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Software Disenchantment (2018)
181–190 of 504 posts
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#182> Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. ... Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. > I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos, but not scroll web pages? How is that ok? IMO the comparison should be buildings fine-tuned libraries (i.e. video decoding algorithms), modern applications citi…
If we're talking cities, then I don't see how "Any system which has plenty of resources has to become inefficient" follows.
The problem of modern urban design is that of unrestricted freedom for developers. They build mostly whatever the like, however they like, the city be damned as long as they make a profit off their construction. What's lacking here is care - personal care about the city, and centralized care in form of a city that can tell them they can either submit to the constraints of a more holistic planning, or take their business elsewhere.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#183Excerpt: "An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone? Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. B…
My favorite: "What's in there, HD movies?"
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#184> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…
I respectfully disagree -- something that is 10 times more efficient costs 10 times less energy (theoretically). When the end user suffers a server outage due to load, when they run out of battery ten times quicker, all of these things matter. When you have to pay for ten servers to run your product instead of one, this cost gets passed on to the end user. I was forced to use a monitor at 30 fps for a few days due to…
Another problem is that the inefficiency of multiple products tends to compound.
- Opening multiple tabs in a browser will kill your battery, and it's not the fault of a single page, but of all of them. Developers tend to blame the end user for opening too many tabs.
- Running a single Electron app is fast enough in a newer machine but if you need multiple instances or multiple apps you're fucked.
- Some of my teammates can't use their laptops without the charger because they have to run 20+ docker containers just to have our main website load. The machines are also noisy because the fan is always on.
- Having complex build pipelines that take minutes or hours to run is something that slows dow developers, which are expensive. It's not the fault of a single software (except maybe of the chosen programming language), but of multiple inefficient libraries and packages.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I respectfully disagree -- something that is 10 times more efficient costs 10 times less energy (theoretically). When the end user suffers a server outage due to load, when they run out of battery ten times quicker, all of these things matter. When you have to pay for ten servers to run your product instead of one, this cost gets passed on to the end user. I was forced to use a monitor at 30 fps for a few days due to…
Yes, but it's not just relative quantities that matter, absolute values matter too, just as the post you replied to was saying. Optimizing for microseconds when bad UI steals seconds is being penny-wise and pound foolish. Business might not understand tech but they do generally understand how it ends up on the balance sheet.
But the balance sheets encompass more than delivering value to end-users; business can and do trade off that value for some money elsewhere (see e.g. pretty much everything that has anything to do with ads).
Note also the potential deadlock here. Optimizing core calculations at μs level is bad because UI is slow, but optimizing UI to have μs responsiveness is bad, because core calculations are slow. Or the database is slow. This way, every part of the program can use every other part of the program as a justification to not do the necessary work. Reverse tragedy of the commons perhaps?
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#186He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…
He hints at Electron in the end, but I think the real blame lies on React which has become standard in the past five years. Nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on in their react projects . I work with incredibly bright people and not a single one can explain accurately what happens when you press a button. On the way to solving UI consistency it actually made it impossible for anyone to reason about what’s happe…
I think my favourite fact(oid) to point out here would be that the React model is essentially the same thing as the good ol' Windows GUI model. The good ol' 1980s Windows, though perhaps slightly more convenient for developers. See [0].
I think it's good to keep that in mind as a reference point.
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Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#187This article really resonates with me. But my biggest complaint is everything is _so_ buggy! I won't name any names, but I find many major pieces of software from large, well known companies are just riddled with bugs. I also feel like you almost need to be a programmer to think of workarounds "hmm, ok, so clearly it's in a bad state. If I had coded this, what boundaries would likely cause a complete refresh?" My wif…
I'll gladly name names.
Apple have totally forgotten how to test and assure software against what appear to be even stupid bugs. macOS Catalina has been fraught with issues ranging from the minor to the ridiculous. Clearly nobody even bothered to test whether the Touch Bar "Spaces" mode on the MacBook Pro 16" actually works properly before shipping the thing. Software updates sometimes just stop downloading midway through, the Mail.app just appears over the top of whatever I'm doing seemingly at random and Music.app frequently likes to forget that I'm associated with an iTunes account.
Microsoft are really no better - Windows 10 continues to be slow on modest hardware and obvious and ridiculous bugs continue to persist through feature releases, e.g. the search bar often can't find things that are in the Start menu!
My question is who is testing this stuff?
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found OSMAnd~ on F-Droid to be a good offline-only alternative, but it certainly has much worse efficiency problems than GMaps.
Do you mean computationally? Because I don't think that's a fair comparison. If you mean UX, then fair enough.
I mean UX. Also though I don't think there's a good excuse for OSMAnd~ to be so computationally intensive.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#189> How is that ok? Probably because a browser like FF has the goal to load and display arbitrary dynamic content in realtime like a reddit infinite scroll with various 4k videos and ad bullshit, whereas the game has the goal to render a known, tested number of pre-downloaded assets in realtime. Also on shitty pages the goal is different-- load a bunch of arbitrary adware programs and content that the user doesn't want…
Browsers are fine. It's the websites that are slow.
It's not the fault of Firefox that Reddit's new UI is pathetically slow. It's the Reddit's implementation of their UI itself which is total garbage.
And given that people do write fast, complex, real-time games in JavaScript for the browser, gamedev absolutely becomes a valid reference point for the possible performance of any individual page.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#190Excerpt: "An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone? Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. B…
My favorite was "Google’s keyboard app routinely eats 150 MB. Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95? "