Comment by nostrademons

That's sorta the premise of the tweet, though.

Right now, the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software because you can always count on being able to buy hardware that is good enough to run it. The software expands to fill the processing specs of the machine it is running on - "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" [1]. So there is no economic incentive to produce leaner, higher-quality software that does only the core functionality and does it well.

But imagine a world where you suddenly cannot get top-of-the-line chips anymore. Maybe China invaded Taiwan and blockaded the whole island, or WW3 broke out and all the modern fabs were bombed, or the POTUS instituted 500% tariffs on all electronics. Regardless of cause, you're now reduced to salvaging microchips from key fobs and toaster ovens and pregnancy tests [2] to fulfill your computing needs. In this world, there is quite a lot of economic value to being able to write tight, resource-constrained software, because the bloated stuff simply won't run anymore.

Carmack is saying that in this scenario, we would be fine (after an initial period of adjustment), because there is enough headroom in optimizing our existing software that we can make things work on orders-of-magnitude less powerful chips.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

[2] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33957256/this-prog...