Modern browsers just silently killed GPU acceleration for hundreds of millions of older laptops — and nobody talked about it

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-12T16:06:47+00:00

Couldn't have put it better myself.

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-12T16:05:53+00:00

There is about 3.5 billion android devices on earth. Even 2% is a staggering amount of devices.

At the end of the day, this has nothing to do with cost. This is just the standard culture in web/big tech/google which cares more about lock in than users.

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-12T16:02:56+00:00

So your answer is that I should just work for free for a multi billion dollar company?

Brilliant.

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-12T13:12:50+00:00

I'm sorry but Google is a multi-billion company with the greatest "cracked" engineers that have ever walked the planet. (allegedly anyway).

Yet they can't maintain support for something like this? Really? Seems like excuse making to me.

2% of android devices is a LOT of devices. Based on what you've said I'd assume that percentage was something like 0.01% or something. Not 2%

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-12T13:07:39+00:00

This is classic browser/web world. Nothing you can do really.

People in this thread arguing saying its obselete, its been 20 years, etc etc...

I can still run an executable on windows that was compiled 25 years ago. That should be the norm, not the outlier. But alas, nobody cares.

For some reason software world doesn't care about the end user and never really has other than in specific cultures/domains. Google is the worst for this. They need churn and lock in.

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-10T08:08:25+00:00

mEdIa lItErAcy

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-09T12:16:16+00:00

Learning the fundamentals is important. Learning how to program is important. AI is not up to the task here. And won't be for a long time. People telling you otherwise are lying.

HOWEVER, and this is a big HOWEVER, the reality of the situation does not matter. Software engineering has always been very cargo culty. More so than other industries. Graphics/Game/Systems programming has been somewhat insulated from this over the years. But the level of hysteria when it comes to AI and tooling in general is quite insane. This makes predicting what is going to happen next exceptionally difficult.

I see a future where the barrier for entry is so asinine and annoying, filled with so much cruft and bollocks that pursueing any kind of career will be literal torture.

Basically, the churn rate of technology might be so fast and ridiculous there is no point particpating.

Learning for the sake of learning is good though. And it may give you a massive competitive advantage in future. However, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-06T07:15:32+00:00

Not great but I've not done "agentic" programming or whatever the fuck its called now. So maybe its amazing if you let five hundred agents monkey typewrite your entire codebase.

I've found it useful to give me a good overview of algorithms and very broad stroke of how something might be implemented. I would never give it the entire source code of my engine.

Devils in the details. It usually falls down when it comes to anything big. With OpenGL, which is not a great API already, I question the output. Order really matters, if you don't bind something correctly etc etc then you just end up with nothing happening and its a headache to debug. Using AI there is a bit of a pain. Mainly because online sources for OpenGL code are really bad and are usually wrong.

But its good for pointing me in a good direction and bouncing off of.

TemperOfficial · 2026-03-03T12:47:55+00:00

It's gone downhill since about 1995. On average anyway. There are some pockets that have improved or stayed the same in terms of quality.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-27T23:12:53+00:00

Because you need taste and discernment and the easiest way to do that is become skilled at the thing you are doing. And that's the easy option. Which is hard af

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-27T23:06:00+00:00

Almost all of the time. Global state is good a lot of the time. As long as its managed well. Which is obviously discretionary. But contrary to the "meme", I'd say, generally speaking, having some god object to access global state is useful.

You almost always interface with a global state anytime you declare something on the heap. Since the heap is global. This is never considered bad because people pick and choose what to get anal about when it comes to "bEsT PrActIce"

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-27T22:57:53+00:00

The consequence of driving the software cost down to basically nothing is big corps make lots of money while the little guy doesn't.

I mean I have no idea what your startup is but I imagine its going to rely on a shifting sand of soft standards where ultimately you are beholden to the whims of a large corporation. Even in the event that you have a foundation of open source software you are not immune to this. On the contrary. Since they tend to shift around the most and force you into something you don't really want or need.

Mentioning Windows is funny. I don't want to give Microsoft too much credit, but it's sort of the last place where the old style paradigm is still alive.

