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I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

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Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#3

Post by gmuslera »

The main thing I remember from an usability book by Jakob Nielsen is that web pages should fit in 50kb, including all elements. Managing to do this in only 2x that size today, considering that his book was from 1999, may be considered a merit.

To put this into another context, today there was a post about Slack's 404 page weighting 50Mb.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#4

Post by vincent-manis »

I don't do web stuff at all, but I really enjoyed this article. I am convinced that software engineers (not to mention others) have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our brave new world of 32GB memories and fibre-optics. By all means the generous hardware capabilities let us do amazing things, like have a video library, or run massive climate computations, but mostly those resources are piddled away in giant libraries that provide little or no actual functional value.

I don't really pine for the days of the PDP-8, when programmers had to make sure that almost every routine took fewer than 128 words, or the days of System/360, when you had to decide whether the fastest way to clear a register was to subtract it from itself or exclusive-or it with itself. We wasted a lot of time trying to get around stringent limitations of the technology just to do anything at all.

I just looked at the Activity Monitor on my Macbook. Emacs is using 115MB, Thunderbird is at 900MB, Chrome is at something like 2GB (I lost track of all the Renderer processes), and a Freecell game is using 164MB. Freecell, which ran just fine on Windows 95 in 8MB!

I'm quite happy with a video game taking a few gigabytes of memory, with all the art and sound assets it wants to keep loaded. But I really wonder whether we've lost something by not making more of an effort to use resources more frugally.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#5

Post by andrepd »

> As I often point out to teams I’m working with, the original 1993 release of DOOM weighed in at under 3MB, while today we routinely ship tens of megabytes of JavaScript just to render a login form. Perhaps we can rediscover the power of constraints, not because we have to, but because the results are better when we do.

Emphasis mine, and tying with how it opened with the story about the designer who believed accessibility and "good design" are at odds (I'm screaming inside).

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#7

Post by MaxBarraclough »

garbuhj wrote: post #2

Ironic that simplified accessibility view doesn't work on this page

Firefox reader mode works ok for me. Chromium tells me there was 2.5mB of downstream traffic to load the page, rising to 4.3 if I scroll to the Recommended from Medium spam at the bottom of the page. That would be appalling if the bar weren't so low.

I'm reminded of The Website Obesity Crisis, [0] where the author mentions reading an article about web bloat, then noticing that page was not exactly a shining example of lightweight design. He even calls out Medium specifically.

[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm , discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34466910

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#9

Post by TacticalCoder »

vincent-manis wrote: post #4

I don't do web stuff at all, but I really enjoyed this article. I am convinced that software engineers (not to mention others) have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our brave new world of 32GB memories and fibre-optics. By all means the generous hardware capabilities let us do amazing things, like have a video library, or run massive climate computations, but mostly those resources are piddled away in giant…

> But I really wonder whether we've lost something by not making more of an effort to use resources more frugally.

On the desktop we definitely lost responsiveness. Many webpages, even on the speediest, fatest, computer of them all are dog slow compared to what they should be.

Now some pages are fine but the amount of pigs out there is just plain insane.

I like my desktop to be lean and ultra low latency: I'll have tens of windows (including several browsers) and it's super snappy. Switching from one virtual workspace to another is too quick to see what's happening (it take milliseconds and I do it with a keyboard shortcut: reaching for the mouse is a waste of time).

I know what it means to have a system that feels like it's responding instantly as I do have such a system... Except when I browse the web!

And it's really only some (well, a lot of) sites: people who know what they're doing still come up with amazingly fast websites. But it's the turds: those shipping every package under the sun and calling thousands of micro-services, wasting all the memory available because they know jack shit about computer science, that make the Web a painful experience.

And although I use LLMs daily, I see a big overlap between those having the mindset required to produce such turds and those thinking LLMs are already perfectly fine today to replace devs, so I'm not exactly thrilled about the immediate future of the web.

P.S: before playing the apologists for such turd-sites, remember you're commenting on a very lean website. So there's that.

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