201–210 of 504 posts
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Hmmm. Let's think about this.
At least the "small" Window 10 still does have a text editor. The larger Android don't even has an text editor.
Excerpt: "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…
So what is in these huge downloads? Layers upon layers of virtual machines?
> 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 have to be careful about what I describe, but I don't think people care about speed or performance at all when it comes to tech, and it makes me sad. In fact, there are so many occasions where the optimisation is so good that the end user doesn't believe that anything happened. So you have to deliberately introduce delay because a computer has to feel like it thinks the same way you do. At my current place of emplo…
I see this argument coming up a lot, but this can be solved by better UX. Making things slow on purpose is just designers/developers being lazy.
Btw users feeling uneasy when something is "too fast" is an indictment of everything else being too damn slow. :D
Energy (or more accurately power) is a scarce resource. If it's not being spent to keep the organization or individual going, then it could be argued that the energy is wasted. As it requires functioning organizations to acquire more energy and so on. All systems - biological, physical, meta-physical are built on layers that once deep enough are pretty well cemented in. Hindsight is 20/20 and though we know if the fo…
Even quite underpowered phones can boot in ~1-2 seconds if optimized for that. Not everything in the phone will startup in that amount of time (modem, wifi), but it's possible to start to Linux userspace and display fully interactive UI in that amount of time. Even my e-book reader Linux port boots to UI in ~2s. It really is just bloat and lack of care.
He 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…
Heh, software in general, absolutely! But I think the "Web 2.0" is the worst offender: https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-08-11-web-shit-point-oh
One thing nobody seems to mention is the environmental cost of inefficient software. All those wasted CPU cycles consume electricity. A single laptop or phone on it's own is insignificant, but there are billions of them. Combine that with the energy wasted shovelling unnecessary crap around the internet, and it adds up to a big CO2 problem that nobody talks about.
But the vast majority of software is one-off stuff. It makes no sense to optimize it for performance instead of features, development time, correctness, ease of use, etc.