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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#241

Post by arminiusreturns »

I would say it doesn't have to be like this. I have made a whole thing out of stripping complexity out of things, which includes favoring cli tools over gui counterparts, etc, and most of my daily stack is nice and fast and not suffering from this. Webpages with good adblocking and scriptblocking start to seem functional again, but are still the main sticking point since I am doing a whitelist approach (and sometimes forget to commit my rule changes).

If a program is written in electron it's an automatic "won't install" for example. The same for npm. If one can learn to be more discerning in their tooling they can avoid many of these pitfalls.

I would also say; go on a pid hunt sometime. Does that process really need to be running? No, like really?

  systemctl list-units --all --type=service

  systemctl disable $service.service

  systemctl mask $service.service

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#242

Post by 52-6F-62 »

ModernMech wrote: post #81
jakelazaroff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which? I can't remember the last time any of these happened to me. What "hardware compatibility issues" have you experienced lately?

Just yesterday I couldn't connect my laptop to a new classroom projector with a USB-C input. When I selected "Duplicate Display" it caused my whole system to hang unresponsive. Works fine in other rooms with HDMI to USB-C. I have no idea what is wrong. My new iPhone XS doesn't connect to my car's bluetooth, while the 4 year old phone I replaced does. My wife's iPhone 8 does. I'm stuck using an audio cable like it's 2…

That reminds me of a situation at work.

A new coworker couldn't connect to the internet when he had a an Apple Thunderbolt display connected to his ~2014-2015 MB Pro via thunderbolt. Mystifying. Even more mystifying was corporate IT going "oh yeah just don't use it".

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#243

Post by dhconnelly »

gravislizard wrote: post #217

As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at t…

I've been working on Google Maps for close to five years now. I somehow missed the previous postings of this thread, but a little hyperbole never hurt anyone :) Your larger point about the inability in our profession to take a step back and consider the overall situation is spot-on. The mindset I most commonly encounter among other engineers when discussing any kind of systemic problems in our practices is a kind of "it's $CURRENT_YEAR, of course things are the best they've ever been and we've solved all known problems. Also what is $KNOWN_SINCE_DECADES_TRIVIAL_SOLUTION_TO_MAJOR_PROBLEM?"

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#244

Post by dageshi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…

Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…

You can never really make a map for "exploring" because what people want to explore is domain specific. Do you want to explore mountains? Do you want to explore museums, do you want to explore beaches?

There is too much stuff in the world to present on a map without absolutely overwhelming people, in the same way that the internet is too vast to "explore". You can't explore the internet from google search you've got to have some vague starting point as a miniumum.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#245

Post by ehsankia »

RHSeeger wrote: post #206
113 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? It's at the end of their comment.

The page in question discusses latency in terminals, not how it compares to performance of previous generations. That being said, it also seems to have to pull in the 99th percentile behavior in order for the timings to be an issue, and even then it's not horrible; it doesn't get actually "bad" until you consider the worst performance (99.9th percentile) of the worst performer (st). It seems overly picky to me.

Also, almost all performance issues come due to features, which nostalgia about the past always ignores. Some specific tasks may have been tangentially faster, but you also had orders of magnitude less features available, and said feature make your overall workflow much faster. None of these people would actually give up on their zsh/autocomplete/fzf/custom git-integrated theme for a few ms better latency.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#246

Post by dmurray »

derefr wrote: post #121
ncallaway wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally…

I think you’re measuring use-cases by volume (i.e. Monthly Active Users) instead of by mass (i.e. number of man-hours spent engaged with the app’s UI by those users.) Certainly, a lot of people use Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions. This means that they interact with the actual UI and visible map tiles once , at the beginning of the trip; and then from there on are given timely voice directions every few minute…

> Or, someone could just come out with a wayfinding app for pedestrians that does its own map rendering. There’s already a Transit app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for transit-takers; why not a Walkthere app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for pedestrians? :)

This wouldn't really make me happy. It makes more sense to integrate the walking instructions into the Transit app and be good at giving directions for multimodal transport. I need to know if I should get off the bus here, and walk through the park, or wait till three stops later, which leaves me closer as the crow flies but further away overall. The car app doesn't need to work multimodally since it's not normal to drive somewhere, walk 10 minutes, then drive somewhere else.

Google maps is still the best general purpose multimodal transport app I've used, but it could be so much better. I'm in Austria right now and it doesn't know about the Austrian buses. There's an app (OEBB Scotty) from the Austrian rail operator which I assume everyone uses instead.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#247

Post by kokx »

ralusek wrote: post #168
GekkePrutser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really :) Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed . However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.

There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age...when spinners are almost exclusively used in web apps in order to denote that the web browser is yet to receive the necessary data over YOUR internet connection.

Tell that to my former boss. They wanted me to delay sending responses from the backend, because they liked showing off their custom spinner. The spinner would not be seen at all during normal operation, without the delay in sending responses.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#249

Post by chubot »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…

For a better comparison, I ran Windows XP in VirtualBox on a Macbook Air last year to interface with some old hardware.

I was surprised that it ran in something like 256 MB of RAM. And everything was super fast and responsive out of the box.

I consider OS X less janky than Windows or Linux these days, but Windows XP blew it out of the water.

Try it -- it's eye opening. The UI does basically 100% of what you can do on OS X, yet it's considerably more responsive on the same hardware, with the handicap of being virtualized, and having fewer resources.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#250

Post by fwsgonzo »

webmobdev wrote: post #154
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…

> Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry. Can you give us examples of the "good ones" for the "bad" examples he cited. > These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. No, he is saying that certain paradigms made computers fast in the past and…

The original Kinetix 3D Studio MAX was NOT as slow as the current AutoDesk products. It had a loading time, but I can live with that.

With the speed of the M.2 SSDs we have today and everything else I really wonder why it got like this.

Maybe it's the transition to protected mode that did all this? Now everything has to be sanitized and copied between address spaces. But then again, Win95 were also protected mode. I don't know... :)

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