gryn

part of the reason is historical cruft & history path dependency. GPUs didn't start as general computing device for parallelism but a device for the specific purpose of accelerating graphics with very specific fixed functions for that job and only that. with time that fixed pipeline became more complex and more configurable, not fixed/more flexible and hacks were in parallel used to make use of it for tasks outside graphics those hacks were later made into something more formal (CUDA/OpenCL).

CUDA being the winner (closed source, not really usable on non-nvidia GPUs) between those 2 and nvidia not wanting to open their competitive advantage to the competition for the niche of non gamings uses / scientific computing (and later AI, which became a huge win for nvidia).

vulkan came around after as this open thing (based on a previous attempt by AMD called mantle) that's trying to break down the leaky abstractions and the divide between language for graphics & video games and separate language/frameworks for gpu non-graphic computing with the promise of giving more control and more room for squeezing performance from the hardware at the cost of more complexity with the idea that you'll probably build your own abstractions on top of it for your subset of applications.

If GPU were from the get go designed as a parallelism tool first and video game tools second the hardware architecture and the language would probably be different than today and simpler (and if the competition between the duopoly didn't sabotage things)

don't forget that the drivers for GPUs would until recently get updates to patch specific video games for performance issues (not sure if they still do that ?)

My cynical mind think link you but also comes to the opposite conclusion.

Everyone will be writing apps. Almost every app will be as janky as possible and people will just take the jank as the normal thing and get used to it and working around it, just like they did when every company started using electron and fake mobile apps that are wrapped buggy webpages.

With fast updates that changes every feature across updates, breaking everything and people accepting as the norm.

It's already happening:

- you can see Show HN post making it to the front page full vibecoded with as much jank as possible and the all the comments praising it and not questionning all the jank.

- I've seen it in some popular open source projects when after updates existing feature started to break constantly. The whole thing is ai coded up to the handling of bug reports and feature request and have Claude as co-commiter. I've looked in the internet to see the perception no one is complaining about it

- same at work, managers accepting slop AI solutions that are wrong at so many levels simply because it's fast and complain about the symptoms months down the line without questionning the AI part.

I love what he'd done for linux gaming, but man the cult of personality for gabe is strong on the internet.

gabe is not a philanthropy who want to see linux gaming happen no matter what. he's a reasonable man who saw a threat to his business when every operating system started making their own store and windows was directly trying to eat his lunch starting from window 7 and going at it the strongest in window 8 when they had their dedicated to game store directly pinned in the windows bar menu.

Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer)

Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.

The fight is for your limited attention span.

Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.

Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.

Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.

what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops.

You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit

huh ? where did you see the second quote, I can't find it the post. Was it there before ?

the game is very much a game of perfect information.

> It doesn't really matter.

It does matter, that's why those people quit because it's such a shitshow, progress happens at a glacial pace, more and more defects and slowdowns keep being created even if they have a big QA department/teams and the users are probably trapped because the software is the only thing in town, the bosses are the ones that makes the purchase decisions, or the it comes attached to big and/or expensive machines and they can't just buy another one for another X years.

he's not talking about his critics but his supporters & people like Thiel.

> once the open source projects are ready.

so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile.

that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this.

only on the primary display. once you had more than one display there were only workarounds.

then we should change bit(s) because it means dick/penis in french /s

so they'll pay for VPNs/Proxies with residential IPs in their desired location.

heck twitter will probably later offer you an option to buy it themselves or an option to set your desired location if you just pay for X++ premium bot services.