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by IanCal 1137 days ago
The race is about to begin. I wait for the screen to flash green, finger hovering over the enter key. It flashes and I press the button immediately, and the race is over.

In this time, my year old consumer graphics card has performed more floating point calculations than my entire town could in their entire lives.

Occasionally I work this stuff out and it's frankly hard or impossible to truly appreciate just how fast these things are.

(36 TFlops, 250ms reaction time = 9e12 calculations. One calculation every four seconds from birth to age 100 for 10,000 people is about 8e12 in total)
2 comments
Arrath 1136 days ago
> The race is about to begin. I wait for the screen to flash green, finger hovering over the enter key. It flashes and I press the button immediately, and the race is over.

And you missed your window to get into BIOS, you need to reboot and try again. /s

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ByThyGrace 1136 days ago
I'm fairly sure this is more than one somebody's recurring nightmare.
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lazide 1136 days ago
No lie, my eye twitched.
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SamBankmanFried 1136 days ago
And once you understand how fast modern computers are, you realize how absurd it is when software is still slow. How is it that Microsoft Teams takes 15 seconds to load? How many billions of calculations does it take to put a list of names on the screen?

Never forget what they took from you.

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tialaramex 1136 days ago
Although it can be laziness/ incompetence wasting cycles, sometimes the problem is that only the CPU got so much faster, and only in certain ways.

If Teams talks to a remote server, doesn't matter how fast your CPU is, it takes time for the question to get to the server, time to get back, that's some time regardless. Now yes, maybe they write code which goes

Hi! / Yes? / I'm a Teams client / That's nice / And you? / I'm the Teams server, what username? / SamBankmanFried / OK, and password? / Hunter2 / OK, you're logged in SamBankmanFried / OK do I have new #catpics ? / Nope / How about #emergency ? / Nope / How about #general ? / Yes, six messages ...

And that's a lot of round trips whereas they could have done:

Hi, I'm a Teams client, hopefully you're a Teams server / Yes, I'm the Teams server, what username & password ? / SamBankmanFried password Hunter2, also summarise my new stuff / Hello SamBankmanFried, you have six #general messages ...

Which is far fewer round trips.

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