Comment by TeMPOraL

> On the other hand, machines are faster than ever before while doing more than ever before, and apps are more flexible and change more quickly (...). A few milliseconds of UI latency will bother almost no-one.

On the forking hand (distinct from your "other _other_ hand"), the "doing more than ever before" neatly cancels out "faster than ever before", which prompts a question: how useful is whatever it is our machines are doing now? Because one thing is clear: most of that extra work is not visible to the user. The increase in software capabilities is much, much smaller - nowhere near enough to explain where all the performance goes.

We could break the extra work into several categories:

- Support for better hardware - e.g. higher-resolution screens require more RAM (somewhat compensated by GPUs), and require higher-resolution assets to maintain (not even improve on) decent clarity, which has second-order effects on storage use (partially offset by compression) and CPU use on decompression (the price of offsetting storage use), etc.

- Security features - cryptography, secure protocols, isolation, sandboxing, etc. - those all cost CPU and memory.

- "Security" features - "real-time" malware scans (bane of my existence), shady anti-virus/firewall software (i.e. almost all of it), and various other parasites living off people's fear (or need for regulatory compliance), and convincing users to pay them with money, time and compute. Not (x)or, and.

- Legitimate new features - handling more type and variety of content, more advanced algorithms, etc. Continuous auto-saving and collaborative editing are two big and perhaps underappreciated generic advancements.

- ... ???

The first four items on the list don't seem to account for all the performance loss, especially for software that doesn't do things requiring modern security, and offers the same set of features as its equivalent 10 or 20 years ago. Often less features, even.

That last point, the "dark matter" of computing, needs more detailed study. We can guess a chunk of it is developer convenience, but that's not all of it either.

WRT. developer convenience - as a developer, of course I like it, but it's really getting out of hand - at this point, whatever I buy for myself by externalizing the cost on users, I still lose because I'm also the user of development tooling, and those developers externalize on their users too...