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Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#361
post #202
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I would prefer 2005 web again. I'd probably be able to see more of the internet. I use heavy DNS filtering, no javascript on untrusted sites, no cookies, no fonts, VPN and so on. With cloudflare blocking me I basically can't see the majority of websites.

Oh don’t worry. Once dns-over-https becomes standard, you won’t be able to do any dns filtering anymore.

I don't know about other browsers but on firefox I can decide which DNS server is used for DNS over https.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#362
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: you now get a lot of tooling for 'free', which used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

On which platform? On Apple's there cost is part of the premium you pay for the device. Cheapest Mac is $599. Cheapest windows machine is $199? $99. So arguably some of tbat $400-500 is for the extra software. Or would compare against Linux where you could also get a machine for $25

You don't have to buy a brand new Mac.

Older M1 devices which are still very fast are available for much cheaper.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

My daily runner is a T400 Laptop with 4GB RAM on a fairly slim Linux distro. But in the last 6-12 months it is starting to feel a little tight when it comes to anything web browsing. Even things like Thunderbird are getting very bulky in keeping up with web rendering standards. I pulled down an Audiobook player the other day, once all dependencies were meet, it need 1.3GB to function! At least VLC is still slim.

I think there is a thing about starting to boycott overly heavy websites.

There are some useful resources: https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

There are also some tricks to have a lighter web browsing by default:

- try websites with netsurf, links or w3m first

- using a local web to gemini proxy to browse many websites with a lightweight gemini browser.

And you can go a long way by using an adblocker and/or disabling javascript by default using an extension with a toggle.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason Does the App Store collect sales tax and remit on your behalf? If it does then I think it's worth it or face registering both in the EU and UK ($0 tax threshold) as well as 50 US states (once you hit the allowed limit) will take you a long time.

30% cut for handling taxes? That's wild.

It's 15% for most developers. And it's for a lot more than just handling taxes.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#365
post #346
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In several countries you can't file your taxes or access your bank without a google/apple smartphone. People need to live too.

What country only lets you file your taxes and do banking via a smartphone.

It's always been an app in addition to a website.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#366

> I think we lost our way of developing optimized, efficient, and performance-wise applications. I'm not going to deny that we could do better, but it is more nuanced than that: OP uses Word as an anecdotal example, but Word is not designed with a goal of being optimized. It is designed with a goal of being backwards-compatible to decades of history. We cannot assume that all software shares the same goals because th…

So why doesn't Excel solve the famous problem of data loss on importing dates?

Also, Word (despite the general fame) isn't compatible with decades of history (remember a post that found that LibreOffice was more compatible with history (though not current designs))

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#367
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to pay to do that on MacOS, they can bypass the warning saying it’s unsigned and that the developer can’t be positively identified.

Apple should really provide free codesigning for free/open source software.

(almost) everyone has an SSL certificate for the web. An OS could check if software is signed with one. And maybe display a warning for only domain validation.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#368
In my opinion, the reason is purely economic. Writing software in web frameworks (even a phone app, which is often written in javascript and runs in a separate browser which takes up to 300MB of RAM at the very start) is much faster, has a less steep learning curve, shorter test loop, and faster and easier release cycle. Additionally, recently every company has tried to move to SaaS business because it's giving more steady income (pay 60$/month or 10$/month but with a promise to pay the whole year, which vendor-locks a user)

While I've been involved in releasing both types of software (a ye olde Windows standalone app written in Qt framework and the new software that's being released every 2-3 days or so) I find the new way much less painful. I couldn't imagine releasing a Qt app in such a cycle (how to do updates? maybe like Minecraft - every other launch there's a new package of 64MB downloaded)...

...but as a user, I feel much more comfortable when code is on my computer, available for me to run. While extensively using Google Docs to share documents with my wife (calendar, spreadsheets) and band (songlist, lyrics), I'm scared that if I moved everything to on-cloud (paid mail, photo enhancing (thankfully I'm a standalone Lightroom buyer), vector graphics (inkscape user), photoshop (gimp user), etc.) one day I would hit the roof in payments of my per-month-but-bound-to-year plans. In 2030 it would be also netflix, shmetflix, televisionix, phonix, car-as-a-service, heated-seats-as-a-service, air-conditioning-as-a-service, toilet-as-a-service, smartwatch-as-a-service etc. building up to an unbearable rent for something that used to be free or paid once. I don't feel like my duty is to provide a constant supply of money to my beloved corporations

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#369
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative that exists today that I can buy and all the apps I need for work will actually exist and function correctly is called…

Fairphone 4.

Sustainable brands don’t remove their headphone jacks then start selling wireless headphones that require more batteries & rely on firmware updates

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#370
post #89

Google Docs might be able to directly edit .docx files now, but that is pretty new feature, and it doesn't surprise me that it's slow. It's a proprietary format owned by Microsoft. The argument that software ought to be efficient is valid, but the example of editing a non-native format seems unfair. Any time you add emulation layers you should expect things to slow down. Did you consider trying Microsoft's own browse…

But you're not emulating, you're just parsing a file format, so why should you expect slow downs?
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