just like the good old days!
but yeah, in 2023 this challenge that sometimes borders on survival-horror is actually, genuinely worth the tradeoff in a lot of cases, because the alternative is this strange fractal moving target of incompatibility, sabotage by API changes, and arbitrarily different hardware configurations. it's hard to think of a more damning condemnation of the state of our craft
In 1979, Microware released OS-9 for the 6809 processor, a fully real-time, multitasking operating system that ran on a sub-1mhz 8-bit processor with 64kb of RAM. A later revision for the Tandy Color Computer 3 gained an extra 64kb of ram to work with, so they followed up by adding a whole ass GUI for it.
In 2023, when OpenAI farts out the latest version of their stochastic parrot, they just just set fire to some more VC money so Nvidia will squeeze another million cores into a GPU the size of two fucking rackmount slots.
I'm not saying we all should "return to tradition" and start coding bare metal assembly or some bullshit like that, I just think sometimes about how we came to take Moore's Law for granted, and decided at some point that it was acceptable to just expect people to build all new hardware just to run our software.