Obsessing about speed

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.

`1:56:37`

Disk speed. Do do that one, and then run it. So this is testing the performance of the built-in NVMe drive, and what are you getting?

`1:56:47`

So seven gigabytes a second. That's how fast that drive is. Why can we not install a Linux distribution in one second? The Omarchy distribution is 5.8 gigabytes. If we can run at seven gig... Now, of course, you can't actually do that because the USB key is a lot slower than that, but you should be able to maximize the underlying physics and protocols that we're dealing with, and that's your goal. We gotta get all the way back down to that.