Programmer Humor

Computer speed feels about the same as it was years ago.

Uh, that's a bit off to be fair.

Our computers are 15x faster than they were about 15-20 years ago, sure...

But 1, the speed is noticeable and 2, not all the new performance is utilised 100%.

Sure, operating systems have started utilising the extra hardware to deliver the same 60-120fps base experience with some extra fancy (transparency with blur, for example, instead of regular transparency), but overall computer UX has plateaued a good decade and half ago.

The bottleneck is not the hardware or bad software but simply the idea of "why go faster when going this speed is fine, and we now don't need to use 15-30% of the hardware to do it but just 1-2%".

Oh and the other bottleneck is stupidity, like letting long running tasks onto the main/UI thread, fucking up the experience. Unfortunately, you can't help stupid.

Dunno this paradox theory, but the impression I get is that when you're part of the process, it's harder to notice changes. But if putting the two devices side by side, trying to run the same systems, programs, etc., the difference is glaring. And from tests I did, if the software doesn't work on either of the devices, slapping a VM on the newer one to test older programs still tells quite a lot.