[virtue3]

I think this article is drastically downplaying how dramatically more complicated designs and things are now than they were before.

I don't believe it's computers that are to blame; I believe it's complexity nightmare problem.

We have much tighter tolerances for everything now; everything "does more" and relies on my components.

Back when we used pen and paper to create military vehicles it was mostly JUST about performance and completing the objective. There wasn't thousands upon thousands of other requirements and features (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable).

[mcphage]

> Back when we used pen and paper to create military vehicles it was mostly JUST about performance and completing the objective. There wasn't thousands upon thousands of other requirements and features (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable).

It makes me wonder if this piling-on of requirements is also enabled or encouraged by computers. I agree that things are becoming more complex, but I’m thinking computers might be partially to blame for that as well.

[giantrobot]

> It makes me wonder if this piling-on of requirements is also enabled or encouraged by computers.

You can build a radar with pen and paper but you can't build an effective stealth bomber with the same. You can't build guided weapons without computers. You can't effectively build hyper-accurate guidance and navigation without computers.

Without computers you're at late-40s early 50s weapon systems. If everyone is stuck at that level you've got some amount of balance in capabilities. The first side/power to apply computers to increase capabilities has a significant advantage over all competitors.

Even if the availability of computers makes things more complex the increased capability is often worth the complexity in aggregate.

The first Gulf Ware is a good object lesson. Iraq had a large and capable military that was several technological generations behind their opponents. The Coalition forces could operate at night with impunity, had unbroken communications behind enemy lines, and could operate in enemy airspace largely uncontested. If the Coalition forces had the same level of technology and dispersion of high technology through the ranks, the Gulf War could have easily been fought to a stalemate or worse.

[PopAlongKid]

The U.S. tax code is certainly far more complex than it would otherwise be if not for computers.

[chiggsy]

No, the complexity comes from people, both the taxed, and those who impose them, and those who manipulate the legal process for relief. Computers actually give the sums a chance to be somewhat correct.

[hulitu]

> everything "does more"

Windows 2000 GUI was much more complex than the Windows 10 or 11 GUI. Yet Windows 10 and 11 have difficulties painting the screen (glitches, black screens for a second, and so on).

[paulryanrogers]

W2K didn't support 3D GPUs. IIRC it's hardware support was quite limited, at least at launch. I also remember having to reboot after every driver install or update.

Which isn't to say modern Windows shouldn't do better. Its quality seems to have dropped dramatically since they started outsourcing QA to the fans.

[p_l]

The amount of pixels that had to be rendered and pushed, as well as certain lower security in windows 2000, meant that just the pushing of pixels was simpler compared to today. Windows 11 graphic path even for same application code as on windows 2000 is way more complex, and arguably most of that complexity is warranted and needed.

Otherwise you get unfortunate side effects like simple text editor using surprisingly lot of CPU and lagging...

[mrob]

The main benefit of 4K displays is sharper vector fonts. It's very important to imitate the exact shapes of print fonts, so despite sharp fonts already being available for decades in bitmap form, we've got to push those pixels.

Likewise, it's very important to know the exact Z-order of the window stack at all times, despite only interacting with one at a time. This means it's absolutely necessary to render translucent drop shadows for each window, which obviously need some Gaussian blur. A simple blitter won't cut it. And better add some subtle translucency to the window decorations too, just in case the shadows are obscured.

Don't forget the mandatory rounded corners, gradient fills, and animations. How can the user know the computer's actually working if things aren't sliding about the screen?

Of course, it's important to remove useless features, like theming. If users are permitted self-expression they might start getting the wrong idea about who really controls the machine.

[p_l]

While I'm similarly bitter at how things have gone effectively worse, the actual driver path, assuming same user-space code, involved a significant increase in complexity for good reasons.

Back in Windows NT 4.0 - 5.3 days, GDI would draw direct to VRAM. Fast, simple, but prone to rendering glitches that left corrupted screen unless something would redraw the area.

