The article is well written and connects multiple topics: line of code and care work to the software, computer architecture and speed, its industry and more.

Debian 12, for comparison, is 1,341,564,204 lines of code. For comparison, Google Chrome is about 40 million lines, which is in the same ballpark as the Linux kernel these days. No one, even a team, can read these entirely.

Computers aren't much faster now than they were a decade ago, and they will probably never again return to the rate of performance improvement they had for 60 years up to the mid-noughties.

The thing is, that doesn't scale very well. On the desktop we have four-core machines and now we're moving to eight-plus cores, but a single person can't use that very helpfully, so instead, we're getting computers with a mixture of high-performance but hot, power-hungry cores, and lower-performance, cooler, but more electrically-efficient cores.

A limit to multiple cores is the Amdahl's law: even if a program can be made 95 per cent parallel, the maximum speedup you can get is about 20 times, no matter how many processor cores you throw at it.