Despite faster computers every year, my computers don't seem to run any faster, either
Software wastes any gains we get from hardware. See Jonathan Blow's talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM
Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
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Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#22I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents.
Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the clicking for us, and summarize the results in a much simpler UI designed to actually be fast and useful, vs. designed to optimize the business metrics of some company as interpreted by a gaggle of product managers.
This isn't unprecedented. Plaid screen scrapes terrible bank websites and turns them into APIs, though without AI. Google Duplex uses AI to turn restaurant phone numbers into an API for making reservations. DeepMind's Sparrow[1], just announced today, answers factual questions posed in plain English by performing Google searches and summarizing the results. But it's going to be a revolution when it becomes much more general and able to take actions rather than just summarize information. It isn't far off! https://adept.ai is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about, and I expect there are a lot more people working on similar things that are still in stealth mode.
[1] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-agents
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#23I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents. Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we'll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the c…
Your point about more people working on similar projects in stealth mode is likely an underappreciated notion. And thank you for introducing me to Adept; looking forward to keeping my eyes on that company's progress.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#24Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#25basically Jevons' paradox
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#26This would seem to be Myhrvold's first law in action.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#27Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#28This website loads an exceptional amount of data for what it is, at least for me. On my browser it makes calls to a site called streamlitapp.com every 100 ms. It appears to be using about 100MB of bandwidth every 10 seconds from what I can see
100MB is a LOT. Do you perhaps mean 100KB?
Streamlit is the framework I used to build the app at the bottom of the article with. It does unfortunately load a decent amount of JS. However it should be non-blocking, which means it won't interfere with how quickly you can see or use the page.
It pings back to Streamlit to keep your session state alive as it's running a whole Python interpreter on the backend for each session.
The speed index for this page hovers between 1-2 seconds when I test it.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#29We can wish that crappy websites didn’t get more bloated every year, but as long as they still load fast enough most people don’t know the difference or care. Everything has an opportunity cost, so once things are good enough the resources that could be spent optimizing will be spent elsewhere instead, and bloat that can be added to solve other business goals will be added. It’s understandable to get frustrated by th…
That would only be true if every one of your customers had fast, loss free, reliable internet 100% of the time they want to access a website.
Even in a modern city this is rarely the case.
So I'm afraid the real answer is that webdev is just not mature yet.
Re: Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
#30Not just load time, but "time to read content" has exploded. Once the webapp has downloaded and it can start doing REST like requests for the actual content, it also needs to start loading pop-ups and the "continue reading"-button, that can hide the content after it is loaded.
So once all that is done, the user needs to click away cookie consent banner, newsletter sign-up and the continue reading button. And only now can we stop the clock on "time to read content".
This is a big reason why I read comments first. I click and get straight to content.
EDIT: I just realized that the "time to ..."-moniker works really bad in my phrasing here. Maybe "time to start reading" would have been better.