The amount of pixels was way lower - and we already were using a lot of vector fonts at the time anyway. With higher resolutions, even when you scale by integer value, you need a way faster blitter, and new caching and rendering methods. While GDI had reasonably good hooks for caching, they don't necessarily map well with GPU architecture, and on-GPU blitting is way different than old Windows 2D acceleration architecture that worked fine with GDI - and lower resolutions.

Both for security reasons and to prevent glitches, and honestly to also handle caching & rendering better in modern GPU, you need indirect system between GDI and GPU. Once you have shaders rendering windows contents as texture on triangle strip of 2 triangles, adding blur or transparency was close to zero cost unless you have really resource constrained system (and then you had other issues, really).

And windows had to track exact Z-order since Windows 2.0 introduced overlapping windows, otherwise painter algorithm & gdi caching got confused (it was used to know exactly when to send MSG_PAINT to what window and with what params).

Animations are iffy thing, but usability research suggests that some animations, especially in a world where computers are often very silent and have no indicators (neither HDD sounds nor activity LED, for example), is indeed necessary to help majority of users know when computer is "doing something" or just hung.

As for the last point... I agree 200%.

[7thaccount]

Agreed. Complexity could ultimately be our downfall. Everything is drastically more complicated than before and the margins for safety are getting more and more reduced.

Take my own industry of electricity markets for example. It used to be you had large vertically integrated utilities that handled generation of power as well as the transmission of it to the residential grid (distribution). They would run the grid and factor all costs (fixed and variable) into residential and industrial rates. This is easy to explain to someone in a minute or so. In the 1970s and 80s though deregulation took off and you could finally build fairly efficient and smaller gas plants, so there was a push to have these much larger grid operators optimize over a much larger region and introduce competition amongst those in the market, so the public wouldn't suffer from unwise investments from the utilities. This system is more efficient, but is supposed to operate off of a "free market" system. The only problem is that it has never worked very well overall. It does schedule power more efficiently, but you have all these power plants needed for just a handful of events that are no longer solvent as they can't earn enough money in the markets. So the grid operators are dealing with mass scale retirements (some of these would've occured anyway due to EPA rulings) and spending tons of time and money trying to fix a problem that didn't use to exist. These organizations have thousands of pages of legal documents and run enormously complex power auctions and have to employ hundreds of employees to administer all of it. Very few people understand how the cake is made anymore so to speak. Does it save more money? Yes, but the cost is a massive increase in complexity that grows each year as new rules are made. So we took something conceptually simple and made it 10x more complex in order to squeak out more savings. I'm not saying it was the wrong path, but doing this sort of thing all over society/economy has its own costs.

[Gibbon1]

Reminds me before the 2008 financial crisis you used to hear finance types and economists crowing about financial innovation. After that they've been more quiet. But they never exactly came out and said what it was. I can tell you it's about efficiently collecting rents. Being able to pick people pocket faster and cheaper so you can pick more pockets. That isn't most people think of when they hear the word innovation.

(Edgy comment over).

(Less edgy comment begins)

The finance share of the US economy went from 4% 50 years to 17% today. It feels likely that there are been zero or less than zero benefit over all from that.

Everyone has a internet connected doorbell now. 50 Yeah ago my parents never locked their front door.

Lots of complexity that seems to provide no overall value.

[rini17]

And what about financial services mentioned in the articles? Doubt that "everything does more" there.

[RandomLensman]

The referenced article is mainly about about capital efficiency from introducing computers which isn't so surprising as it needs time to (figure out how to) use them effectively.

Nowadays, handling payments, compliance, risk management, trading etc. without computers would be impossible. What is true is that a fair amount of productivity is absorbed on compliance and control issues, though.

[pas]

Financial services went from a solid base of institutionalized racism (redlining) and casual prejudice based risk profiling when you went to the branch office ... to credit scores and financial engineering (2008 hello!) and introducing a thousand useless intermediaries, global 0-24 trading and investing, online Regulation A+ offerings (pre-IPO investing for nonaccredited investors), and online banking.

It's a lot more, of course, and there are even a few advantages.

[__MatrixMan__]

Oh yeah, also some parts have cancer. Tumors can take a lot to maintain.