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I’m becoming deeply concerned by the explosion of growth in high level software, with a slow abandonment of low level engineering.

I’ve been in tech for as long as I can remember, and I don’t remember having the issues I have now, nor in this number. Every sentence is beginning to end with “if it works.”
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The Beave 2y ago

My observation, though I'm highly ignorant, is that the sheer speed of hardware allows for exceptionally sloppy coding to run so fast as to not really have an effect on nearly everything that people do. I know a bit more about assembly than most, because I dabbled in it for a while in my younger years for the purpose of reprogramming early fuel injection ECUs. It's pretty amazing what you can do with an 8 but microcontroller if you understand the basics of taking in data, manipulating it in a concise way to get useful outputs.

I look at today's hardware in awe. And it leads to horrors like windows 11.(I hate it so, so much.) I think even Linux is affected by this, though, it still runs wonderfully on much older hardware most of the time.

I'm not sure where I wanted to end up with this little ramble, but, it's pleasant to see others with interesting opinions about this.

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nobody 2y ago

It really does boggle the mind that Microsoft Office doesn’t do anything it didn’t do in 2000, but doesn’t run any faster.

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The Beave 2y ago

It crashes more, from what little I have used it.

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nobody 2y ago

But now you can send every detail of your device to the developers automatically. Earth shattering.

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LuisSP 2y ago

for 15 years now, I have been asking students to use datasets large enough to require efficiency.

like, auto-complete with the full english dictionary, search on real point clouds with millions of points, or TSP on city lists of real countries.

e.g., if they do not use a hash table correctly (implementing comparison functions, not just == ), and perform dumb linear search, it will take 100s of seconds. if they implement stuff in a stupid cubic way, it won't finish in the same month.

and something I really found amazing:

conspiracy theory "USA did not go to the moon" because "there was no way such old computers could control a spaceship - they could not even run a VGA screen!"

just lack of understanding that once the equations are solved in the paper, the actual control laws aren't really computationally intensive (at least for today's standards), a few kflops could handle that.