• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 12th, 2025

help-circle
  • A gamer does not need to switch from the mouse to the keyboard repeatedly. Plus, a gamer cares about precision, which obviously a trackpad lacks.

    “Faster” standalone means nothing. Can you move the pointer faster with a mouse? Of course. But I don’t see most people flicking on their workstation.

    In the context of this thread, “faster” refers to completing your tasks faster. And for that a trackpad beats a mouse if your job requires you to type a lot.




  • Of course! But sometimes, most often even, the optimization is not worth the development to get it. We’re particularly talking about memory optimization here, and it is so cheap (or at least it was… ha) that it is not worth optimizing like we used to 25 years ago. Instead you use higher level languages with garbage collection or equivalents that are easier to maintain with and faster to implement new stuff with. You use algorithms that consume a fuck ton of memory for speed improvements. And as long as it is fast enough, you shouldn’t over optimize.

    Proper optimization these days is more of a hobby.

    Now obviously some fields require a lot more optimization - embedded systems, for instance. Or simulations, which get a lot of value from being optimized as much as possible.



  • In most cases, you either optimize the memory, or you optimize the speed of execution.

    Having more memory means we can optimize the speed of execution.

    Now, the side effect is that we can also afford to be slower to gain other benefits: Ease of development (come in javascript everywhere, or python) at the cost of speed, maintainability at the cost of speed, etc…

    So, even though you dont always see performance gains as the years go, that doesn’t mean shit devs, it means the priority is somewhere else. We have more complex software today than 20 years ago because we can afford not to focus on ram and speed optimization, and instead focus on maintainable, unoptimized code that does complex stuff.

    Optimization is not everything.