Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
The problem is that both hardware and software are garbage.Spectre/Meldown & friends are just the tip of an iceberg. We have layers & layers of indirection/abstraction everywhere. We have hardware that lies and tells you that it has certain properties when in reality it doesn't (example: sector sizes in hard drives/NVMs, processors still pretending that they behave like PDP-11), we have hardware that is flat out broken. We try to fix those issues in software.But in the software, we have another dump of workarounds, dependencies, abstractions with a sprinkle of backward compatibility. We are now creating "minimalist" applications with a fraction of functionality of the software from 30 years ago but using so many layers that total amount of code used to make it work is many orders of magnitude larger than what we had back then.I know that most of the programmers did not work with systems where it's very, very easy to debug the whole stack and you can learn it in a short period but it's amazing when you have knowledge about EVERY part of the system in your head.There are some good things going on (like strive to replace C with something which has similar performance characteristics but without its flaws) but it's not enough.Here are two things worth watching:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk - Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilizationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9MjGziRw-c - Computers Barely Work - Interview with Linux Legend Greg Kroah-Hartman