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I Waited 10B Cycles and All I Got Was This Loading Screen
Modern hardware is unbelievably fast. The M1 Max that I’m writing this article on runs at 3.2GHz. That is 3.2 BILLION clock cycles per second. Yet, Microsoft Teams takes 3 seconds to open a link, and I refuse to believe it takes 9.6 BILLION clock cycles to open a link. Obviously, that’s an over-simplification, but the point stands: how is it that hardware gets faster, but the applications we use only get slower?
I can simulate massive 3D environments, complete with physics and ray-traced lighting, and play in real-time with my friends in other states or even countries, all while pushing 124 million pixels per second on reasonably attainable consumer hardware. Over the last decade, it’s become socially acceptable for application downloads to be over 500 MB, and for them to use egregious amounts of RAM and CPU, slowly killing your battery life in the process. So many apps leak their non-nativity through strange scrolling and selection behavior, appearance, and navigation handling, not to mention the dismal sluggishness that comes with changing screens.
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