I'm really really really not interested in computers getting more powerful.
I am super interested in them being more repairable and modifiable, drawing less power, lasting and being supported for way longer etc. That stuff still gets me excited
I'm really really really not interested in computers getting more powerful. 76 comments
I've built a few really high-end PCs for people recently and nobody needs a computer that fast. It's like things load before you've even realised you've clicked on them. We don't need more than that! It's really silly @eldaking @Shrigglepuss I'm still using a Xeon W3565 for "generic desktop stuff" SSDs and a newer Radeon and it's...fine, y'know? totally competent day-to-day. @arrjay Yeah I imagine it is totally fine, the xeons were beasts. I still use my Ivy Bridge i5 laptop. The HDD died so it got an SSD, but it got no other upgrades and it is _almost_ enough for everything I do. It probably will fall apart before it stops being useful. My dad still keeps occasionally using his first-gen i3 laptop (instead of his brand-new, fancier Win11 laptop), just because it has Windows 7 (last decent Windows version). @Shrigglepuss I think most of us are really quite relieved that ten-year-old laptops are...fine, really. 4G of RAM is...fine, I guess. SSDs made laptops feel faster than any CPU improvements ever did. Years ago I was excited to get another used laptop as a backup, or re-purpose a chromebook. these days I look around and think "I have too many laptops: I don't use all of them" and that's kind of amazing. @spacehobo It is! I get people's old laptops given to me sometimes so I refurbish them and donate them onwards to a few local charities I'm in contact with. @Shrigglepuss @spacehobo and people are pushed into the wring compromises because they dont know better. The quest for thinner, cheaper laptops has led to compromises across cases, keyboards, thermal management, even using glue instead of screws. So people get conditioned to thinking laptops need to be replaced every few years. My main portable is my x230 from 2012 withmaxed out ram, screen and keyboard upgrades. Does everything i need aside from slowness on a few sites here and there. @Shrigglepuss Well, _some_ people need machines that fast. People who play high-end computer games, people who use video editing software, people who do professional graphics editing or 3D modelling, people working with AI. The kind of stuff for which you would use an incredibly expensive workstation 20-40 years ago, but which nowadays can be done with a machine for €800-3000. @LordCaramac @Shrigglepuss That is like saying "some people need an oscilloscope" or "some people need a lathe". It is technically true but it should not change anything for anyone else. @eldaking @Shrigglepuss I own two oscilloscopes, and I've been thinking about building a small lathe for myself using the electric motor from an old drill. @eldaking @Shrigglepuss Most of the time I don't even start my big PC though because my RaspberryPi 400 is more than enough. @Shrigglepuss @Shrigglepuss @Shrigglepuss I just kept slowing down new computer purchases. The last one I bought was mostly because the previous one had lots of little issues from wear. I was let down by how little improvement I saw. Yes, everything works now, but the experience is about the same as with the old one. Unless something radically changes, I think I'll stick to "only if it's broken" for the rest of my life. @Shrigglepuss We do need loading that fast, but we had it 25 years ago, and lost it because the software keeps getting worse thanks to new ideologies and frameworks aimed at making the people who make software fungible and disempowered rather than a skilled craft we only need a small number of people who actually care to be doing. Well, DevOps, Serverless and Kubernetes on the server side will ensure that computers are never fast enough. ;-) If you have been around long enough; GEM ran desktop publishing (Ventura?) on like a 2MB 386 with disk space less than the size of a regular web page today. It is mind-blowing when thinking about it, and lived it. @Shrigglepuss built two for me and the hubster ... just under 10 years ago ... the vid card i chose ... still good today. we've had to do some storage tweaks but by and large those two rigs are still firing on all cylinders almost as good as they did 8ish years ago. @Shrigglepuss indeed ... tbh i am shocked they're still this good considering what the industry is up to @Shrigglepuss the last few notebooks I've bought all come from e-recyclers. great thinkpads, slapped linux on them, bam total daily drivers 1 out of the last 12-15 machines, in as many years, ive bought or built came from erecyclers. the only new one i got was for my kid's gaming rig, and even that runs linux. i have two machines from 07, 08 which still run just fine with linux. it can be done. just not by apple or microsoft. used machines last decades. i have proof @Shrigglepuss I want cheaper lower spec lower powered hardware and really nicely written software that runs fast on it. @joaopinheiro @Shrigglepuss I was chatting to the Hui Muslim from Yunnan Province about pc tech. This community are very traditionally functional still cooking on solid fuel stoves etc but still displaying the latest tech even for the tots. DIY PC seems to be a thing there too. Nowt halts progress it seems...archeomodernism in the flesh! @Shrigglepuss (and by stalwarts I mean the bloodsucking vampires of human endeavour for whom no opportunity to screw over their fellow man is too outrageous) @Shrigglepuss yes! yeah, genuinely if modern decent computers are ever 'obsoleted' by software requirements, a lot of things have gene seriously wrong Computers need to be so powerful to support the additional processing and memory necessary to handle the JavaScript bloat of the spyware to sell us to advertisers and propagandists. @Shrigglepuss not arguing, but I find dark humor in this sentiment being echoed again and again since at least the early 1990s @Shrigglepuss When I was looking to put together my current desktop I went to a local shop and the kids there honestly thought I was joking when I said I wanted something to last a decade. My last computer did 8 years and I only replaced it because I used to live by the sea, and I was down to my last working USB port due to rust. Got the current one from a GNU/Linux specialist. Installing Debian