I've noticed the trend of ever-increasingly complex hardware with little or no change in performance since the 90s, and ranted about it extensively since I joined HN. I think we're past considering the problem from a technical perspective and need to look at the conspiratorial forces involved.

To me, the problem is one of monopoly and corporate thinking. When Intel and AMD make most of the chips, we end up with a Coke vs Pepsi mentality. There may be a hundred other hungry manufacturers, but without access to capital they'll never get enough traction to scale.

Around 2000, FPGAs were set to go mainstream and let us design CPUs of our own, but Xilinx chose to keep them proprietary so they never evolved. It's unfortunate that the company most capable of thwarting the status quo is the one propping it up. But they were trendsetters, that's how it's going with all things tech now.

Then Nvidia mostly monopolized the GPU industry and sent us down the SIMD rabbit hole. So we can process large vector buffers at great personal effort ..and that's about it.

What I and I think a lot of people probably want is a return to big dumb processors. Something like a large array of RISC-V cores with local memories connected via content-addressable memory and copy-on-write that presents a symmetric, unified address space that can be driven with traditional desktop programming languages. Had a CPU like this kept up with Moore's law, we would have had a 10 core machine in 2000, a 1,000 core machine around 2010 and a 100,000 core machine today, reaching between 1 million and 10 million cores by 2030. Which shows just how incredibly slow CPUs are vs what they could be.

The situation is so bad that I've all but given up on things ever improving. I mostly think about getting out of programming now and going back to living a normal life in the time I have left. Because the writing is on the wall: SIMD will deliver a narrowly conceived notion of neural network AI that's "good enough" and will stop all further evolution of CPUs. We'll miss out on the dozen or so other approaches like genetic algorithms and be forever separated from simple brute-force methods that "just work". The AI will soon be like Mrs. Davis and the vast majority of people will be face-down in their phones, then connected neurologically. The arrival of WALL-E and Idiocracy will coincide with the destruction of the natural world by 2100 and that will be that.

The argument really comes down to centralized control vs distributed resilience and freedom. It's pretty obvious which one we have right now, and that it's getting worse each year. Now I look on each headline with growing weariness, picking up on which mistakes will be doubled down on, which kool-aid they want us to drink this time. Because without the intervention of at least one successful internet lottery winner, or a concerted effort by thousands of hobbyists, there's simple no viable path from where we are now to where we could be, making the vast majority of the work we do a waste of time in the face of the potential we might have had.

It's hard to write anymore without sounding like a fringe lunatic projecting frustration on a world that is blissfully unaware that anything's even wrong. I'm probably wrong for doing so. Just another reason to probably get out of this business.