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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

danluu.com

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Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#441

Post by mxuribe »

titzer wrote: post #439
mxuribe wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as i dislike Windows, i agree that the versions of the OS from that era were really fast (except for maybe Vista)!! As far as OS X, I had used OS X back around ~2007 - 2010, but can't recall what versions it was...and it performed fine back then too. I've been on one or another linux distro since around 2003 or maybe 2004, and have been running linux as my primary driver for laptops and desktops since maybe 2…

I dunno, Ubuntu got bloated. I tried to put 24 on an old Chromebook at it was atrocious. Going back to MX Linux made the UI relatively snappy.

You're not wrong! Some releases (and not just Ubuntu), it does feel like some distros are inching towards their "Windows Vista" moment, where UI aspects slow some things down...But, i think i tend to not get impacted by this since I often use KDE or XFCE....which is not to say that these are perfect nor the lightest-weights either....simply that, i know what you mean, but it doesn't tend to hit me much. Oh, and MX Linux i haven't touched in a long time, but yeah it used to fly and be super snappy back when i had used it!

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#442

Post by fingerlocks »

ryandrake wrote: post #427
sgarland wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great. The original design had the speakers setting u…

So many developers do this, and it's infuriating. I have a device sitting there on my perfectly good LAN, yet if I want to remote control it, the brilliant software decides to send the commands to the Internet, then back to my device, then the response gets routed to the Internet, and back to my phone. Device developers, stop doing this! You people realize that LANs exist, don't you?

I was doing firmware + mobile a at large-ish startup a decade ago. Same story as Sonos; there was a push to go all cloud instead of our local network implementation that worked great.

I argued breathlessly against it for days. I’ll never forget the sales chad raising his voice to shut me down with a cop-out:“This is the way the industry is going!”.

It’s not the developers making these changes.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#443

Post by AlotOfReading »

softwaredoug wrote: post #393

The problem is that there’s a tradeoff between MANY objectives, not just performance You want code that’s fast, correct, stable, memory efficient, secure, usable, and more The reason code might be slow is about product tradeoffs. It’s certainly easy to have an LLM optimize performance only, but what do you sacrifice? Is that an acceptable tradeoff? Maybe slow code is a good idea if it’s the only way to get correct an…

I've almost never seen the trade-offs you're describing cause the slowness being discussed.

Take slack for example. It's not fast, it's not correct, it's not stable, it's not memory efficient, and it's not particularly secure. There's a reasonable argument that it's usable, but that doesn't seem to have much to do with tradeoffs in their technology choices.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#444

Post by champagnepapi »

0x20cowboy wrote: post #56
champagnepapi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People these days are saying “don’t look at the code”. People are shipping all sorts of weird architectures, non-performance code, etc. I wish that the ram scarcity would drive more performant software however I just think that the way people are shipping software currently will not lead to this

> People are shipping all sorts of weird architectures, non-performance code, etc. And they weren’t before AI?

I'm not saying that folks weren't doing that prior to generative AI! I'm saying that the rate at which this is being done is much greater than before.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#445

Post by BorisMelnik »

sgarland wrote: post #399
cavem0nkey wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Apple Music is the most egregious example of this. It could be ridiculously fast on your pocket supercomputer but the moment a web request gets fired off from stumbling blindly across the field-of-dung user interface, bam, you’re done. Especially if your network connection isn’t great at that time. Things like this really pushed me to everything local systems. I’ll move actual files around if I want to do anythi…

Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great. The original design had the speakers setting u…

wow really? is this only for newer speakers or do older gen speakers work this way too

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#446

Post by alightsoul »

xstas1 wrote: post #241
alightsoul wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canva replaced PowerPoint. Canva is cloud based and PowerPoint is not. There's so many apps that are cloud only so that corporate it no longer has to manage installations and users don't need to ask IT for permission anymore. I think SaaS doesn't really work without the cloud, you could technically do what adobe does but why bother with app distribution and windows' quirks. Cloud based web apps are write once, run an…

I like this example. A lot of people would prefer to use PowerPoint because they can still use their files and templates they made last year even if Microsoft doubles the price of Powerpoint, removes features, discontinues the product, or goes bankrupt.

I have seen many companies migrate to gsuite away from Microsoft. It's perfectly compatible with excel, word and PowerPoint files unless you use macros

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#447

Post by jtari3333 »

alightsoul wrote: post #229
ddejohn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background This gave me a chuckle because I personally hate things like watching the browser jump through 50+ redirects when logging into a website.

My bad, I mean the interstitial. Like it should stay for at least a second to not make it jarring. People believe computers need to think so you can't make things too fast either. Not the interstitial and not the app either, to the point you sometimes have to deliberately slow down the app, add latency to make people trust it because it "gives the computer time to think"

Literally the first thing I do is disable all animations when setting up an os

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#448

Post by cavem0nkey »

ryandrake wrote: post #427
sgarland wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great. The original design had the speakers setting u…

So many developers do this, and it's infuriating. I have a device sitting there on my perfectly good LAN, yet if I want to remote control it, the brilliant software decides to send the commands to the Internet, then back to my device, then the response gets routed to the Internet, and back to my phone. Device developers, stop doing this! You people realize that LANs exist, don't you?

As I said at [1] they want to centralise it as a control point so they can monetize it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376040

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#449

Post by throwaway270925 »

qsera wrote: post #432

Yes, Seriously, where is the native versions of LLM created slack, vscode and other memory sucking Electron apps. No one should need Electron now as well..

> where is the native versions of ... vscode

Those at least already exist, without the need for any LLM: Sublime Text, BBEdit, Notepad++

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#450

Post by teeray »

59nadir wrote: post #287
ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

This is an incomplete and quite superficial view of what is going on out there, in my opinion. I've worked on plenty of projects where the assumption was that since the round-trip to the server is going to take almost 100ms that'll dwarf anything that's going to happen on the server itself, justifying poor choices that lead to potentially adding a whopping 100ms onto that number. These numbers only get larger with a…

> These numbers only get larger with a larger perceived "Nothing we can do about it"

God forbid you say anything about it in a code review lest you get shouted down about premature optimization.

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