was a dream. Didn't need a single non-free driver. How it should be. @Shrigglepuss computers haven't gotten more "powerful" in over a decade. Hardware is spinning its wheels against incrementally shittily programmed software @Shrigglepuss But how will the blessed line continue to go up if society isn't buying gadgets every three seconds? Won't somebody please think about the line? D= @Shrigglepuss My main computer is a 2012 Mac mini but I also use a 2015 MacBook Pro. While both do everything I need to do at speeds I can live with, I still confess to lusting after an M4 mini when it becomes available. I’ll just need to let the irrational part of my brain override my Scottish heritage. Should be a battle royale. I miss the days when high-capacity storage was prohibitively expensive and law enforcement were tech-illiterate. @angiebaby@mas.to @Shrigglepuss@godforsaken.website I love having good storage. Roms go brr. @Shrigglepuss Heard a great thing on the radio the other day: it's important to recycle phones, computers, etc, because we nearly have enough of the essential minerals dug out of the ground to keep them all going by recirculating the stuff, instead of sending children down mines @Shrigglepuss holy shit, I’ve never considered how good things could be if we pivoted towards narrower and more suitably designed computers. The technology is all there to make lifetime usage computers. @Shrigglepuss I say do more with less, @Shrigglepuss Also I hope hardware manufacturers help us start to make less bloated software @Shrigglepuss hopefully #riscv will be the turn to more efficient computers. If they also get more powerful at the same time though, I wouldn't be sad. @joracle @Shrigglepuss we could also look into using more efficient software. If we built the true cost of fighting and protecting against climate change into the price of polluting energy sources the focus of the computing industry would change. @Shrigglepuss @tealeg More efficient software is a thing that we should focus on, but it would be too much effort for too little gain. How could we compare different software for their efficiency? How could we enforce software efficiency if people are already doing idiotic stuff like mining bitcoin? We should focus on making our energy cleaner, cheaper, abundant and more available so we don't even have to worry about wasting it. @Shrigglepuss absolutely this. Much easier to reduce software bloat than improve your hardware. Ran xubuntu for years on an old laptop and probably got better or equivalent performance than most modern laptops available new, really great. @Shrigglepuss Having worked in IT since the 90s, I agree. The main reason personal computers and laptops are getting more powerful is because the applications are bloating, requiring more and more resources. Same with Windows and Mac. @Shrigglepuss I'll start being excited about computers when companies stop needlessly making every program you use take up more and more ressources by the month There was some science fiction story, where a man walking meets a computer in the form of a spear, lying in the dirt where it had been dropped a thousand years before. It speaks to him, encouraging him to pick it up, explaining that it could be useful. That's the sort of computer longevity I daydream of. @Shrigglepuss God yes, and also creating a healthier GPU market (stop crypto and AI from gobbling up all graphics cards, more good alternatives to Nvidia, developing open standards for compute further instead of Nvidia working on their own damn thing with CUDA, and not just focusing on developing gimmicks) @Shrigglepuss Oh, no, I'm totally the opposite. I'm a "need-for-speed" tech junkie, addicted to progress. Bigger better faster. More cores, more ram, better graphics, faster processing times. Bleeding edge or bust for me. But I don't like web apps, and I'd rather sit at my desk in front of my desktop PC with chonky keyboard, mouse, and external monitor, than on the couch with my phone or laptop. So I guess that makes me a bit of an enigma. 😜 (cc @CiaraNi) @Shrigglepuss I'm interested in seeing the software we currently have better utilize what resources are already available, rather than constantly requiring more to do the same thing, but, somehow, slightly worse. @Shrigglepuss Are you really? I have 386sx here, needs replacing power supply, and it eats <5W without HDD. Repairable, modifiable, long lasting... but hard to run modern software on it. We had era where computers met your requirements, but most of the world decided we want powerful, and ... you know the rest.
@Shrigglepuss I would say the same thing about smartphones. More resistents, better batteries and actually customizable @Shrigglepuss @uilgs i am using 8yo lg and i'm fine. also customizable (specially that it's with cyanogenmod) ;p @hacknorris @Shrigglepuss I had three LGs in a roll (Leon, K10 and K41S but after two years they started to crash apps and the battery lasting only one day). Leon was the only one that the battery also swelled. It's really customizable, I loved that, specially apps position @uilgs @Shrigglepuss too. at me it's l65 and still works (including playing a little heavier games, like f.e. aaaxxy or minetest and browsing nets via firefox) @Shrigglepuss Getting more powerful isn't just uninteresting but an antifeature. Every time they get more powerful it's license for all the software to do more unnecessary and often hostile stuff. @Shrigglepuss @Shrigglepuss hardware is as good as it needs to be, but software improvement has stalled, and in many cases, regressed. @Shrigglepuss I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less, and I want computers to match @Shrigglepuss I fully agree. There's a ton of room for optimizations to be made. But since «memory got cheap» it's apparently acceptable to waste a gazillion Watts to just read a mail. @Tamasg @Shrigglepuss In a long term, we must remake all of the hardware and software architectures in order for them to become simpler. the simpler, the more repairable. @Shrigglepuss@godforsaken.website I wanna see everything get cheaper, the only thing that needs increases is storage. |
Computers are as fast as they need to be. I know that's an old thing we've been joking about for decades, but these days it feels software is just getting more and more bloated for the sake of selling faster computers and features for the sake of more=good capitalism