> That's why chips, unlike software, get faster.
The difference is that perf is a feature of chips. It's not necessarily a feature of software.
Your main dichotomy is people doing stupid things vs people doing non-stupid things. But if you consider that "stupid" only makes sense with respect to a particular set of objectives, you may find that other terms are more suitable for characterizing the general situation.
I think you can roughly describe how many resources should be devoted to performance and correctness* as a function of 1. how many other systems will depend on the system in question, and 2. how much departing from the ideals in performance/correctness will impact individual users.
As both 1 and 2 decrease, an ideal development resource allocator would decrease the amount allocated to performance/correctness.
I would argue that making sacrifices in performance and correctness is not necessarily stupid behavior at all; departing from an ideal resource allocator would be the less smart thing to do.
*Assuming you're working with a resource pool smaller than what would be required to produce an Ideal product, as is typical.
I see this sentiment by programmers often. Programmers often have a naive/romantic view of what the semiconductor industry is like. If you've experienced how inefficient the meatspace operations alone are regarding what goes on to bring semiconductors into existence, even by meatspace standards, you'd wish you were surrounded by the kinds of peers who were dumping bloaty-by-nature Electron apps on the world. (That's before we even get to the software that those engineering orgs are cobbling together themselves, for a more direct comparison.)
I don't get this. What would it mean for consumers to be "smarter"? Smarter in what way?
Like, imagine how much better many interfaces could be if we taught basic regular expressions in schools? Things like searching and filtering could be much more expressive everywhere. Regular expressions are so simple that anyone could learn them in a few hours.
Of course people can learn how to navigate more complex interfaces than Twitter, but why? For what? Certainly not for the purpose of social entertainment like Twitter et. al. What a waste of time that would be!
> Like, imagine how much better many interfaces could be if we taught basic regular expressions in schools?
Ok I've imagined it and I think the answer is "not much better". Pretty much all of us here know regular expressions and we all use interfaces purpose-built for people like us who know regular expressions, but beyond searching and replacing, this isn't a particularly powerful interface element. Like, it's fine and all, it's just not revolutionary. Searching could be made a bit better with widespread understanding and use of regular expressions, but little else would change.
I really think you're underestimating the extent to which interfaces are already really useful to the people using them. We have endless scrolls in social media, which is what people want for the mindless entertainment they're seeking. We have Photoshop for photographers, Ableton for people making music, really good CAD software, tons of good film creation and editing software, the Bloomberg terminal for financiers, really good editors and IDEs for people making software, etc. etc.
Of course there are exceptions, places where there is real room for improvement (I think streaming video interfaces are pretty bad, for instance), but for the most part interfaces are what they are because they serve their purpose well, and not because people are lacking education in their use.
consumer software exists downstream from advancements created by people who care about performance and correctness. You can only do extremely stupid things because someone else did non-stupid things to enable that kind of waste.
That sort of works as long as the wasteful people don't outnumber and outrun the few people who keep everything glued together, but if they don't then at some point this arrangement breaks down.
Maybe let's try to convince developers and consumers to be smarter rather than try to make software dumber. We should take a page out of the semiconductor industry's book which is run by engineers and builds towards engineering and scientific targets, not consumer demands. Those are a byproduct afforded by increases in performance. That's why chips, unlike software, get faster.