> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

If the software made by my company ceased to exist, every government in the US, federal, state, and municipal, every construction company, plus most governments worldwide would be unable to build roads or houses until they were able to cobble together a replacement.

The entire world runs on software. Software controls our banks, flies our planes, decides what happens when you press the brake pedal in your car. The bridges you drive, walk, or ride across were modeled in software and simulated to determine whether they needed to be built stronger. The power companies use software to route power across the grid. Software drives servos which determine how much natural gas and air get pumped into our power plants. Every day, power producers and power consumers bid on how much they will pay for electricity at certain times tomorrow, and all of that is automated by software. Judges and lawyers file motions electronically, routed through software. Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a memorandum of understanding, opening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump was in Versaille, Pezeshkian was in Tehran, Sharif was in Islamabad; the agreement was signed digitally, with software.

If every computer on earth stopped working tomorrow, we wouldn't notice the lack of cat videos, but we would notice the complete collapse of civilization.

As a 'software engineer' myself, I fully understand your position, but please qualify the statement about the software you work on. Either add 'efficiently' or 'at scale', because all that infrastructure you mentioned could definitely be built without your software. It was possible before your software and it sure would be possible without it, it just would not be as easy.

I am sure someone is going to dwell on that if not fixed.

This is silly. People survived before the Haber Bosch process but an overnight removal of it from the world would absolutely result in a catastrophic collapse.

If you want to be reductive, we’re all going to die due to entropy anyway, it will all balance out so there’s no point in doing anything at all.

Internet is now critical infrastructure, whether we like it or not.

We've quietly gone from it being a research project, to a cool toy, to something most people had but that definitely wasn't essential, to a world where it is just as crucial as lightning or electricity.

I bet many farming and food distribution operations just wouldn't be able to function without a connection to AWS.

If the toilets at all those firms started operating in reverse, very little would get built. The conclusion is that plumbers are extremely important, not that plumbing is de facto engineering.

Plumbers build all the pipes, but one of the aforementioned professional engineers created a drawing of where they would go and how the water and sewage would move through the building.

And crucially, independent regulatory bodies formed the building codes[0] which govern things like minimum acceptable pitch for waste lines, size and materials selection of pipes, acceptable pressures and temperatures, etc. Engineers can be held responsible for failing to design to these codes, and plumbers and other tradespersons can be held responsible for failing to build to them.

IMO what we really need in software is something like the various codes which govern fire safety, efficiency, etc of modern buildings. It exists in some safety critical domains but should be more widely applied.

The safety codes are where we accumulate the hard-won knowledge over time. Many of the rules in the codes were paid for with human lives lost.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_Council

It's less about whether we could live without it, more about whether we could live without it now.

We objectively don't need credit cards. We could do with cash just fine. If we were told that Visa / Mastercard were shutting down in 5 years, we'd manage to muddle through. If they suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth? People would definitely die due to starvation.

It's fun to do it forwards too (ie all recent technological advances that could be category a where society cannot live without it or category b where society is like meh or even category c where soecity utterly collapses because of it).

The internet as a whole can arguably be all three at the same time.

A gps logger would likely be too heavy. The birds themselves only weigh 12 grams.

You can derive latitude from the length of the day. You can derive longitude from the offset of dawn/dusk. It won't be nearly as accurate as gps of course, but accuracy to a degree or two is really all you need.

> (I would upload as AV1 but the encoder is slooooooooow.)

If you're using libaom, try switching to libsvtav1. It's still slow, but it's slooow instead of slooooooooow.

The Motorola 68000 was roughly an order of magnitude more expensive than the Intel 8086.

I wonder if/when we'll reach the point that it's cheaper to manufacture SRAM (with 6 transistors per bit if I recall correctly) than it is to manufacture DRAM. (with 1 transistor and 1 capacitor per bit)

The transistors get smaller every year. The capacitors, like you say, don't anymore. At some point those 5 extra transistors will be cheaper than the capacitor, unless Moore's Law well and truly bites it.

My feeling about JavaScript is statistically speaking, random JavaScript code is more likely to be spaghetti nonsense than, say, the equivalent Python code. This feeling isn't based on empirical data, tbh it's probably as much anti-JS bias as it is experience with poorly written JavaScript.

Is your criticism of tracing specific to messy, confusing code, with lots of edge cases in the main loop, or does it also hold true for well written code?

I have no experience with compiler design, didn't even take a compilers course in college.

Nah, as titzer said, it's really about general-purpose code being branchy (a good match for CPUs) vs numeric code being heavily parallelized and non-branchy (a good match for SIMD/GPUs). Only a small subset of very specific languages / instructions target the latter (e.g. CUDA and SSE4).

> AV1 software decoding is already very intensive

I think you might be misunderestimating how incredible the dav1d AV1 decoder is. Not only does it require less total time than the reference decoder to decode the same video, but it can spread that out over far more threads. I was unable to watch 4k 60fps av1 video on my media center PC (it's from 2019, so predates hardware av1 decoding, and, well, the CPU was a little long in the tooth) until I switched to dav1d. With dav1d I am now able to watch 4k 60fps av1 using software decoding, and my machine uses 10% CPU while doing so. Really amazing piece of software.

With any luck, the dav2d 5x claim will hold true, and 10% CPU usage will scale to 50% CPU usage, meaning I'm still able to watch 4k 60fps video on my media center without a hardware upgrade. (that machine doesn't have hyperthreading, so 50% cpu is actually 50%, not 100% in a fancy suit)

dav2d author here - the 5x number is just where we currently are, it's not the theoretical limit. We're hopeful that a significant amount of the increase we observe in dav2d relative to dav1d is in math code, which should be easier to optimize using hand-written assembly or other algorithmic optimizations. If that holds true, the practical slowdown once everything has been optimized may be substantially less, possibly 2x.

Wikipedia does not say that the Strait is Iranian/Omani territorial waters. Wikipedia says that Iran and Oman claim that the Strait is Iranian/Omani territorial waters.

Claiming it does not make it so.

A lot of people don't understand just how bad the 3d printer ecosystem can be. Most people understand how bad HP/Epson/Canon ink printers can get, but they really need to understand that 3d printers can be worse than that.

While I kinda sorta need my 3d printer more than my 2d printer, it's an absolute nightmare in a way that my 2d printer isn't, and it's caused entirely by the dogshit proprietary software I have to use in order to print things.

Really? My 3D printer uses filament from any vendor. My slicer has profiles for all of these filaments and printer combinations. Hell, my 3D printer is more reliable than my 2D printer.

"Bambu's software" is forked from an AGPL project and is therefore itself AGPL. I have a right to fork, modify, and use it how I wish subject to the terms of the AGPL. Bambu's TOS is irrelevant. Their TOS is superceded by the terms of the AGPL.