Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation?atomcommentsDWiki2021-01-04T06:00:06ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation.By Nieve on /blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnationtag:CSpace:blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation:2f0c646a1392c0ec94f003c78ff03dbc1c2eb741Nieve<div class="wikitext"><p>@cks</p>
<p>I think the data giveaway is even bigger than it might look since the infrastructure to capture and update the map data continuously didn't exist in any relevant form in 1996. Driver's map books were still a thing and you were lucky if a change last year made it into this year's edition (if they were even yearly). Mapping software and sites with map data weren't much better. Catching a temporary road closure or reroute was very rare and traffic data mostly limited to electronic road signs & radio reports. This isn't just Google, or Bing, or OSM & Apple, it's also all those state and local agencies working together to get data distributed quickly in reasonably consistent formats. You're absolutely right, no amount of 2021 hardware is going to make that happen.</p>
</div>2021-01-04T06:00:06ZBy Verisimilitude on /blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnationtag:CSpace:blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation:4f6db686a9828e44daaf8b8fe4bcbce5447e1c49Verisimilitudehttp://verisimilitudes.net<div class="wikitext"><p>I agreed with the original article. Seeing cretins boast about how C compiler error messages and other garbage have improved since only reveals their ignorance.</p>
<blockquote><p>But you definitely wouldn't have been able to have that map on almost any device</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is, almost any device which runs one of two operating systems. It's much less impressive when stated this way. The world isn't the WWW, and its browsers are only growing worse.</p>
<blockquote><p>and have it updated frequently</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Don't forget the surveillance opportunities this enables.</p>
<blockquote><p>and have high resolution satellite views of much of the west included (and probably not all of the map details, either).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's a hardware advancement.</p>
<p>Building WWW garbage which requires me to install a giant WWW browser, or perhaps the one other browser kept around to avoid some criticism of being a monopoly, is hardly anything good.</p>
<blockquote><p>Twitter's global scale and activity create a whole new set of problems that require post-1996 software technology to deal with, often in areas that are genuinely new.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Giant centralized systems eat resources like a fat child eats candy, sure. That doesn't make it impressive, and the world would be better without that horrible website anyway.</p>
<blockquote><p>My strong impression is that much of this progress has been driven by the existence of the HTTPS web, due to the web being where most cryptography is used</p>
</blockquote>
<p>None of that cryptography is sufficient for hiding from a government or sufficiently-well connected business, but it's good enough to protect machines from purchasers and ensure advertisements aren't modified, certainly.</p>
</div>2021-01-04T05:31:22ZBy Chris Siebenmann on /blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnationtag:CSpace:blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation:c4b068d04e7620361ac937e8d7b9ddd24f436fd2Chris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>I'm pretty certain that if you gave 1996 the client and
server hardware that's used to access and run modern sites,
both large ones and smaller ones like <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/PrometheusGrafanaSetup-2019">our Grafana dashboards</a>, 1996 would not be able to build
equivalent services with anything short of major multi-year efforts.
Some of this would be incremental software improvements that you might
argue were presaged by technology that existed by 1996 (even if it wasn't
necessarily widespread), but I'm pretty sure some significant software
technologies would have to be invented from scratch.</p>
<p>(For mapping and so on, I'll assume that 1996 gets the data along
with the hardware.)</p>
</div>2021-01-04T05:02:08ZBy frankg on /blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnationtag:CSpace:blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation:be985cdf5df7c65ee5de7eea4e6faf166314e247frankg<div class="wikitext"><p>If computation is better because hardware is better (not disagreeing) and hardware is better because the laws of miniaturization have dictated they will be (looking at you Moore) have we had any real innovation at all? Sure the web and everything is better, faster, stronger but that's expected. It feels like a pause, or just catching up with capability.</p>
</div>2021-01-04T04:40:33ZBy Chris Wellons on /blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnationtag:CSpace:blog/web/WebVsSoftwareStagnation:ab0ba1663ff4fda747dbf1f5b218f3238cf5960dChris Wellonshttps://nullprogram.com/<div class="wikitext"><p>I agree with the sentiment of the essay, but its examples and arguments are all poor. Jon Blow made a much more thorough and convincing argument in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko"><em>Preventing the Collapse of Civilization</em></a>. His counterargument about Google Maps would be that it's not software innovation but hardware innovation. You couldn't transport this software back to 1996 and hope to run it on hardware of the era, at least not without essentially re-engineering it from scratch. The current version already runs poorly, if at all, on computers from 2011. Software has gotten a free ride on hardware innovation (i.e. Moore's law), which is why software generally feels no faster today than it was in 1996 despite hardware being literally 10,000 times faster.</p>
</div>2021-01-03T13:50:12Z