Obsessing about speed

`1:52:27`

First, let me quote Mitchell Hashimoto, who created Ghostty terminal that's awesome and also available on Omakub and was also the founder of HashiCorp, who had this great post on X not too long ago that had the killer line, "The pursuit of excellence deserves no explanation." Wanting to make something as good and as fast and as beautiful as possible has no need for justification. We should want beautiful, fast systems that are a delight to use. Now, the funny thing with the install time is it didn't actually start with a one-minute mission. I was being modest when it got going. I thought if I could set up my entire system in 15 minutes, it would already be such a dramatic improvement over what came before it that I would be perfectly happy. And it came off the fact that the benchmarking had been skewed so out of whack. You talked about the Commodore 64 being your first computer, right? When you unwrap that Commodore 64 and you hit the on button, in I think about less than one second, the basic interpreter was ready to accept your command. It was literally almost instant. There was virtually no boot time. Do you know how long it took me to set up a new Mac that I had bought for actually the one app that I still haven't vibe coded my way into on Linux, which is Adobe Lightroom? Brand-new computer, out of the box. I set it up. There's a software update. Before I was ready to install Adobe Lightroom that I had it fully up to date, it took 42 minutes. That's grotesque.

That's absurd. That's an insult to everyone who likes computers, that you get a new computer and before you can use it, you have to spend 42 minutes doing updates on something that was already installed on it out of the box from the factory. That is just preposterous, and it's crazy that that's not even the worst thing. I also got a PC, um, because all these Linux machines, they come as PCs, right?

`1:54:35`

And they have Windows pre-installed. So I got one. This was just three weeks ago. Brand-new machine, Intel Panther Lake, the whole shebang. An hour and 35 minutes from unwrapping the thing until it's ready to use. How long did you take before you think you were in Omakub?

`1:54:55`

A minute. We can build computers like this. We have the technology. We've had the technology since like 1981 when the Commodore 64 first came out. The fact that we now have a computer that's a trillion times faster and you have to spend 42 minutes or an hour and a half setting it up before it's ready to use is so infuriating to me that it became a passion. And it's funny Just while we were having a little break here, I was talking to Ryan Hughes, my co-conspirator here. We now have, we think, a line where we can create these special turbo images that are pre-made for specific computers because it relies on some knowledge of the hardware, like the Dell XPS. We're gonna make a Dell XPS turbo image that can install in about 12 seconds. A full Linux system installed in about 12 seconds.

`1:55:45`

That obsession is what gives me this great satisfaction with using computers, that we do not accept things the way they are. And this is why this agent-accelerated reality that I now inhabit is so invigorating. Because I can look at these kinds of constraints and go, do you know what? Um, I could have stopped when we were at five minutes. That would already have been fast enough. This was the argument on X, right? Why do you keep going? Five minutes is fast enough. Okay, maybe for you, but for me, 12 seconds is a lot more fun. And I always try to think these first principles. Okay, in that machine, actually hit the Omarchy, key again, and then do speed. You'll see a list come up, and one of them is, like, disk speed.