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To be fair humans could choose to do this. We perversely choose not to. Enormous quantities of computational power squandered on what could be much lighter and faster programs. Software latency not improving over time as every marginal improvement in hardware speed is counteracted by equivalently slower software.
not sure how perverse it is
massively upgrading my laptop would cost me (after converting time to money) few days of work
rewriting my OS/text editor would take years of work
I am not sure whether even total overall costs of badly written OS/apps would cost much more than rewrite costs.
16GB RAM for laptop costs about 5 hours of minimum wage work, and it is in a poor country.
And if it would be overall worth it - we again have standard issue coordination problem. And not even particularly evil one.
OK, I can make some program faster. How I will get people to pay me for this? People consistently (with rare exceptions) prefer buggy laggy programs that are cheaper or have more features.
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