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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#231

Post by mixermachine »

commandlinefan wrote: post #56
luckylion wrote: post #2

> I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. I know something we could do, at least for websites. Google could finally make good on their announcement and make CWV actually have a measurable impact on rankings. I work for affiliates/SEO people. When CWV was announced, suddenly they cared about performance. Then the deadline came and went and Google decided not to make it really count after all, and they stopped cari…

> at least for websites We could start by stopping using these stupid pointless frameworks that provide little functionality but reams of overhead.

Angular, React and many other frameworks can be fast. If you add ads, many DOM updates and to large JSONs you can grinde every site to a halt.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#232

Post by pixl97 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #206
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #45

"apex predator of grug is complexity complexity bad say again: complexity very bad you say now: complexity very, very bad" https://grugbrain.dev/ No really -- I would bet that the single greatest contribution comes from the massive growth in complexity, in all relevant areas, over the last 20+ years.

Some of the complexity is, unfortunately, introduced by grugs, because complexity smarter than grug and sometimes pretend is simple. Couple months back, I read an article that made a bold claim: that the old wisdom saying most software is IO-bound stopped being true some time ago; instead, most software nowadays is CPU-bound, typically on parsing JSON. JSON is something that may seem simple to grug, particularly a we…

What are you suggesting instead? A protocol change like protobuf for example? Or an architecture change (send less data in the first place)?

Just wondering what a more complex but better solution would look like in this example.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#233

Post by pixl97 »

runevault wrote: post #102
ajmurmann wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's unfair to blame the developers. Almost every developer I know loves working on performance stories. It's one of the few times we get to use our deeper technical and algorithmic skills and get a clear metric to optimize for. However, businesses are reluctant to prioritize that work and get impatient when they don't see new "features". I worked on a project where PMs would constantly complain to me about a par…

I dunno, I run into a lot of devs on reddit/here/etc that argue "who cares about performance just spin up more containers! I just wanna write {insert slow interpreted language here}."

I think you're reading that the incorrect way, though it's hard to say. This is my take on it

Dev: I get paid for writing features. I can write new features faster in {insert slow interpreted language here}.

Also if the company is of any size, whatever they write has to fit in the rest of their CI/CD stack and pass whatever kind of code review the company does or doesn't implement. So yea it's easy to say devs suck (and they do), but without looking at the entire process they are involved in it can be very hard to qualify why they suck and where the suckage comes from.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#234

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pixl97 wrote: post #219
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it isn't providing orders of magnitude more utility in exchange. Compare what the latest greatest word processor does vs the equivalent from the 90s to what a computer game today does vs the equivelent from the 90s. The latter is what orders of magnitude of improvement looks like.

See this is a particular problem.... You don't use 100% of the features of your software, hell, you might not even use 50% of the features. The problem here is one of measuring YOUR net utility of the gross utility realized by all users. Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast. Of course now you have countless different versions…

> Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast

If I'm not using it, why is it slowing the application down? I don't buy this reasoning. Binaries are not big in modern terms and they don't go slower for including code that never runs.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#235

Post by pixl97 »

JohnFen wrote: post #178
trollied wrote: post #5

I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones. Front-end wise, what with the trend of using frameworks (react/vue/etc) & a billion lines of javascript downloaded from npm, it'd probably be too much of a task to even begin profiling.

> I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones My experience is the opposite of this. It's usually the self-taught devs that care a lot about performance, and the formally educated ones who are willing to trade it away.

I'd almost split it out slightly differently, but I work indirectly with a lot of peoples code problems and this is just my own observations.

People that are formally educated tend to end up in large organizations based because HR like the idea of college degrees. Large organizations are process oriented. Somewhere above the dev the specification of the application is created. The dev typically does not get to choose their tools, instead particular versions of the tools are provided, the versions of the libraries they need to target and so forth. Also after the code is written it needs to pass any number of tools and gates and QA systems and UAT systems before it's ever used in production. In general the last thing the dev is thinking of is 'is this fast' and instead they are thinking "I have 400 things on my to do and I hope this doesn't get bounced back to me"

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#236

Post by agentultra »

quanticle wrote: post #228
agentultra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing so…

Another reason that people often overlook is security. Even if each individual software product has a good security model, differences in the way they interact can lead to security vulnerabilities and opportunities for attackers to move laterally through a network. In the case above, it may be that IT knows how to integrate SAP with their Active Directory system in a manner that ensures that users have access to the…

Security is important. What makes SAP secure? I personally found errors in customer systems. And at the time even Microsoft couldn’t implement OAuth2 correctly with regards to the specifications… which is no surprise given how often it had to be amended.

A good deal of “security,” even in the enterprise, is a lot of theatre and show boating. Write a formal specification and throw it at a model checker and you’ll probably start finding holes in most software stacks. But hardly any software developers do that let alone IT managers.

The later generation of the stuff I was working on at that company had to also be certified under certain important regulations. The system had to be able to be auditable in the sense that application logs couldn’t be repudiated in court and users couldn’t tamper with data. That was some pretty serious work.

