When I was young, I learned, and was taught, how to make the computer to work efficiently and correctly, in my computer science degree.
Now it is the opposite. Do brute-force search using giant farms of computers, using a huge amount of energy and water, and get results that are not guaranteed to be correct any more.
And I was discussing with a colleague this morning that my 2001 laptop ran faster than my current top-range computer for everyday tasks. Of course, it had a much worse CPU and much less ram. And of course the software for things we still do *now* was much faster *then*.
I still have that laptop from that time running Ubuntu 4.10 from 2004 in my personal museum of computers. You would be amazed how responsive the system is for everything we do every day with a computer. I recently tested it with my son, because he was curious to see how things were then.
So we are using more powerful hardware for getting a poorer experience.
The new computers are much better for some things, such as running Agda. But, for everything else I happened to do, they were just as fast, because people programmed them in a more efficient way (they had to - there was no other way).
