311–320 of 406 posts
This problem will return with a vengeance once humans occupy the Moon and Mars.
PSA: Please optimize your website, web apps for caching and efficiency, and offer slow/graceful fallback versions instead of 8K fullscreen video as your homepage for all users.
I 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…
I used to work on the team that served those docs. Due to some unfortunate technical decisions made in the name of making docs dynamic/interactive they are almost entirely uncached. Basically every request you send hits an AppEngine app which runs Python code to send you back the HTML.
So even though it looks like it should be fast, it’s not.
Having a lot of experience commuting on underground public transport (intermittent, congested), and living/working in Australia (remote), I can safely say that most services are terrible for people without "ideal" network conditions. On the London Underground it's particularly noticeable that most apps are terrible at handling network that comes and goes every ~2 minutes (between stops), and which takes ~15s to conne…
It's not only the services them self. I have a very slow mobile connection, and one thing that bothered me immensly is downloading images in the browser: How is it, than when I go to a .jpg url to view an image in the browser it takes way longer and sometimes times out, than hopping over to termux and running wget. I had this problem with both firefox and chrome based browsers. Note that even the wget download usuall…
With wget it sends you the source you actually requested and doesn't try to get clever (stupid). Google likes WebP so that means everyone needs to join the WebP cargo cult even if it means transcoding a lossy format to another lossy format.
hyperwave is great for slow connections - in my testing, even a 2G throttled connection is still usable with load times in the 5s range.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s serious presumably because Starlink coverage includes the poles now. 7 months ago was around the time they did a demo with the McMurdo base IIRC.
McMurdo has starlink. South Pole doesn't, but not due to technical reasons from starlink's side. From what I understand when they tested at Pole they noticed interference with some of the science experiments, its possible they will engineer around that at some point but for now starlink is a low priority compared to ensuring the science goes on. I forget the exact distance, but its something like 5 miles from pole th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack additionally decides to hard-reload itself, seemingly without reason. I work on the road (from a train / parking lot / etc) for five or six hours per week. My T-Mobile plan is grandfathered in, so I can't "upgrade" to a plan that allows full-speed tethering without considerably impacting my monthly bill. Realistically, I hit around 1.5Mbps down. When Slack reloads itself, I have to stop _everything else_ that I…
I feel your pain - one minute you're reading some messages or a note and the next you're locked out of slack with faded screens and infinite spinnies. Apparently we must be very niche amongst their user base because these kinds of fixes hasn't made it onto their roadmap in years
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I feel like some devs need to time-travel back to 2005 or something and develop for that era in order to learn how to build things nimbly." No need to invent time travel, just let them have a working retreat somewhere with only bad mobile connection for a few days.
Amen to this. And give them a mobile cell plan with 1GB of data per month. I've seen some web sites with 250MB payloads on the home page due to ads and pre-loading videos. I work with parolees who get free government cell phones and then burn through the 3GB/mo of data within three days. Then they can't apply for jobs, get bus times, rent a bike, top up their subway card, get directions.
Another thing I think people should think about is scenarios with intermittent connectivity where there is literally no internet for periods ranging from minutes to days.
Sadly in both these regards I believe we're utterly screwed.
Even the Offline First and Local First movements who you'd think would handle these issues in at least a semi-intelligent manner don't actually practice what they preach.
Look at Automerge or frankly the vast majority of the other projects that came out of those movements. Logically you'd think they have offline documentation that allows people to study them in a Local First fashion. Sadly that's not the case. The hypocrisy is truly a marvel to behold. You'd think that if they can get hard stuff like CRDTs right they'd get simple stuff right like actually providing offline / local first docs in a trivial to obtain way. Again sadly not.
The following two links are yet another example of a similar kind of hypocrisy: https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1781840288300097896 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/1052#issuecommen...
Again at this point the jokes are frankly writing themselves. Like bro make it possible for people to follow your advice.
Also if you directly state or indirectly insinuate that your tool is ANY/ALL OF Local First, or Open Source, or Free As In Freedom you better have offline docs.
If you don't have offline docs your users and collaborators don't have Freedom 1. If you can't exercise Freedom 1 you are severely hampered in your ability to exercise Freedoms 0, 2, or 3 for any nontrivial FOSS system.
The problem has gotten so bad the I started the Freedom Respecting Technology movement which I'm gonna plug here: https://makesourcenotcode.github.io/freedom_respecting_techn...