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   Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-Jun-2026 21:55:28 JST Hailey

   I got to play with a period accurate pentium 4 machine running windows xp the other night, noodled around in control panel and in ableton live 7 and the thing that really shocked me was how *fast* it was. Obviously loading stuff off the hard drive was quite slow, but once the page cache was warmed up it was a very snappy, very responsive experience.

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-Jun-2026 21:55:27 JST Hailey

     in reply to

     I'd noticed how snappy vintage windows is in a VM on contemporary hardware before, but this was shockingly snappy even on hardware of its own time. Really makes you question what the fuck we're all doing here in computing

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 14-Jun-2026 21:56:33 JST Andrew Zonenberg

     in reply to

     @hailey you can still build fast software if you don't build in 500 levels of abstraction and run your inner loop in python compiled to wasm running in a browser in a container in a Linux kernel emulated inside more JavaScript in yet another browser. With another 2GB of ad SDKs to monetize it.

     But apparently the art of just making a tool that does the thing is becoming lost...

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 14-Jun-2026 21:57:43 JST Andrew Zonenberg

     in reply to

     @hailey Try running a SSH server on a single core Cortex-M at a couple hundred MHz, bare metal, with hardware crypto offload then benchmark it against openssh on a Pi with >10x the CPU.

     But nobody still builds things the old way anymore it seems.