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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#331

Post by cocoablazing »

gilbetron wrote: post #288
1_2__4 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the whole article is about how some people do care your dismissive comment is as pointless as it is incorrect.

Sure, some small amount of people care, definitely. And there are options for them. And everyone would like it if things were faster, but they just don't care enough to put their money towards a fast, but less feature-filled, option. Plenty of UX research confirms what I have stated. Why does the average webpage take N seconds to load, with a standard deviation of D? Because that's the range most people are ok with i…

In reality, so many people have a problem with it that they are actively interfering with the code of the webpages to the point of endangering the business model of much of the web.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#332

Post by stuaxo »

marbletiles wrote: post #183
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

We've even managed to slow down things like Excel 97. I played with a 486 laptop recently, and was completely amazed at how fast things like Word felt (once they'd loaded off the ancient hard disk). The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various wi…

There were recently some benchmarks of USB keyboards and they all add quite a lot of latency, even the so called gaming keyboards.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#333

Post by dredmorbius »

digi_owl wrote: post #330
dredmorbius wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those are an option on Chrome/Android, and I don't think they apply on Firefox/Android (not sure about disabling JS). Firefox does offer uBlock, at least, which is a massive relief. I also run (on the router) a large, and after significant modularisation by me, flexible dnsmasq blocklist that addresses another large set of issues. On desktop (Linux, MacOS), I have and use: NoScript, uBlock, uMatrix, and St…

Could have sworn i have seen a version of Noscript that worked with Firefox on Android.

Checking: there are multiple javascript toggles, but not "Noscript" specifically AFAICT. "NJS" seems to be among the closest to that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=javascrip...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#334

Post by tluyben2 »

s73ver_ wrote: post #236
fusiongyro wrote: post #39

In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. I think optimizing for user experience is partly to blame for this. You don't want users to have a confusing experience the first time they use the application, and you want the application to look good and be inviting. But that may be at cross purposes with making applications that allow open-ended exploration. Exploration implies that…

I simply cannot agree with the take that making things easier to use "neuters" them. Enabling people to actually use these things makes them more powerful, not less. I think far too often, people get caught up with the false machismo of, "This is hard to use, yet I can use it, so I'm a badass and you're not."

But that depends on easier for whom; the issue is that is a system is very easy for beginners it will be crap as an expert and vice versa. This is the reason a lot of applications used to have a beginner/expert mode switch. When I use a mobile app, it is usually beginner only, so every time I have to go through the same steps and explanation wizards. I don't want that; most of these things, for experts, would be one form while for beginners they are 20+ pages. Literally.

Error messages are very generic and are passed immediately to support (more work, more time for an expert who probably would understand the real error).

Nothing wrong with that but it is not easier to use for me once I am an expert; it is harder and more annoying.

I would like expert mode in many apps.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#335

Post by digi_owl »

dredmorbius wrote: post #333
digi_owl wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have sworn i have seen a version of Noscript that worked with Firefox on Android.

Checking: there are multiple javascript toggles, but not "Noscript" specifically AFAICT. "NJS" seems to be among the closest to that. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?q=javascrip...

Ah, it never went beyond the alpha stage.

https://noscript.net/nsa/

Only reason i bumped into it was because i was toying with Tor for Android, and their fork(?) of Firefox had it bundled.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#336

Post by demosthenex »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22
glial wrote: post #2

Given the speed of modern computers, I'm fascinated by the fact that so many processes complete in human-scale time (seconds-minutes), rather than milliseconds or years+, depending on problem complexity. If times for compute tasks have some power law distribution (a big if...), I'd expect a very small part of that distribution to overlap with the 'seconds' range. Then again, computers do so many things in the millise…

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.…

I'd love to see more terminal interfaces. I've been looking for a modern TUI library for a while.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#337

Post by zeveb »

acdha wrote: post #164
jkoll wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250 megabytes for a simple email client.

Versus, say, 1GB for Outlook and variable amounts for Mail.app depending on usage. It's not 1993 — these days email includes a full text search engine, rendering complex content, etc. Since even a phone comes with considerably more than 250MB of RAM, if you don't want to use the resources you paid for to make things faster or better, wouldn't that be an argument for using pine or mutt in a terminal window?

> if you don't want to use the resources you paid for to make things faster or better, wouldn't that be an argument for using pine or mutt in a terminal window?

I rather think that pine, mutt or gnus in a terminal window (or even X) would be faster and better than a web client.

I read my mail in emacs using notmuch these days, and the full text search engine is a couple orders of magnitude faster than Google's Inbox; the complex content rendering is faster than Firefox or Chrome; everything is better and nothing is worse.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#338

Post by zeveb »

sliverstorm wrote: post #301
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Try setting just "Animator duration scale" to 0.5x while leaving the others off. This will fix the camera problem, as well as makes things like closing apps in the "recent" list less janky, and you still get the rest of the benefit.

It's a real pity that there isn't a .25x setting, or even a .125 setting; the .5x setting feels nice, but still a bit slow-ish. I understand that the intent here is to simulate slow phones (try using the phone with the 10x setting — it's horrid!), but it'd be nice to simulate a fast phone instead!

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#339

Post by zeveb »

yason wrote: post #277
tomc1985 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think animations, as most program them, slow down the UI exactly as you say. But when their timing is tight, and the whole thing happens in under, say, half a second, you get the benefits of that context association and it still feels really cool and high-tech. People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms)

People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms) They could start with 500ms and subtract 100ms from each UI activity after each time it is used until the delay is 0ms. The user would learn the interactions on the screen first and then not be bothered by the animations later. As a bonus the user might actually thing the program "speeded up after a 'break-in' period".

Now that's an awesome idea! It'd be fine to actually just store that setting in memory, and reset with every restart: I wouldn't mind a half-second delay on my first window zoom after restart if I knew that it'd drop down to zero four zooms later.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#340

Post by sliverstorm »

zeveb wrote: post #338
sliverstorm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try setting just "Animator duration scale" to 0.5x while leaving the others off. This will fix the camera problem, as well as makes things like closing apps in the "recent" list less janky, and you still get the rest of the benefit.

It's a real pity that there isn't a .25x setting, or even a .125 setting; the .5x setting feels nice, but still a bit slow-ish. I understand that the intent here is to simulate slow phones (try using the phone with the 10x setting — it's horrid!), but it'd be nice to simulate a fast phone instead!

Even on the 0.5x setting things like the refresh pinwheel spin a little too fast, so 0.25x might be a bit much. It just controls too many different animations.
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