this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
204 points (93.6% liked)

Technology

85645 readers
4808 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 113 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Only bad management is keeping everything from being crazy fast. No reason for today's programs to be slower than what we had a decade ago.

[–] Flower@sh.itjust.works 14 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

There's also a whole lot of abstraction layers in software these days. All kinds of frameworks, no code platforms, scripts and engines ask introduce their own delays when running software, all added to make time to market a bit shorter or just because of some tech fetish.

[–] ag10n@lemmy.world -4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Windows OS updates and releases aren’t subject to this as it’s closed source

Whether human or machine, external factors are all internally decided

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Why do you assume this can't be an issue in a closed source?

[–] ag10n@lemmy.world -1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Describe the abstraction layers of a closed source project in the context of Microsoft

You can’t, unless you work for Microsoft

There’s market forces, which is not what you described; rather tooling and nuance specific to software development

When Microsoft controls the input and outputs, it’s a closed loop affected by Microsoft governance, not random tools, systems or transparent inputs

[–] morto@piefed.social 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I remember when finishing my dissertation and thinking about how my sister did her one several years before me, in a computer that was considered unusable by the time I did mine, and both the work process and the finished result were pretty much the same. I had a computer that was astronomically better than she had, yet, everything was slow, just like she felt when she did her.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

The CPU in an average consumer PC can do tens of billions of instructions per second now. 10,000,000,000+ instructions per second. And then it can also offload some work to other devices. Here, graphics card, deal with updating this display at 144Hz. Hey network card, take this buffer and squirt it out the ethernet port at a 1 gigabit line speed for me.

And even with all that help, it still takes for-fucking-ever to get shit done. What the fuck are all those instructions doing‽

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 2 points 5 hours ago

Mine are all used up to block ads and trackers and page elements, then when they're done, I'm being throttled punitively by the service because i didn't watch their ads :(

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world -1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I think many programmers and business models have given up on programs running 'fast' but rather they just running and shoving them out quickly. Add in all the AI programming, and I don't see it getting better. It's basically like most people when they earn more income. The more speed and memory a computer has, the more programmers will use of it.

A computer from the 80's starts up a million times faster than any modern computer.

[–] kandykarter@lemmy.ca 13 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

That's nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.

[–] cenzorrll@piefed.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.

When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.

My dad had a C64 that I'd play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 hours ago

Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 0 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

You realize most computers in the 80's instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I'm sorry, are you fairly young?

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.

So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world -1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Except they did instantly boot. I didn't say anything about how long they took to load a program, and if you had a cartridge, it instantly loaded as well. Have you actually used these computers, or just remember slow tape drives? Not that modern ones are fast by any means either, they just move more data and are prohibitively expensive.

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It’s easy to “boot up instantly” when not even the OS is loaded.

Modern BIOS load also instantly. Care to explain what you can do with that?

[–] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed. Care to explain what you can do with that? You could easily boot DOS within 40 seconds on a 486. Can't do that on Windows at all these days and we are talking 30 years later.

[–] mabeledo@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Sure, let’s compare a single user, 16 bit, text only OS, with Windows.

Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed.

Again, apples and oranges.

I/O drivers were stored as part of the ROM in both Apple and Commodore. That’s your ancient equivalent to BIOS and kernel. But they loaded essentially nothing, and didn’t need to handle a myriad of different devices and interfaces. The whole thing took a few kilobytes of storage, and obviously, wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t very specifically supported.

A modern Linux kernel would also boot in a couple seconds if we were to strip every single driver from it but the handful needed to handle a monitor, an input device, storage, etc. The moment you plugged in a mouse, it wouldn’t work, and without an UI or even an interpreter, it would be useless. And I can assure you, it is way faster to load zsh in a modern computer, than any BASIC interpreter on an Apple II.