Why modern software is slow
I’m profoundly disappointed in the direction computing has gone in the last decade. It’s like Idiocracy actually happened and we’re living in that timeline. Desktop software is trash. Apps that worked perfectly well a decade ago on far slower computers run like ass on far faster computers. The new Mac Outlook sucks CPU just sitting there doing nothing. The new Acrobat is so bad I’ve gone back to emacs for reading and annotating PDFs. To be clear, viewing PDFs in Emacs is a total hack. It involves rendering each page to a PNG file in a separate process, and having Emacs display the PNG. And it still causes the fans on my laptop to spin up less than Acrobat. And don’t even get me started on all the pdf.js&#x2F;Electron stuff.<p>What on earth is going on in the computing industry? Did all the smart nerds get siphoned off to hedge funds and machine learning, so Microsoft and Google can only hire the dregs to write boring desktop software?