "premature optimization", when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary. A related problem is that programmers often have top-of-the-line gear, so code that works acceptably well on their equipment is hideously slow when running on normal people's machines. When I was managing my team, I would encourage people to develop on out-of-date devices (or at least test their code out on them once in a while).

It's the pages. It's all the JavaScript. And especially the HTML5 stuff. The amount of code that is executed in a webpage these days is staggering. And JS isn't exactly a computationally modest language.

Of the 200kB loaded on a typical Wikipedia page, about 85kb of it is JS and CSS.

Another 45kB for a single SVG, which in complex cases is a computationally nontrivial image format.

My first PC ran at 16MHz on turbo.

PCs today are orders of magnitude faster. Way less fun, but faster.

What's even more orders of magnitude slower and infinitely more bloated is software. Which is the point of the post.

It's almost impossible to find any piece of actually optimised software these days (with some exceptions like sqlite) to the point that 99% percent of the software currently in use can be considered unintentional (or intentional) malware.

Particularly egregious are web browsers, which seem designed to waste the maximum possible amount of resources and run as inefficiently as possible.

And the fact that most supposedly desktop software these days runs on top of one of those pieces ofintentional (it's impossible to achieve such levels of inefficiency and bloat unintentionally, it requires active effort) malware obviously doesn't help.