up zoomers so I have something very urgent to talk to you about and that is a lot of people have this idea that computers they're just gonna get faster and faster and better and everything's gonna be way slicker in the future everything's gonna be it's gonna be a you it's gonna be wig history wig history is happening computers are gonna be faster and better and stronger and all that kind of stuff this video I want to talk about the fact that I don't really think that's gonna happen and I think that you don't really think that's gonna happen and I'm gonna talk about why and I also want to give a an embarrassing anecdote then involve someone else I'm sharing it with permission because it is like I consider it very embarrassing but it's a good example so I'll just put it this way you've probably heard of Moore's Law if you know stuff about technology Moore's Law is the idea that or it's really the realization that you know for long periods of history now that we've been making computers the number of transistors that you can fit on any particular area of space is gonna double about every two years that's just something that's happened and you would think usually what that would transfer into is the the idea that computers are gonna get exponentially faster you know computers are twice as fast now as they were two years ago they're four times as fast as they were four years ago etc etc etc I mean it's not it it's not that simple but you know what I mean it's that's the idea so that's more or less Moore's Law now I want you to think about even you know before you even think about the flaws and an idea like that or I guess the asterisks asterisks to a statement like that does your does the internet ignoring bandwidth but thinking about internet applications are they twice as fast as they were two years ago are your desktop applications twice as fast as they were two years ago are your video games twice as fast as they were two years ago my answer to those would probably be no I don't think anyone feels like things are faster and in fact you know you since I'm a boomer who's been using computers my whole life I sort of feel like computers haven't really gotten that fast more fast at all frankly I mean they're they're a little faster internet is definitely the internet bandwidth is definitely faster but in terms of actually processing things or getting things done it doesn't actually seem like anything's much faster now that I think happens for a reason now of course you you can tell me of course in terms of processing power yes computers are actually getting faster but let me let me put it this way at the same time that Moore's Law is occurring and our processing power is increasing the programs that are written for computers have to care less and less about efficiency so what ends up happening is that programs are often written incredibly inefficient you know web apps nowadays which used to not even exist because you know it was such an extremely intensive thing to do to you know do this all the stuff in browser but web applications now all this junk that's written in JavaScript they even have JavaScript desktop applications this stuff is either using abstract languages or it's just inefficient code and when you learn how to when you take a computer science class nowadays writing efficient code as it is processed by the computer is not a big concern okay and I have talked about this in videos before and people will tell well it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if it's actually efficient code I mean you just got to get stuff done that's the mentality that a lot of people have now of course in real life when you have when everyone who's writing code for your computer has that mentality that is going to you know that's gonna snowball into having a computer that's basically as fast as computers were five years ago or 10 years ago or something like that so you're doing basic stuff you know because we no longer have the constraints of processing power a lot of times that means that you can now write code extremely inefficiently without actually having having to you know pick up your trash so to speak and that's not a big problem so let me give you I know I mentioned that I was gonna give a specific embarrassing anecdote and I think this illustrates a problem I was talking you know I was talking to someone who was sort of writing something for himself he just sort of a it's not really important what it is but one of the things he needed I noted that okay so for this little module you need to take that file and number all the lines okay so it's let's say it's a hundred lined file every line should have its line number on the side now I didn't tell him how to do that because I thought it was obvious but how he did it is he wrote a Python script that looped through the file and you know numbered all of the line and incremented a variable and all that kind of stuff in the way that you would do in a computer science 101 course now the reason I didn't tell him how to do that is because I thought it was a little obvious because there is a built-in unix utility called in L number line I guess that you could just run on a file or standard input or something like that and it will automatically number all the lines that's all you have to do I just assumed that I guess he knew about that but he wrote yet another program or just a little script but it was bigger than it should have been anyway he wrote this other script to go on top of all that stuff that's already on the system in a more in a totally different language Python that loops through and does things in this case that weren't necessarily efficient he is replicating a behavior of a built-in utility that he doesn't even have to do now I could call him stupid for for doing this and of course I did because he's my friend but this is something that happens all the time specifically I mean you know actually to talk about unix utilities there are so many that do basic things that people try and reproduce like I was talking to someone who wanted to oh I need to learn to wrap my line so I'm gonna write a perl script to do all this know that there are unix utilities that literally wrap lines for you you don't you don't have to worry about that now I say this because one of the reasons you know what's happening nowadays is one of the reasons that computer programs are so inefficiently written is a lot of people writing these programs aren't familiar with the things that are already on their system that do these things that they already know you don't need to have this you know a Python script loop through a file and replace instances of words when you could just do use a said script and it'll I pretty much always is gonna do it way faster so it's not I mean this is I guess the problem you know as we are writing more and more bloated programs you know we're just there's there are more and more super-strates separating what we're doing from our actual system systems and now people will be programmers programmers and their knowledge of programming is basically limited to the JavaScript implementation that they live in and nothing else and this is the weird so they end up reproducing things that already exist on their system that they could easily use so anyway so that's what I wanted to say as it comes to again the wig history aspect of Moore's Law I don't think that computers realistically are going to get faster and faster I think that are the stupidity at which people are writing computer programs is going to increase exponentially as well I think that's pretty much it's almost inevitable unless people just there is just oh that's a spider web unless people just arbitrarily can or not arbitrarily but can strain themselves rigorously to you know being writing efficient code or something like that I think it's realistic to it's realistic to expect there to be no big speed increases in computers and more than that you know the number of people you know people you know one aspect of my channel and I don't necessarily think it's bad but you know it's funny that a lot of times I'll use these basic utilities to do basic things and people who are professional programmers nowadays just don't know about them it's so weird to me I mean I I'm just a guy who like does stuff on the the command line to get things done inefficiently and you know there are people who get paid six figures who don't know who think I'm like showing them some kind of arcane knowledge and I don't want to be snobby with it in fact I want to be the opposite I want this to be common knowledge but it's so weird when you know people who are frankly paid more than me you know basically don't know aren't able to do things that I think of as just being basic computer knowledge I'll just put it that way it's just a little really makes you think frankly so that's all I have to say yeah that's all I have to say so think about that next time you're writing something and be just read the manual for all Unix core utilities just do that before you even start writing stuff and I will see you guys next time