alt Hacker NewsIt's always struck me as living in some sort of bizaro world. We now have these super powerful personal computers, both handheld (phones) and laptops (My M4 Pro smokes even some desktop class processors) and yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...be a dumb terminal to someone else's computer.
I had always hoped we'd do more locally on-device (and with native apps, not running 100 instances of chromium for various electron apps). But, it's hard to extract rent that way I suppose.
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I don't even understand why computer and phone manufacturers even try to make their devices faster anymore, since for most computing tasks, the bottleneck is all the data that needs to be transferred to and from the modern version of the mainframe.
I think people have been finding more compelling use cases for the fact that information systems can be multi-player now than for marginal FLOPS. Client-server is just a very effective way of organizing multi-player information systems.
yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...animate liquid glass
What's truly wild when you think about it, is that the computer on the other end is often less powerful than your personal laptop.
I access websites on a 64gb, 16 core device. I deploy them to a 16gb, 4 core server.