I've been struggling with this topic a lot, I feel the slowness everyday and productivity loss of having slow computers, 30m for something that could take 10 times less... it's horrible.

It is true, but also funny to think back on how slow computers used to be. Even the run-of-the-mill cheap machines today are like a million times faster than supercomputers from the 70s and 80s. We’ve always had the issue that we have to wait for our computers, even though for desktop personal computers there has been a speedup of like seven or eight orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. It could be better, but that has always been true. The things we ask computers to do grows as fast as the hardware speeds up. Why?

So, in a way, slow computers is always a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we always wrote software to be as performant as possible, and if we only ran things that were within the capability of the machine, we’d never have to wait. But we don’t do that; good optimization takes a lot of developer time, and being willing to wait a few minutes nets me computations that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than what it can do in real time.

To be fair, things have improved on average. Wait times are reduced for most things. Not as fast as hardware has sped up, but it is getting better over time.