Comment by jpc0

> Do we all need to know about processor architectures and microcode and L2 caches and paging and OS distributions and system software…

Have you used modern software… or just software in general to be honest.

We have had orders of magnitude improvement in hardware performance and much fewer orders of magnitude increase in software performance and features.

May I present the windows start menu as a perfect exhibit, we put a web browser in there and made actually finding the software you want to use harder than ever, even search is completely broken 99% of the time (really try powertoys run or even windows + s for a night and day difference).

We add boundless complexity to things that doesn’t need it, millions of lines of code, then waste millions of cycles running security tools to heuristically prevent malicious actors from exploiting our millions of lines of code that is impossible to know because it is deemed to difficult to learn the underlying semantics of the problem domain.