But yeah.. there’s a lot of “lol security” out there and as an IT person trying to manage ISV solutions it can be a huge pain trying to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But just buying MS or SAP and thinking you’re done with security is also as bad. Don’t overlook security.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#237

Post by astrange »

lkbm wrote: post #222
astrange wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not self-employed there's like a 0% chance you're getting your taxes wrong by holding TurboTax wrong. If you're FAANG there is some chance you're overpaying by not doing the RSU cost basis properly.

I imported Coinbase Pro transactions and they all got counted as short-term gains because they'd been moved from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro within the past year, despite having been purchased several years prior. Now, you can definitely make the case that this is mostly Coinbase's fault for not sending over the actual purchase date, but TurboTax charged me a bunch of money to do that import, so I feel like they should…

But that's an example of you overpaying - no need for audit insurance if you're making mistakes in their favor.

I don't think it does wash sales across different brokers properly though, but neither does anyone else.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#238

Post by pixl97 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #234
pixl97 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See this is a particular problem.... You don't use 100% of the features of your software, hell, you might not even use 50% of the features. The problem here is one of measuring YOUR net utility of the gross utility realized by all users. Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast. Of course now you have countless different versions…

> Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast If I'm not using it, why is it slowing the application down? I don't buy this reasoning. Binaries are not big in modern terms and they don't go slower for including code that never runs.

If by never runs, you mean things like automatic grammar and spell checking, which way back when were things you'd click a menu to run, and now are constantly running reassessing your lifes worth every time you click a new key. There tend to be any number of 'small' things like this that add up over time and suddenly we're running slow. It also doesn't help many applications followed the Apple school of thought and remove any configuration options so you're unable to disable much of this.

This is ignoring the plethora of bad decisions in the past we're paying for now. Your word processor is likely running in a virtualized environment in your operating system because 30 years ago running full blowin programming applications with no security in your document was a good idea. Then you'll have another layer or two of anti-virus on top of it.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#239

Post by TeMPOraL »

pixl97 wrote: post #223
TeMPOraL wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. Sync was done in many ways, thanks to the app using actual files to store information. It wasn't a concern of the app itself - nor it should be. Off-line mode was the default. Public API wasn't needed. Collaborative projects i…

>WinAMP reigns supreme. I mean, kinda but not really. Back in the day a large number of us likely had huge (exceptionally legally questionable) MP3 libraries that we managed. And while, yea having 100GB of music with just about everything was nice, it is also a major pain in the ass. So much so that Winamp pretty much died after streaming (long with legal issues in MP3s) took over the market. Now, if the music market…

> So it appears we may be asking the wrong questions. Not why apps are getting slower, but why it seems the market has fewer competing apps at all levels.

This is exactly the phenomenon I recently started describing on HN with the phrase "software is resisting commoditization". It's rare these days to see an app you could use for a while and then replace with an equivalent alternative.

I think SaaS is a big driver of this - by keeping important functionality (and user data) server-side, the user ends up being locked into your software. No need to rely on IP protections - there's just no way for them to pirate the bits running on your infrastructure. And even if someone reverse-engineered your APIs and built a better frontend, the users of that alternative would still be tied to your backend, and thus your service.

This means there's no business in making alternative frontends. Instead, it's better to start your own SaaS and go after a different market slice. Even seemingly equivalent products quickly drift apart, each optimizing strongly for slightly different audience. It's easier than to fight another company over their users directly.

A tailored set of features is a good "unique value proposition" for a while, but it may be too easy for someone to eventually replicate. Taking user data hostage is better, but users don't like it very much. The best UVPs seem to have nothing to do with software.

Spotify is a stellar example here: the real value they own isn't software or infrastructure, it's all the relationships and contracts they've established in the music industry. This moat is impervious to nearly all competition - unless you're insider on the music label side, or plugged into Softbank's infinite money hose, you're not going to replicate it. Spotify, in turn, doesn't have to give a shit about its music player anymore.

How to fix this? I'm not sure if it can be. We'd need to destroy the ability for businesses to prop their software with some unique propositions that can't be easily copied by competitors. I can't see it happening without a total overhaul of intellectual property and computer crime laws. Things like Data Portability section of GDPR help a little, but ultimately there's just too many ways to create those tiny moats that make applications non-substitutable.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#240

Post by bob1029 »

gowld wrote: post #224
9erdelta wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I stopped using TurboTax (after using it for 8 years) for 2 reasons. I was never confident that my tax situation was being handled correctly. The UI is noisy, the explanations don't explain. So I would buy audit insurance just in case. The second reason, it was slow and navigating between pages and sections was annoying. So now I pay a real person to do my taxes. It takes a quarter of the time, costs abo…

Audit insurance is a scam. If you get audited, you just update your return (unless IRS already did that for you) and pay (or get credit for) the correction. IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly. What do you think the "real person" does? They put your data into TurboTax or equivalent.

> IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly.

A lot of people would live much easier lives if they believed this.

You can make a really half-assed filing and all they will ever do is send you an invoice for the difference.

In fact, you could simply not file your taxes ever and the IRS will eventually inform you of your actual tax burden, at which point you should probably pay accordingly. I've never gone beyond this point.

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