A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

Got a new work laptop: 13th Gen Intel Core i7 with 10 cores, 32 GB RAM, SSD.

Also, Windows 11 Enterprise.

That machine is incredibly slow — to boot, to open apps, to do anything really.

Over the last 30 years we’ve progressed CPU clock rate, RAM latency, and SSD performance to insane levels. We all have computers that are multiple times more performant than a Cray of yore.

And yet the awful pile of steaming bloatware that is Windows and friends renders even modern mid-range machines aggravating to use, and not better than the user experience from the past three decades.

It feels like the headroom provided by leaps in hardware is being completely canceled by a lazy lack of optimization of the tech-debt-ridden software stack

/rant

The business aims of Windows are 1) Consumer SAAS onboarding 2) Using the KYC DRM needed for SAAS onboarding to collect deep user behavioral data and reconcile that in their CRM backend with ad targeting and predictive analytics that better compete with Alphabet, Meta and Apple— using Bing and XBox Live as horizontally integrated consumer space trojan horses that can be supercharged by that data.

Windows Interface design KPIs prioritize generating differentiating behavioral data impressions and transaction conversion— not performance. In a way, the user is now the operating system and the operating system is now the user. That’s why Windows 11 can be qualitatively slower in 2024 than Windows 3.1 was in 1994 from a standpoint of launching, clicking and dragging. 

Exponential hardware capacity got eaten by Rube Goldberg design. Software engineers get promoted not for efficient utility but exploding behavior KPIs to make Product Management and Marketing look good and squeeze more cheese from user moons.

Chocolate rainmaker. Singer. Thinker. Voice

Windows aims for data-driven consumer dominance, sacrificing performance for user behavior metrics and ad targeting.