<story><title>Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser</title><url>https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ilrwbwrkhv</author><text>I swear. What happened here? Like why do things feel sluggish than software over 20 years ago? I just can&amp;#x27;t wrap my mind around it. We have SSDs and infinite CPU and RAM now compared to those days, yet there is always this feeling the computer is doing something more than I asked for behind the scenes. Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It&amp;#x27;s a very uncomfortable feeling.</text></item><item><author>andai</author><text>When I want to get work done quickly, I boot up Windows XP in a VM. It&amp;#x27;s just so damn snappy it&amp;#x27;s unbelievable.&lt;p&gt;What Moore giveth, Gates taketh away...</text></item><item><author>ilrwbwrkhv</author><text>It feels so fast. Even in the browser. Modern OSes just feels so sluggish by comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edwcross</author><text>We transitioned from a &amp;quot;high-trust society&amp;quot; (where software, Internet, etc, did not need to take into account so many security considerations, protect itself from enemies everywhere) into a &amp;quot;low-trust society&amp;quot; (encryption everywhere, hardware mitigations for Spectre-kind attacks, Javascript-based tracking, etc).&lt;p&gt;The overhead is similar to the one people face in third-world countries: you pay once for the government (taxes), then again for basic services (private education, private security, private health, private transportation), and you still end up in a worse situation than in a (high-trust) first-world country.&lt;p&gt;I tried using a Core 2 Duo laptop recently, but the simple fact that HTTPS is mandatory nowadays, and Core 2 doesn&amp;#x27;t have AES-NI, makes the laptop spin its fan much more than it should, even if I try to use an old Linux&amp;#x2F;Windows.</text></comment>
<story><title>Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser</title><url>https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ilrwbwrkhv</author><text>I swear. What happened here? Like why do things feel sluggish than software over 20 years ago? I just can&amp;#x27;t wrap my mind around it. We have SSDs and infinite CPU and RAM now compared to those days, yet there is always this feeling the computer is doing something more than I asked for behind the scenes. Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It&amp;#x27;s a very uncomfortable feeling.</text></item><item><author>andai</author><text>When I want to get work done quickly, I boot up Windows XP in a VM. It&amp;#x27;s just so damn snappy it&amp;#x27;s unbelievable.&lt;p&gt;What Moore giveth, Gates taketh away...</text></item><item><author>ilrwbwrkhv</author><text>It feels so fast. Even in the browser. Modern OSes just feels so sluggish by comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>naikrovek</author><text>&amp;gt; What happened here?&lt;p&gt;three things, I think:&lt;p&gt;1) people saying (and believing) that CPU, RAM, and disk are fast enough and cheap enough to be effectively infinite, and no longer worthy of concern.  put another way: developers feeling that their target platforms are no longer constrained.&lt;p&gt;2) many software developers simply stopped caring about performance and began implementing all kinds of things extremely naively.  new developers do this continually for many years early in their careers.&lt;p&gt;3) JavaScript.  the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used.  excruciatingly slow language. and JavaScript is EVERYWHERE, even on extremely constrained platforms, doing work, when almost any other language would have been a better choice.</text></comment>