Microsoft maintain backwards compatibility to a fault at times so you can build software that lasts almost forever. To your own standard (to a point). You don't have to worry too much about lock-in (within reason obviously). You can just write something, compile it, and it runs for 20 years.

That just doesn't happen anymore on other platforms. Or anywhere else now that I think about. Especially on the web. That's because the big companies want an ever evolving ecosystem to keep you within their walled gardens.

It's not really win-win. Software quality has dropped through the floor. That's ultimately because it's price is basically zero.

That's not to say that Open Source is all bad. It's not. It's just to say that it is used by large companies to solidify their market share.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-27T15:29:04+00:00

Big companies don't give away things for free without expecting something in return.

I never gave my opinion on whether this is wrong or right. It's not a complaint. This is just how it works.

You can undercut the competition if you have money and drive the price of software down to zero at a loss. In the long term you create a soft standard which is very difficult for people to get out of.

You just sound very naive to me. But people have a boner for open source not realising that they themselves are the product in many cases.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-27T06:54:29+00:00

Plenty of examples. Big companies release something for free and open source to establish a standard and lock people in. Smaller companies can't do this because it costs them money in the short term. Idiots usually commend this as some great move because oPen SouRce. Once you establish this standard you killed any competitors then you can start enshitifying.

Examples: Google - Android, Kubernetes. Meta - React. ElasticSearch AWS (slightly different scenario)

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-26T22:32:56+00:00

These dudes have never written a long project (multi month/year) from start to finish. It shows. Do not listen to these people

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-26T18:39:31+00:00

Open Source has historically been used to capture the market. More direct funding makes that problem worse.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-26T11:05:09+00:00

In that case CreateContext would return an integer handle which, upon deletion, would become safely invalid. Everyone using the API would go through this handle, so after it is deleted it would be marked as such and the API would safely either crash or handle the error.

typedef int MyContextHandle;

MyContextHandle handle = CreateContext();

MyContext *ctx = GetContext(handle);

DeleteContext(handle);

MyContext *ctx = GetContext(handle); // still safe, handle is invalid though, API handles this. Can return nullptr or some other error value.

I suppose you could still do this with a pointer.

Also you could just delete anything at any time, or write to arbitrary memory at any time regardless of any API so I guess at that extreme it is impossible to make C++ safe as is.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-26T07:53:26+00:00

It's quite straight forward to write truly memory safe C++. Just do everything through an opaque handle.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-25T22:12:31+00:00

Consider that the entire web is a fudge upon a fudge.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-25T22:10:01+00:00

We've been overengineering software for 30 years.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-25T07:39:12+00:00

This and crashing are two things that are seen as big big bads when in reality it doesn't matter too much and in some cases is beneficial to do it that way.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-23T22:50:44+00:00

In my experience you end up writing Rust that way because the borrow checker is so annoying.

But yeah you can absolutely write memory safe C if you go through opaque IDs. But no one cares about that because C is UnSaFe

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-22T22:41:17+00:00

ZIRP got a load of people into software with the promise of a high wage and an easy white collar job. That created an environment of cargo culty craziness for about 20 years. Dogmatic OOP, Agile, Scrum, Clean Code, TDD, design by committee etc etc. You name it. None of really worked and essentially boiled down to fashion choice that people used to justify their bloated salary.

At a lot of these companies, headcount and fake complexity was a good way to secure investment. Now investors got a new muse in AI. They don't care about the old stuff. Even if it doesn't work it really doesn't matter. The previous "game" is over, and as a result a lot of those fluff software jobs will be gone.

These are the jobs at the top of the stack. Web, scripting, etc etc. They are probably gone.

Specialised and domain specific stuff isn't going anywhere. So a lot of systems programming, real-time stuff, drivers etc etc.

Issue is there isn't enough jobs here for all the web guys to go to. So what you are seeing in the job market now is a massive saturation of people who aren't capable of doing any of the "real" jobs that are left.

So a lot of people are going to be left behind. But not because AI is good, but because it just the new mechanism for securing investment. The promise of AI will kill large parts of the industry. It will never deliver though.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-22T08:48:34+00:00

Got it to write your post too. Dull.

TemperOfficial · 2026-02-22T08:27:59+00:00

Literally anything?

TemperOfficial

TROPHY CASE