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Step 4: audit whatever code ChatGPT wrote for you for performance impact
Engineering for Slow Internet
71–80 of 406 posts
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#72A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…
Sounds like what would benefit you is a HTMX approach to the web.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#73[flagged]
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Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a web developer you can just throttle your connection in developer tools though, no self-limiting required. But nobody does that in big corporations building most of the sites needed by people with slow connections.
In my experience, browsers limit speeds in a way that's kind of nice and stable. You tell them to stick to 100kbps and they'll have 100kbps. Packet loss, jitter, it's all a single number, and rather stable. It's like a 250kbps fiber optic connection that just happens to be very long. In my experience, real life slow internet isn't like that. Packet loss numbers jump around, jitter switches second by second, speeds va…
Good points, but it would still be a major step forward if websites start handling browser-simulated 3G well. Right now the typical webshit used by regular people more often than not ranges from barely usable to completely unusable on browser-simulated 3G, let alone browser-simulated 2G or real world bad connections. As a first step, make your site work well on, say, 200ms and 1Mbps.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#75A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…
Or maybe, just get rid of the firewall. I am all for nimble tech, but enabling the Chinese government is not very high on my to-do list.
Please understand that Chinese government wants to block "outside" web services to Chinese residents, and Chinese residents want to access those services. So if the service itself decides to deny access from China, it's actually helping the Chinese government.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#76A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…
Sounds like what would benefit you is a HTMX approach to the web.
What about plain HTML & CSS for all the websites where this approach is sufficient? Then apply HTMX or any other approach for the few websites that are and need to be dynamic.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#77I still think engineering for slow internet is really important, and massively under appreciated by most software developers, but ... LEO systems (like Starlink, especially StarLink) essentially solve the core problems now. I did an Arctic transit (Alaska to Norway) in September and October of 2023, and we could make FaceTime video calls from the ship, way above the Arctic Circle, despite cloud cover, being quite far…
doesn't take much stress to make starlink exacerbate packet loss levels way above docsis. it's ok for off-grid but not for the majority.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In Australia you're just 200ms from everything most of the time. (...) > The only app that I am always impressed with is WhatsApp. It's always the first app to start working after a reconnect, the last to get any traffic through before a disconnect, and even with the latency, calls feel pretty fast. The 200ms is telling. I bet that WhatsApp is one of the rare services you use which actually deployed servers to Aust…
> I bet that WhatsApp is one of the rare services you use which actually deployed servers to Australia. To me, 200ms is a telltale sign of intercontinental traffic. So, I used to work at WhatsApp. And we got this kind of praise when we only had servers in Reston, Virginia (not at aws us-east1, but in the same neighborhood). Nowadays, Facebook is most likely terminating connections in Australia, but messaging most lik…
> I used to work at WhatsApp..
Do you know why there is a 4 device limit? I run into this limit quite a bit, because I have a lot more devices.
And... Why is there is WhatsApp for most commonly used devices, but iPads?
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a tough because a lot of bands have been repurposed for 5G and an Xs doesn’t support any of those.
I get 400 Mbps down standing at the door of that same diner. My understanding is that 4G bands are repurposed for 5G in rough proportion to the usage of 4G vs 5G devices at that tower, plus there’s some way to use a band for both. In any case I was having these indoor performance issues back in 2019. I’m pretty sure it’s an Intel issue, and any Qualcomm modem would be fine.
I see this in my french city, there's a particular spot on my commute where my phone (mediatek) will report 2 bars of 5G but speeds will actually be around 3G. I've also noticed other people on the tram having their videos buffer at that spot, so it's not just me. The carriers do not care, of course.
I think there's just some of these areas where operational conditions make the towers break in some specific way.