• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1223·
    2 months ago

    I am so tired of people, especially people who pretend to be computer experts online, completely failing to understand what Moore’s Law is.

    Moore’s Law != “Technology improves over time”

    It’s an observation that semiconductor transistor density roughly doubles every ~2 years. That’s it. It doesn’t apply to anything else.

    And also for the record, Moore’s Law has been dead for a long time now. Getting large transistor density improvements is hard.

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Also the improvements in computer speed from Moore’s law were from Denard Scaling, which says with transistors 2x smaller, you can run things 2x faster but produce 2x as much heat.

      Heat dissipation has been the bottleneck for a long time now.

      • adavis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        While not hard drives, at $dayjob we bought a new server out with 16 x 64TB nvme drives. We don’t even need the speed of nvme for this machines roll. It was the density that was most appealing.

        It feels crazy having a petabytes of storage (albeit with some lost to raid redundancy). Is this what it was like working in tech up till the mid 00s with significant jumps just turning up?

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          This is exactly what it was like, except you didn’t need it as much.

          Storage used to cover how much a person needed and maybe 2-8x more, then datasets shot upwards with audio/mp3, then video, then again with Ai.

        • toddestan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.

          Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.

          Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)

      • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        I guess you’re expected to set those up in a RAID 5 or 6 (or similar) setup to have redundancy in case of failure.

        Rebuilding after a failure would be a few days of squeaky bum time though.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          At raid6, rebuilds are 4.2 roentgens, not great but they’re not horrible. Keep old backups.but the data isn’t irreplaceable.

          Raid5 is suicide if you care about your data.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      2 months ago

      I’m more shocked how little I need extra space!
      I’m rocking an ancient 1TB for backups. And my main is a measly 512GB SSD.
      But I don’t store movies anymore, because we always find what we want to see online, and I don’t store games I don’t actively use, because they are in my GOG or Steam libraries.
      With 1 gigabit per second internet, it only takes a few minutes to download anyways.

      Come to think of it, my phone has almost as much space for use, with the 512GB internal storage. 😋
      Maybe I’m a fringe case IDK. But it’s a long time since storage ceased to be a problem.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          I can understand that having your own copy is nice, especially if the service is closed for some reason.
          I just don’t bother doing that anymore, I prefer browsing my library on GOG instead of a file-manager.

  • udon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    We can argue as much as we want about whether moore’s law covers technological development in general or be pedantic like good old fundamental Christians and only read what the words say.

    The bigger problem is that we have reached the era of what we could tentatively call “wal s’eroom”. Thanks to enshittification (another one of those slippery words!) I predict that technological progress reverses from now on by 50% every 2 years.