For anyone unsure: Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use (see DeepSeek), but instead AI companies just buy up all the GPUs and shove more compute in.
For the expansive bloat - same goes for phones. Our phones are orders of magnitude better than what they were 10 years ago, and now it’s loaded with bloat because the manufacturer thinks “Well, there’s more computer and memory. Let’s shove more bloat in there!”
Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use
They are being written to be more efficient in inference, but the gains are being offset by trying to wring more capabilities out of the models by ballooning token use.
Which is indeed a form of Jevon’s paradox
Costs have been dropping by a factor of 3 per year, but token use increased 40x over the same period. So while the efficiency is contributing a bit to the use, the use is exploding even faster.
I always felt American car companies were a really good example of that back in the 60s-70s when enormously long vehicles with giant engines were the order of the day. Why not bigger? Why not stronger? It also acted as a symbol of American strength, which was being measured by raw power just like today lol.
This also reminds me of the way video game programmers in the late 70s/early 80s had such tight limitations to work within that you had to get creative if you wanted to make something stand out. Some very interesting stories from that era.
I also love to think about the tricks the programmer of Prince of Persia had employed to get the “shadow prince” to work…
Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
More specifically, it’s when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.
So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.
The modern web is an insult to the idea of efficiency at practically every level.
You cannot convince me that isolation and sandboxing requires a fat 4Gb slice of RAM for a measly 4 tabs.
On Linux it really is noticeable
Two possible and opposite interpretations of your comment:
- Modern Linux feels exactly as responsive or worse on modern hardware than old Linux used to feel on old hardware.
- Linux feels much more responsive and fast on modern hardware than it does on old hardware, unlinke other OSes.
PCs aren’t faster, they have more cores, so they can do more at a time, but it takes effort to optimize for parallel work. Also the form factor keeps getting smaller, more people use laptops now and you can’t cheat thermal efficiency.
My first PC ran at 16MHz on turbo.
PCs today are orders of magnitude faster. Way less fun, but faster.
What’s even more orders of magnitude slower and infinitely more bloated is software. Which is the point of the post.
It’s almost impossible to find any piece of actually optimised software these days (with some exceptions like sqlite) to the point that 99% percent of the software currently in use can be considered unintentional (or intentional) malware.
Particularly egregious are web browsers, which seem designed to waste the maximum possible amount of resources and run as inefficiently as possible.
And the fact that most supposedly desktop software these days runs on top of one of those pieces ofintentional (it’s impossible to achieve such levels of inefficiency and bloat unintentionally, it requires active effort) malware obviously doesn’t help.
Turbo slowed your processor down though
Only on some and name brand PC’s which used it for compatibility. For home built or local store, the turbo would overclock. I remember telling a friend, that although their 16mhz could run at 20, to not do it because it would compromise longevity! Ha! Mind you the cpu’s in those days didn’t have heat sinks but still- Oh no your 386 might not work in 20 years from running too hot!
That’s some nonsense, though.
For one thing, it’s one of those tropes that people have been saying for 30 years, so it kinda stops making sense after a while. For another, the reason it doesn’t make sense is it doesn’t account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.
In 2016 I had a 970 that’s still in an old computer I use as a retro rocket, and I can promise you that wonderful as that thing was, I couldn’t have been playing Resident Evil this week on that thing. So yeah, I notice.
And I had a Galaxy S7 then, which is still in use as a bit of a display and I assure you my current phone is VERY noticeably faster, even discounting the fact that its displaying 120fps rather than 60.
Old people have been going “things were better when I was a kid” for millennia. I’m not assuming we’re gonna stop now, but… maybe we should.
The problem is not so much badly written programs and websites in terms of algorithms, but rather latency. The latency of loading things from storage, sometimes through the internet is the real bottleneck and why things feel so slow.