Oddbean new post about login | logout You need a new phone and laptop and faster Internet every couple of years because they can't be bothered to build better software because the people building it have a new phone and laptop and Internet every couple of years.
A lot of what you think of as essential software developments are just indifference and lack of ingenuity. They don't need to do anything groundbreaking, completely reorganize the workflows, rethink their data transmission concept, fix bugs, or refactor. They can just say: You need a bigger battery.
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I notice this because I worked in automotive, for so long. The customers' computer hardware is embedded in the car and covered by the extended guarantee. Anytime we wanted to upgrade or change the software, we had to "make room" on the current system or buy new hardware at our own cost and exchange them in the shop. And we had a financial incentive to choose the least-powerful processor and simplest sensors possible, and then tune them and program them to maximum efficiency, because that raised the margin on each automobile, without lowering the customer experience.
When you align consumer and producer incentives, in this way, the engineers have to actually... think. How can we do the most, with the least? The cost of the thinking is high, but it only has to be done once, whereas the costs of inefficient design are long-lasting. And each inefficient version is packed onto the last one, making it worse and worse.
I am realising that "Aligning incentives" is a solution to many problems around me. At work At home with the kids Governments and citizens When resolving an argument with a neighbour ... Everywhere!
Wait a second you were in auto too??? My background was ECU firmware! We had 256k of space to work with, and only 108k of text segment.
😁 I wasn't developing, but I did QA for powertrain.
Oh man, how fast did my Windows 95 boot and start apps!
Today even my BIOS has healthchecks, USB support and animations. And I didn‘t want this!
I always thought Microsoft's business plan was to bloat their operating system and Office so you needed a new computer that came with ... ... ... new MS OS and MS Office. They forced you to buy new software by making their old software slower and slower, so you had to buy better hardware that came with more of their bloated software. I don't use MS office any more. I use Libre Office. I'd love to get away from MS Windows, but my work software only runs on it.
We use Linux Mint, for the house computer, but it has a dual boot with Windows because of such limitations.
CPUs and virtualization tech like wine have gotten far enough I might stop giving windows stuff bare metal access at this point and keep it in virtualization (VMs / compatibility layers)
And so many business's rely on this. I've spoken to some founders of typescript/python products that simply don't care because it's good enough. As I have said before: "people don't want good, they want good enough" And I will probably say that till I die as a perfectionist.
Absolutely true, there are 100 layers of software on top of every current development. But on the other hand if you want to develop at the pace imposed by the market you have to use third-party libraries instead of reimplementing at a low level. The eternal dilemma
In terms of desktop I disagree. 10gb of memory on a Windows 10 VM was not enough after 2 days of working. The only apps I was allowed to use were firefox and outlook. Thats it. I couldn't open more than about 4 tabs. Most of the tabs were Google based. I used to have to close tabs and reopen them between spreadsheets just to avoid the lockups. It took hours just to work with some spreadsheets. This isn't anecdotal btw, it was a lack of system memory causing performance issues and app crashes due to greedy allocators. Closing apps out regularly helped but still a pain. If 10 y/o software was running on a 10/yo machine I might agree, but now the bloat is just asinine. Smart phones I think less so, only because I'm still rocking a 6 y/o device thats been heavily striped down and only has 8 usable apps installed.
