Gmaps is so far ahead of anything available in 1983 that a comparison is almost silly.
Except for actual, physical maps, with indices for finding locations, and all kinds of markings to denote things of interest (such as restaraunts, museums, etc.)
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
121–130 of 349 posts
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#122It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…
I've written many sites with React, Bootstrap, and a dozen or three other third party dependencies, but I've never run into a case of a button not responding when clicked or things taking a noticeably long time to load (assuming that the server processing or sheer size of the payload over the network isn't the cause). I think a lot of it boils down to "don't do work you don't have to." But there's nothing about a fra…
Great work on the sites you've made! Unfortunately, most of the time when I see a simple webpage not responding or lagging heavily, it's made with React/Bootstrap.
It's particularly tragic when the page is only text and images.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#123One way to improve this is to do like gmail and provide keyboard shortcuts in addition to the point and click interface. (It has to be explicitly enabled in settings, but it didn't have to be that way). Like the author is claiming, it takes very little time to get used to and you get more productive quickly. The only problem I've run into (also covered by the OP) is that input focus might be different than what you think and you end up quickly doing unintended things to your email. Luckily there's an undo function for that.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#124The argument about function keys resonates with me. I still use F5 (refresh) and F2 (rename) but can't remember when I last used any of the other keys. Instead of using F6 for a function in a programme I now have to use something like CTRL+Shift+K. Why? Why not utilise the keyboard properly?
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#125It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…
I've written many sites with React, Bootstrap, and a dozen or three other third party dependencies, but I've never run into a case of a button not responding when clicked or things taking a noticeably long time to load (assuming that the server processing or sheer size of the payload over the network isn't the cause). I think a lot of it boils down to "don't do work you don't have to." But there's nothing about a fra…
You probably weren't updating 50 different ad networks on every mouse event.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#126It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…
> I spent years of my life working on a CSS framework 100x smaller than Bootstrap Interesting! Can you share that?
http://mincss.com (and yeah, homepage needs some work, my friends say it sounds like too much of a corporate product and not a FOSS CSS framework)
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.
Does anyone know if you can do the same with iPhone?
Settings -> General -> Acessibility -> Reduce Motion
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M. Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)
Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?
Full Unicode support, including input methods for languages that can't be typed directly on a QWERTY keyboard, takes a lot more than 1MB. Seeing as most of the world's population doesn't speak English, this is a very important improvement.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M. Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)
Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?
250MB is around 100'000 pages of text. Or some 150 full HD images. Why such amounts of data needs to be in memory at all times to read/reply to emails, I have no idea.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a relief to do a bit of Go from time to time, render a complete html template in 40 ms (with almost 2 MB of JSON data) instead of spending forever figuring out the JS framework du jour to do the same thing, only with it feeling a lot more involved, heavyweight, and slow - even if said framework claims to be faster than all the other JS frameworks. I think I want to do back-end or terminal-based interfaces again.…
This has nothing to do with Go and a lot to do with choosing the right tool for the job. Maybe Go is the best tool for you in this job, but a given js framework can serve someone else just as well if it is in their expertise area. Don't confuse your expertise with language/ecosystem pros and cons.
This has nothing to do with choosing the right tool for the job, but with performance, which this discussion is about. Practically all JS frameworks, having multiple levels of (near-inscrutable) abstractions naturally degrade the performance and certainly contribute to the trend the submitted twitter thread is talking about.