If you break « technology » into hardware and software, you have a different story.

Hardware have never been so efficient, giving you a lot of computing power for very little energy usage.

What is questionable is what we do with this power. Basically we use it to run our badly written garbage collected programs into layers and layers of VMs.

It feels that there has been two trajectories. Hardware has gotten more powerful and more efficient. While software has become less efficient. Not that it doesn't do in some cases more things like bigger resolutions and such, but in many others it feels like we are doing the same or less while having much more computing power available.

Just compare what software did 10 or 20 years ago today, and it seems that we haven't really progressed so much. Even while we have massively more memory and computing power available...

I'm totally in this boat. I can't understand how basic things like chatting (Slack, Teams, Discord ...) needs so much power to do, basically the same thing (plus artifices) MSN or IRC did 20 years ago.

I'm not saying that we have not better software but please, there wouldn't even be enough RAM to run Slack on the computer I used to chat with hundreds of people.

I don't think that's necessarily true given the rise of mobile computing. We definitely had to optimize for performance, RAM, and energy usage with mobile phones. The M1 for laptops is a direct benefit of those optimizations, where Apple has essentially shown that such power optimizations for battery devices can be useful even for desktop class computing.

That is completely and absolutely false. Newer mobile devices are not getting weaker, they are becoming more powerful and have processors that are often more powerful than older desktop or laptop processors. These optimizations aren’t being made because newer mobile devices are much more powerful. The new iPhone has 6GB of ram, proof the direction is that nobody will care about optimization and will create and use more bloated toolkits and CSS, and adding more analytics.

I for one can't wait to run the in-browser regression app I've been working on in JS at the M1 mac I just ordered... a stack that would probably run faster on my old 2015 box if I'd written it in C. Basically proving the OP's point that optimization tends to decrease when you can write easier code and just throw more cycles at it.

My point isn't that optimization tends to decrease as we get more powerful. My point is that we don't simply scale our use cases towards more resource-hungry applications.

Mobile phones prove my point. As processors became more powerful we didn't simply make them bigger and more power hungry, instead we sought out use cases where we could make the devices smaller and more portable, thereby using the performance enhancements to miniaturize computers rather then simply scaling them up.

Yes, what you're saying is absolutely true for hardware. I guess I'm referring to the software that's written to take advantage of each platform. It always tends toward bloat, so no matter how much faster the platform is, pretty soon there are apps in the wild that push its limits. And often, these apps could be written in more efficient ways, but the existence of the extra power justifies coding further and further from low level languages. That's all I meant.

Fundamentally, it comes down to the "human REPL". To a surprising and perhaps unsettling degree, no one really understands what's going on in the computer, we just have to infer what's going on by making changes and observing. So the human being is sitting at his computer making changes and refreshing to see what's changed, and he can only see lag and performance issues that are apparent on his machine. Everything else (not UI) is invisible to him. If the computer did computation instantly, there would be no real way for him to know (much less incentive to know) the performance or purely "mechanical" difference between, say, subtracting 1 by counting down 1 and subtracting 1 but counting up from 0 until the "next" number is equal to the "current" number. Weird concept, huh?

P.S. I've just replied to your very excellent post from 6 days ago.

>> (much less incentive to know)

Just riffing here, but I think a lot of times we do optimize just because it seems like doing good work, polishing things up. If it would feel cleaner, faster, and if we have time, we go back and improve it. Sometimes we even test that concept by running some piece of code millions of times even if, in practice, there is virtually zero speed difference. And I think we probably do that because we want to really know our tools better and more closely than just having the divorced sense that the computer is doing something we don't completely understand, under the hood - shaving off the milliseconds of difference between .map and .foreach and for(let...) or reducing what you need to some arcane series of byte array operations is what does give us the sense of control, that we're not just functionaries in a big REPL. I mean, I do take the time to optimize when I'm approaching a tricky problem as a matter of principle, not as code golf. But the underlying principle holds that, as you said, when lag for a given program approaches zero, so does the incentive to improve it. If I were still writing programs in BASIC on a TRS-80, you can be sure I'd optimize a whole lot more. So when you stick hundreds of such programs together into a framework, and each has its own authors, the collection or platform will tend toward maximizing the available hardware until the very last program, the new one, the one you're trying to write, has to find a way to optimize. And then it will optimize just enough.

I guess you could phrase this as: Software tends toward filling or exceeding hardware capacity over time.

Yes but they're doing it from a political angle. We should be building simpler, snappier, and more resource efficient software because it's the right thing to do and it makes software better.

I haven’t read anything political on there. Why is wanting to reduce energy consumption „political“. It’s just plain old frugalism mixed with environmental concerns.

Because if you actually wanted to reduce energy consumption, then you'd have actual targets and goals. E.g. I started out at n mW and now I'm at m mW of usage. This article talks about the solar setup they're using now, but not where they started from, and what the energy usage profile of their server is over time. In other words, it's either lazy or greenwashing.