From 8 cores to 12; from 16Gb to 32; from SATA to NVMe; from 60Hz to 144

I love Moore's Law

@Areg My first harddisk in 1991 had 52 MB. MB, not GB. Adjusted for inflation, the price was 1030 EUR. Crazy, huh?

@Fast-Nop I had a copy of "8 Bit Magazine". In an advert in the back it had a 5MB hard drive. It said, "More space than you will ever need."

I'd always hoped that at a certain point, we're going to look at a specific point of resources and be like "why the hell are we using so much resource on this simple task? Can't we make it more efficient?" Looking back it seems only MS and a few other choice organisations figured this out.

Everyone else (web devs, game devs etc) gave up on efficiency and good code and just decided to rely on power.

Shame, really.

You need to pump those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers!

@stonestorm Heh, that's been going on since time began. In particular, this used to be a common complaint back in the day (probably still is for some):

"Wtf?! Why are you using all the power of an 8 bit micro to flash an LED?! You could just use a 555 timer for that. Kids these days."

@AlmondSauce I actually did make a 555 based thing last year (the scooter charging control) because a micro would have been overkill. ^^

@AlmondSauce Meh, 8bit micros are so yesteryear. Now it's

import led as LED
LED.flash()

This drive is sick. 🤯

@AlmondSauce There is a limit though, where people just get lazy (and they have gotten very very lazy).

A perfect example of this was windows vista, which forced MD to set last consider re-work the kernel and engines to be more efficient; And for all the people who hate Windows because of caveman bias, MS improved it lot by being more efficient.

@Wombat Yesterday I bought this.

@stonestorm This was because MS had been betting on Moore like everyone else, but then the netbook fad happened and got MS with pants down. These computers sold as new had the performance of PCs from many years before that.

Vista didn't work, and there was a short time where even Linux was sold on them - until MS gave XP a new lease, and later Win7 Starter which worked well enough at least with 2 GB which was the maximum these machines supported.

That kicked Linux away for good not because of "dem cuntspirashuns", but because the customer support cost for the Linux netbooks unsurprisingly turned out to be insanely high for the vendors.

@Fast-Nop True, though my point was more that very few people / companies are still yet to consider that moores law is nothing to bank on even today.

I believe the state of the Web right now and the dependency hell that is almost every common framework (and frameworks masquerading as a "language") really shows this.

As an addendum, it also shows in devs attitudes these days; Most, less knowledgeable devs now will actively attempt to shame prole doing things without the hundreds of packages (read. Bloat) that they need to even Comprehend basic concepts.

It just makes me sad and angry that we're devolving and calling it evolution.

@RememberMe Luckily, that "programming" style is not for professionals because it means you'll need a bigger MCU than necessary, and that would increase the BOM as well as reducing battery life for mobile applications.

@stonestorm Yeah frontend devs in particular struggle already with basisc of their craft, like HTML. That domain is riddled with sheer incompetence.

I've made fully responsive, accessible pages with interactive animated graphic stuff where all of the page is less than 18kB over the wire. The tech is there.

@Fast-Nop (As a non-web dev) I'm looking to build some tiny websites, any recommendations? I could go full-on writing manual HTML5 (with some sprinkles of CSS), but I also heard stencil and svelte are quite decent. Sites shall be static at best.

@saucyatom I'm using fully static with raw HTML. OK, I've also written an SSG that can do some templating, but only for repetetive blocks like main navigation, cards, responsive images and the like.

You don't need a framework at all if you're going fully static. Frameworks are useful if you have dynamic stuff with state management, and enough of that so that direct DOM manipulation would derail into spaghetti.

Like, this button here needs to be active only if that state there has that value, and pressing that button impacts other UI elements also. And unless this is inherent in the data and functionality, such a cross-dependent UI is an antipattern in itself.

@Fast-Nop in case your nightmares weren't bad enough https://micropython.org/

(Kinda impressive that somebody managed to squeeze python down into that small a runtime though, relatively)

@RememberMe Oh shit. Such a powerful M4 like in the pyboard and then fucking it up with Python. But maybe for quick & dirty stuff or hobbyists, similar to Arduino.

@Fast-Nop that's exactly what it's for. A research group here is working on some very industry-relevant tech, they prototyped and real-world tested their design in like a week using micropython, iterating quite a few times and in some cases modifying their code on the go/on site (their current design looks nothing like the old one, they found lots of issues with their original ideas).

Now they're working on converting that into an actual deployable low power design with a different set of controllers and some pretty hardcore C and DSP programming.

I'm sure it's not the only way to do this, but that design iteration speed was pretty impressive to watch.

@RememberMe I bet - did something like this in the 90s in my final thesis. First doing stuff in Matlab on the PC, debugging it, tweaking it, and finally bringing it on a DSP in assembly.

The added benefit of the pyboard is that actual GPIOs, CAN and whatnot can be integrated. I guess this will also be useful e.g. for verification test benches.

Another advantage is that no stupid PMs can let the proof-of-concept (throwaway) code end up in production.

@Fast-Nop do you have a source for Linux causing high cost in customer support?

@electrineer Google the articles from 10 years ago if you're interested. I'm not inclined to do your work.

@Fast-Nop it sounded weird but now I get it — Microsoft will do the customer support for free for the oem.

@electrineer Na, the issues revolved more around shit not working as intended, weird bugs, and outright device returns. Returned devices can't be sold as new anymore, that's where it got really expensive.

@Fast-Nop yeah, returns due to not being able to run windows programs was mentioned in the article I read. But whatever you wish.