1801
might be a form of Jevons Paradox (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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https://raru.re/@ocean/116214437024389203

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[–] 30 points 6 months ago (13 children)

I feel like this is Windows specific. Linux is rapid on PCs and my MacBook is absurdly quick.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    Mint Xfce on my 2015 laptop compared to its previous system was the difference between usable and waiting 10 minutes for it to even boot, and things like gaming, VMs, comically large spreadsheets (surprisingly the memory hog), etc., were an eternal challenge on it. On my current laptop, I have the luxury of picking the systems by aesthetics and non-optimization functions instead. And to compare, I've run even the same updates on the two laptops, as the older one still works.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    PC games are software.

    Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.

    Proton can only do so much.

    ... and Metal basically can't do that that much.

    Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.

    They haven't really.

    They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.

    Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I guess the counter argument for games is load times have dramatically improved, though that’s less about software development than hardware improvements.

    If we put consoles in the same bracket as computers, the literally instant quick-resume feature on an Xbox (for example) feels like sci-fi.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.

    You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.

    You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.

    Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?

    You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.

    RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.

    Moore's Law is not only dead, it has inverted.

    Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    With respect to OP's post, they say "you can't even tell the computers we are on are 15x faster...", and I reckon that quick resume etc, is an example of "you absolutely can tell that we now have extremely fast hardware" when compared to what came before, irrespective of the quality of the software.

    I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just picking apart the blanket "computers feel the same as they did a decade ago". Some computers might feel the same, and a lot of software might be unoptimised, but there's a good selection of examples where that's not the case.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    App launch time can be annoyingly slow on mac if you're not offline or blocking the server it phones home to

    it can be the difference between one bounce or seven bounces of the icon on my end

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    What apps out of interest? I’m a new Mac owner, so limited experience, but everything seems insanely quick so far. Even something like Xcode is a one-bounce on this M4 Air.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (2 children)

    All of them. The device has to phone home to apple to ask permission to run them.

    to test close app (really shut, make sure dot on icon isnt glowing) then open and measure time

    close app and then disconnect from the internet and launch again

    the speed difference depends on how overloaded apples servers are.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    I’ve not come across this but I’ll check it out. Is that App Store apps only?

    I think probably 90% of the apps I’ve installed have been through the homebrew package manager which likely means they don’t do any phoning home, but I’ll check out the pre-installed stuff and see if I can replicate.

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