Criticizing Computers
This is very similar to another article posted recently[0].<p>I both agree and disagree with what the author is saying. Like, they claim:<p>“The processors in our laptops are over 1,000 times faster than they were thirty years ago. So it’s natural to ask, as Joe Armstrong does, why our programs don’t run 1,000 times faster.”<p>I wrote this in the linked thread:<p>“It really does seem to be dependent on the type of work you’re doing. In 2000, I started writing plugins for Final Cut Pro. You could write “real time” plugins for it! That meant you were working in YCbCr 4:2:2 at 320x240 and 30 frames per second (so quarter-sized frame, with 2&#x2F;3rds the data that an RGB frame would carry and half as often). 22 years later, I’m still writing such plugins, but on the top-end systems you get multiple streams of 8K uncompressed RGB video at 60fps and you can play back in real time.”<p>And I forgot to mention that that video is also processed in floating point (usually 16-bit half float). According to my calculations, that’s about 862x more data being processed in the 8k case.<p>But some of the other points I think are way off. They talk about piping data from one command to another. That’s not how typical users work, and I don’t think it’s how they want to work. I don’t want to pipe data from &#x2F;dev&#x2F;MIDI into one command that stores it, and pipe &#x2F;dev&#x2F;microphone into another command, and use a third command to mash them together and compress the result so I can listen to it on my phone. I want to use a DAW that records tracks (which are not textual data and would be very inefficient to represent as such) and sometimes I want to render the result to an audio file I can put on my phone.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31798580" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31798580</a>