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Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

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Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#221

Post by dustingetz »

electroly wrote: post #152
dustingetz wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is your ping to fly.io right now?

90ms for me. My fiber connection is excellent and there is no jitter--fly.io's nearest POP is just far away. You mentioned game streaming so I'll mention that GeForce Now's nearest data center is 30ms away (which is actually fine). Who is getting 6ms RTT to a data center from their house, even in the USA? More relevantly... who wants to architect a web app to have tight latency requirements like this, when you could…

who said anything about designing for tight latency requirements? My argument is that, for Linear’s market - programmers and tech workers either in an office or working remotely near a city - the latency requirements are not tight at all relative to the baseline capacity. We live on zoom! I have little patience for someone whose 400ms jitter is breaking up the zoom call, I had better ping than that on AOL in 1999, you want to have a tech career you need to have good internet, and AI has just cemented this. I have cross-atlantic zoom calls with my team in europe every day without perceptible lag or latency. We laugh, we joke, we crosstalk all with realtime body language. If SF utilities have decayed to the point where you can’t get fast internet living 20 miles from the backbone, then the jobs are going overseas. Eastern europe has lower ping to Philly than jitter guy has to the edge. And people in this thread are lecturing me about privilege!

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#222

Post by dustingetz »

abandonliberty wrote: post #195
JusticeJuice wrote: post #177

I remember being literally 12 when google docs was launched, which featured real-time sync, and a collaborative cursor. I remember thinking that this is how all web experience will be in the future, at the time 'cloud computing' was the buzzword - I (incorrectly) thought realtime collaboration was the very definition of cloud computing. And then it just... never happened. 20 years went by, and most web products are s…

The speed of light is rather unaccommodating. We run into human-perceptible relativistic limits in latency. Light takes 56ms to travel half the earth's circumference, and our signals are often worse off. They don't travel in an idealized straight path, get converted to electrons and radio waves, and have to hop through more and more hoops like load balancers and DDOS protections. In many cases latency is worse than i…

as you point out so vividly, the speed of light is actually not a problem given you can ping across an ocean in sub 100ms (not a laser beam, actual packets through underwater pipes). 56ms is acceptable latency for realtime video

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#223

Post by dustingetz »

asoneth wrote: post #149
CharlieDigital wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? If that's the primary selling point for a project manager versus being just a really damn good project manager with good visibility? I've never used a project manager and thought to myself "I want to switch because this is too slow". Even Jira. But I have thought to myself "It's too difficult to build a good workflow with this tool" or "It's too much work to surface good visibility". This is not a first-person s…

> any minivan on the market is going to do an acceptable and safe speed Growing up my folks had an old Winnebago van that took 2+ minutes to hit 60mph which made highway merges a white-knuckle affair, especially uphill. Performance was a criteria they considered when buying their next minivan. Whereas modern minivans all have an acceptable acceleration -- it's still important, it's just no longer one you need to thin…

2000ms isn’t network latency, it’s the db query. Moving a slow query from the cloud (high compute, fast network under your control) to the client (low compute, unreliable network, not under your control) is not going to make it faster and you’ve damaged reliability. All to save 50ms network latency.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#224

Post by mike_hearn »

recursion wrote: post #96
mike_hearn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To see this first hand try this website if you're in Europe (maybe it's also fast in the US, not sure): https://www.jpro.one/ ? The entire thing is a JavaFX app (i.e. desktop app), streaming DOM diffs to the browser to render its UI. Every click is processed server side (scrolling is client side). Yet it's actually one of the faster websites out there, at least for me. It looks and feels like a really fast and modern…

At least for me this site is completely broken on mobile. I'm not saying it's not possible to write sites for mobile using this tech... But it's not a great advert at all.

I haven't tried it on mobile. That could be, but my point was limited to latency and programming model.

You can use JavaFX to make mobile apps. So it's likely just that the authors haven't bothered to do a mobile friendly version.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#225

Post by antgiant »

swsieber wrote: post #127
antgiant wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may end up doing that, but I really wish there was a true p2p option that doesn’t have me relying on someone not rug pulling their free tier sync server.

Yeah... true p2p is pretty hard though, to the point that even stuff like WebRTC requires external servers to setup the data sync portion. It would be nice to develop something that worked at that layer though. IIUC, InstantDB is open source with a docker container you can run yourself, but at this point it's designed to run in a more cloud-like environment than I'd like. Last time I checked there was at least one op…

I spent some more time hunting due to this conversation and I’m hopeful that yjs + y-WebRTC + PeerJS will solve this. I also see that there are a few libraries that enable QR codes to replace PeerJS as a truly offline WebRTC initialization with true p2p connectivity. Looks quite promising

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#226

Post by porker »

nasretdinov wrote: post #153
porker wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you are running some really complicated globally distributed backend your roundtrip will always be higher than 80ms for all users outside your immediate geographical area. Many of us don't have to worry about this. My entire country is within 25ms RTT of an in-country server. I can include a dozen more countries within an 80ms RTT. Lots of businesses focus just on their country and that's profitable enough,…

If you put your server e.g. in Czechia you can provide ~20ms latency for the whole of Europe :)

Any providers in Czechia you'd recommend? It's not a market I know.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#227

Post by jFriedensreich »

nchmy wrote: post #218
fredguth wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RxDB is the OG? I thought it was PouchDB.

Fair enough, rxdb was originally built on pouchdb, but now doesn't support it anymore since that project has a lot of issues. https://rxdb.info/rx-storage-pouchdb.html My point/question still stands though - rxdb seems to be vastly more capable than all of the new tools that get all the attention. Very peculiar

rxdb has a toxic license and tried to do too much in too many different ways and does things like have open source components that are just working worse and are slower. its something that a lot of people were appalled by including me. they also changed so much it was hard to keep track of how things actually worked.

pouchdb is definitiely the OG local first database, and it inspired rxdb and was the core of it for a long time. it has definitely flaws mainly the developer ergonomics and not very up to date and non homogenic ecosystem. my feeling is non of these issues were the reaason rxdb parted ways, they could just have decided to > contribute < by fixing them and improving, but that would not have allowed them to create moat that they can enforce users switching to pro feautures with.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#228

Post by asoneth »

dustingetz wrote: post #223
asoneth wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any minivan on the market is going to do an acceptable and safe speed Growing up my folks had an old Winnebago van that took 2+ minutes to hit 60mph which made highway merges a white-knuckle affair, especially uphill. Performance was a criteria they considered when buying their next minivan. Whereas modern minivans all have an acceptable acceleration -- it's still important, it's just no longer one you need to thin…

2000ms isn’t network latency, it’s the db query. Moving a slow query from the cloud (high compute, fast network under your control) to the client (low compute, unreliable network, not under your control) is not going to make it faster and you’ve damaged reliability. All to save 50ms network latency.

I'm not saying local first will help or hinder UI latency, merely that UI latency is indeed a valid evaluation criteria for software.
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