Too bad only US has starlink active. Other nations, like Australia, has nothing...
Starlink is available in something like 40 countries, including Australia.
Unless you're specifically talking about bases in Antarctica?
Engineering for Slow Internet
151–160 of 406 posts
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, getting 6.4KB of data (just tested on my blog) or 60KB of data (a git.sr.ht repository with a README.md and a PNG) is way better than getting 20MB of frameworks in the first place.
Also wonder how many savings are still possible with a more efficient HTML/CSS/JS binary representation. Text is low tech and all but it still hurts to waste so many octets for such a relatively low amount of possible symbols. Applies to all formal languages actually. 2^(8x20x10^6) ~= 2x10^48164799 is such a ridiculously large space...
Check this proposal out: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-binary-ast
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an incredibly naive and dismissive thing to say.
It isn't naive, and isn't dismissive. The problem is the CCP. The only fix is for the people to rise up against them. This doesn't even have to be violent. Most of the former Soviet Block governments fell without any bloodshed. What's the alternative? Wait for Xi to "make his mark on history" in the same way that Putin is doing in Ukraine because it's "naive and dismissive" to even talk about unseating him?
By 2017 Xi Jinping already had six failed assassination attempts against him, which prompted him to perform a large-scale purge within the ranks of the CCP.
If it was all that easy, it would have been done a long time ago.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#154I travel a lot. Slow internet is pretty common. Also, right now my mobile data ran out and I'm capped at 8 kbps. Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load. The worst problem is that most UIs fail to account for slow requests. Buttons feel broken. Things that really shouldn't need megabytes of data to load still take minutes to…
>Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load.
Things aren't always that simple.
I'm in the UK, and my ping time to news.ycombinator.com is 147ms - presumably because it's not using a CDN and is hosted in the USA.
cloud.google.com on the other hand has an 8ms ping time.
So yes, Hacker News is a simple, low-JS page - but there can be other factors that make it feel slow for users in some places. This is despite me being in a privileged situation, having an XGS-PON fibre connection providing symmetric 8Gbps speeds.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#155I travel a lot. Slow internet is pretty common. Also, right now my mobile data ran out and I'm capped at 8 kbps. Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load. The worst problem is that most UIs fail to account for slow requests. Buttons feel broken. Things that really shouldn't need megabytes of data to load still take minutes to…
One additional benefit of static sites, which I learned the hard way, is that you're mostly immune to attacks.
I have a domain that's currently marked as "dangerous" because I didn't use the latest version of Wordpress.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite Berlin's general lack of parity with modern technology, I've never actually had a problem with internet access across the ubahn network in the past decade. I noticed that certain carriers used to have very different availability when travelling and so switched to a better one, but I was always surprised at being able to handle mobile data whilst underground.
Really? I don't even get consistent internet on the Ringbahn. There are lots of holes in the coverage in Berlin. Which provider are you with? Vodafone is still dead in large parts of the U-Bahn, but I know that one of them works much better.
Wow! I was in Berlin last week and kept losing connection... like all the time. I use 3 with a Swedish plan. In Sweden, it literally never drops, not on trains, not on metro, not on faraway mountains... it works everywhere.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, getting 6.4KB of data (just tested on my blog) or 60KB of data (a git.sr.ht repository with a README.md and a PNG) is way better than getting 20MB of frameworks in the first place.
Also wonder how many savings are still possible with a more efficient HTML/CSS/JS binary representation. Text is low tech and all but it still hurts to waste so many octets for such a relatively low amount of possible symbols. Applies to all formal languages actually. 2^(8x20x10^6) ~= 2x10^48164799 is such a ridiculously large space...
The generalisation of this concept is what I like call the "kilobyte" rule.
A typical web page of text on a screen is about a kilobyte. Sure, you can pack more in with fine print, and obviously additional data is required to represent the styling, but the actual text is about 1 kb.
If you've sent 20 MB, then that is 20,000x more data than what was displayed on the screen.
Worse still, an uncompressed 4K still image is only 23.7 megabytes. At some point you might be better off doing "server side rendering" with a GPU instead of sending more JavaScript!
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
By far the lightest weight JS framework isn't React, it's no javascript at all . I regularly talk to developers who aren't even aware that this is an option.
If you're behind an overloaded geosynchronous satellite then no JS at all just moves the pain around. At least once it's loaded a JS-heavy app will respond to most mouse clicks and scrolls quickly. If there's no JS then every single click will go back to the server and reload the entire page, even if all that's needed is to open a small popup or reload a single word of text.
Here’s something that’s not true: in js, the first link you click navigates you. In the browser, clicking a second link cancels the first one and navigates to the second one.
GitHub annoys the fuck out of me with this.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#159Try using the internet on an "exchange only line". Technically it's broadband but its speeds are still dialup tier. I know several streets in my city that still have these connections.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're behind an overloaded geosynchronous satellite then no JS at all just moves the pain around. At least once it's loaded a JS-heavy app will respond to most mouse clicks and scrolls quickly. If there's no JS then every single click will go back to the server and reload the entire page, even if all that's needed is to open a small popup or reload a single word of text.
This makes perfect sense in theory and yet it's the opposite of my experience in practice. I don't know how, but SPA websites are pretty much always much more laggy than just plain HTML, even if there are a lot of page loads.
Having written a fair amount of SPA and similar I can confirm that it is actually possible to just write some JavaScript that does fairly complicated jobs without the whole thing ballooning into the MB space. I should say that I could write a fairly feature-rich chat-app in say 500 kB of JS, then minified and compressed it would be more like 50 kB on the wire.
How my "colleagues" manage to get to 20 MB is a bit of mystery.