71–80 of 93 posts
I run headless Alpine Linux (a minimal distro) in my homelab and it’s fast AF. The lag in Windows Explorer is sad when something like cd folder/folder is instant in Linux.
I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer. It's like it's barely attached to reality. There's this weird floaty delay in everything. You copy a file, or did you? You're not sure. It hasn't updated yet. Oh, now the copy dialog appears with this progress bar that isn't showing progress. The dialog just sits there. Is something happening? I don't know. Many s…
I've been using computers for decades, and have used dozens of paid products, but not a single paid option stuck with me forever, while tons of open-source tools are literally irreplaceable - and not because I'm just used to them, but specifically because they give me control to customize them just the way I need.
No, no software is the best software. BTW, the title should say "(2019)".
Best solution is no software, or as little code as possible. But that the best software is no software isn't very practical or actionable :)
If the software is fast as a byproduct of being simple, that tends to align with correctness. If it is fast because it is optimized, then that does not align with correctness, because optimizing something that works only adds risk.
Similar thing is happening with web sites. Lately I've done "view page source" on eg. news sites I visit. Common pattern:
100s of KB html, loads & loads of meta tags, then a mountain of CSS junk, embedded scripts etc, and at the very end: maybe 3..5 paragraphs of text (a few dozen words each) with actual content. That's not counting images, video or external scripts, stylesheets, fonts etc. Oh and images not from the actual subject discussed, but 'random' sample illustration from an image library.
Ok sure, you want to add some meta-tags to html documents. You want a page to look good, and run a couple of scripts. But do you need a MB+ of that to provide a few KB of text to your visitors?
NO YOU DON'T. >95% of that is non-essential crap that shouldn't be there in the 1st place.
There's little doubt in my mind that (most) software development works the same way. Bad incentives -> crappy software.
If the software is fast as a byproduct of being simple, that tends to align with correctness. If it is fast because it is optimized, then that does not align with correctness, because optimizing something that works only adds risk.
One could say that (for whatever reasons) many software makers do a poor job of keeping non-essential stuff out of their software. And/or do a poor job of taking the shortest route from user input -> result. Never mind UI design. Similar thing is happening with web sites. Lately I've done "view page source" on eg. news sites I visit. Common pattern: 100s of KB html, loads & loads of meta tags, then a mountain of CSS…
I fully agree. I loathe slow software. I hate bloat. I love fast software. As a developer, I'm completely, even irrationally, obsessed with speed, performance optimization, and profiling. I wish more developers felt the same way.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I’m making browser games and my core idea is that they must be fast as hell and light as hell. Such that they can run on a potato!
Unfortunately this means cutting non essential animations lol.
And testing on throttled devices (low end mobile) and respecting thermal throttling
A recent win for me for performance was:
- 8192 simultaneous entities on screen path finding, checking reward functions, making strategy decisions with zero frame drops
- sub millisecond average frame Time (more like sub 0.5ms) with 256 entities on screen (logic and rendering)
- “compressing” game replays from 100KB naive to 1KB