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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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The same fear existed before - from programmers forgetting how to get most of the hardware, to bloatware memory hogs that loaded useless libraries

To be fair, these fears were 100% valid. The resources required by the average modern app are insane.

The resources required by the average modern app are insane.

Electron has entered the chat

That's largely a casualty of Moore's law. There's no point in optimizing candy crush to run on the Apollo guidance computer when nobody is going to run it on hardware like that.

Nah, it's not just that. There's also a problem with what Casey Muratori has termed "pessimization", where careless devs don't do even the most basic things to make the computer not have to do the same work twice. It's especially embarrassing when the shittier way of doing it is harder to write than the non-pessimized way and retarded web dev monkeys do it anyways.

Again, this is nothing new. There actually was something called software crisis of 1960s. Shitty programmers made costly errors, delivered faulty code with years long delay, causing immense damage in terms of wasted time of expensive mainframes. It was direct effect of the early thinking that software is a work for "calculators", akin to clerical and administrative jobs. All the really talented people focused on hardware. If you have a software company that thinks software is a job for low paid foreign labor, the results will be the same.

where careless devs don't do even the most basic things to make the computer not have to do the same work twice.

Exactly, because it's basically not worth it outside of actually high performance computing. Who's not going to use a product because it's 20% slower but otherwise better than competitors? Vim is way faster than Microsoft Word, but who cares?

It's especially embarrassing when the shittier way of doing it is harder to write than the non-pessimized way and retarded web dev monkeys do it anyways.

You'll have to provide some examples.

You'll have to provide some examples.

We had a project that gets some fields from the database. These fields were being cached in memory after retrieval because they literally only change once a year. The H1B code monkeys in Mumbai bypassed the cache and fetched them from the database every single time because they're retarded. They wrote a whole nother SQL query instead of just typing "SomeGloballyAvailableMemoryCache.Get("TheTaxFormFieldsThatGetUpdatedAnnually") or something like that.

Oh and they passed all these fields around in a stringly-typed DataTable instead of the strongly-typed object the cache would have given them. This is one of millions of examples, this shit happens daily in the software engineering world.

There are a depressing number of "engineers" who don't give even the remotest fuck about making a good product.

There are a depressing number of "engineers" who outright promote making shitty products.

See every comment that claims "premature optimization is bad" or "you need to benchmark it before you can say anything about performance".

Did they intentionally bypass the cache, or did they not even know about it? It's not hard to believe that clueless programmers don't know that the value is in the cache.

The H1B code monkeys in Mumbai

Perhaps he's wondering why someone would sponsor a man for an H1B before employing him overseas.

Did they intentionally bypass the cache, or did they not even know about it?

No clue, when we asked them why they did it they didn't have any sort of coherent answer.

Perhaps he's wondering why someone would sponsor a man for an H1B before employing him overseas.

You're a big guy. And my mistake, I call them all H1B code monkeys even if they're still offshore employees.

I'm not asking for everything to runnable on a potato, just for things to not be retarded.

Case in point: A basic streaming music player with a shitty UI using over half a gigabyte without even doing anything (Spotify). Actually playing music increases memory consumption by another 100 MB.

Meanwhile a properly written player (Foobar 2000) with vastly superior UI supporting dozens of formats, a plugin system and conversion between formats uses 16 MB by being written in a fairly straightforward but not outright stupid way.

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