Years ago while I was at a startup, I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday. I wanted to write some code over the weekend. Well, I had a raspberry pi kicking around, so I fired up nodejs on that and took our project for a spin. But the program took ages to start up. I hadn't noticed the ~200ms startup time on my "real" computer, but on a r.pi that translated to over 1 second of startup time! So annoying! I ended up spending a whole morning profiling and debugging to figure out why it was so slow. Turns out we were pulling in some huge libraries and only using a fraction of the code inside. Trimming that down made the startup time ~5x faster. When I got into the office on monday, I pulled in my changes and felt the speed immediately. But I never would have fixed that if I hadn't spent that weekend developing on the raspberry pi.
Since then I've been wondering there's a way to do this systematically. Have "slow CPU tuesdays" or something, where everyone in the office turns off most of our CPU cores out of solidarity with our users. But I'm not holding my breath.
> That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
Yes, but why? As I see it, everyone has been conditioned into this lie that computers naturally slow down over time, because that's the way it has always been—at least relative to the speed of modern software.
What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow, and we were no longer able to make computers faster than they are today? I'd posit that a (slim) majority of computer users would actually benefit. Not hardcore gamers, not scientists, certainly not software developers. But for the people who just need to message friends, write documents, check email, etc., the experience would be unchanged—except that their current computer would never slow down!