rant

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

One of the reason why I use terminal apps over GUI apps is how slow graphical user interfaces are. I can’t stand input latency higher than 40ms

Raycast

Building /frametown. Amusement, wonder, and uncertainty ✴︎ libred.org


A niche example: change output device in Spotify is 10x faster (and easier) via /raycast than using the Spotify GUI.