 Protip: When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do, "Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed." 141 comments
  @Zulgrib @natecull this is what happens when people forget that a nanosecond is 30cm (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_692464) @ninjawedding i was actually thinking about your scrolling demo when i cc'd you :) @LottieVixen @ninjawedding @er1n profiler output visualization tool, helps you see what functions and system calls your program is spending the most time on this, or similar (like what erin linked) : @cascode @LottieVixen @ninjawedding the difference with what i posted is that it's very good for monitoring infrequent events oh heck this looks awesome, also erm....the delay may be toot.cat fed issues....*sigh* @ninjawedding @LottieVixen @cascode telemetry is theoretically amazing but it's also probably unfathomably expensive, like so expensive that they just say "contact us if you're interested" @LottieVixen @er1n @cascode I think you would do fine -- Telemetry's data comes from hooks you write into the code, so they work a lot like print statements
(or so I hear) @er1n @LottieVixen @cascode heh yeah -- when I first saw Telemetry in use I was like "oh how much could this be? certainly no worse than CLion"
lol me @ninjawedding @er1n @cascode I mean..... I my debugging so far is print statements. meanwhile the Gemini Guidance Computer team laugh "you MIT people had 4K of RAM, we had 39 whole bits AND WE WERE GRATEFUL" ah, actually they did have 4096... 36-bit words of writeable core RAM. Weird. Was the Gemini computer *bigger* than the Apollo one ???? The Apollo LVDC is the third computer on the ship that never gets any love cos it just ran the engines and wasn't sexy << and the MIT Instrumentation Labs' antibodies flooded in to destroy the invader with critiques and reports negative of the IBM report. >> lol programmers then just like today << A so-called "bugger word" has been stuck at the end of each bank—no comments on this terminology, please, since I didn't invent it; when I asked Don Eyles some question that involved them, he somewhat-laconically stated "we called them check sums">> Huh, and if you have ROM and RAM I guess it literally is a Harvard Architecture http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/BlockIII.html I never thought of that before!  @natecull john roderick often talks about his ~85 year old mother on his podcasts, and describes how she (as a programmer in the 1950s-1960s) is appalled at pretty much all bugs in computer programs and the blasé attitude developers have, saying something like "back when I worked on those machines we made sure the code was correct before we sent it to anybody, we spent months and years making sure everything was completely correct before any of it was sold" @jk @natecull Back then, though, #programmers were #mathematicians and/or #physicists; nowadays, programmers are people who visited #codecademy and #geeksforgeeks ^^ @jk to be fair, producing software in that manner is how you often end up with user interfaces and feature sets that don't meet the needs or expectations of the end users there's a reason software development today is largely incremental and iterative, and that reason isn't because coders are lazy or incompetent  End use and how easy it is to correct errors makes a big difference - its way harder to stop a batch run of bank transactions to fix a bug or to make a site visit to physical equipment, yeet its EPROMS and replace them with the updated firmware. My car's braking system has a software version number, I would expect this code to have a much higher standard of testing and quality checking than the entertainment system (which locks up and has to be rebooted every so often) @natecull Actually, the Apollo 11 block II guidance computer had 2k of RAM (core memory) and 32k of ROM. This was a significant upgrade from the previous block I unit that had 1k of RAM (again, core memory) and 24k of ROM. Even a VIC 20's feeble 3.5k RAM was luxurious by comparison.  @natecull This reminds me. I was at a 2 day course in usability by Norman Nielsen Group. They talked about they where frustrated that devs didn't take them seriously when the pointed out (via usability testing) that a UI was too difficult to use. The devs said "well the users are just not smart enough!". To prove that the UI really was too difficult to use they did the usability test with rocket scientists from NASA and showed that even they couldn't figure out the UI. Huh talk about Margaret Hamilton and there she is! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbVOF0Uk5lU and there's a million things she hasn't done @natecull if the kids these days still printed their code, they'd get to the moon simply by climbing up it  @natecull I love that this post is making the rounds again. I was reading about Commodore Grace Hopper the other day and it made me think of this post, but I couldn't remember who wrote it. So, you know, thanks and all that.  @natecull The raspberry pi: cheaper than a console game, fits in a pocket, powerful enough to run a full graphical OS, uses 6 watts running full-pelt. The computer I just had to buy so that my wife could run Android Studio: $500, hundreds of watts, weight in double-digit kilos and big enough to need its own furniture. One of these is what all computers should look like by now. @ifixcoinops @natecull I've been moving to more energy efficient computing (eyes stare off into the distance) since the sheeva plug days, but more recently with the pis + kin @natecull I think it makes the most sense to design UI for the majority of people who will use it rather than edge cases. You can spend unlimited resources trying to make a UI that works for people who don't effectively draw intuitive conclusions based on related information, but you'll reach a larger audience by appealing to those who do, because those who do also have the wherewithal to ditch your product for another one that does what they want the way they want. @natecull meanwhile Japanese gamedevs with mostly 16 colors (aside from a few later 256 color games) and in many cases even a NEC v30 (faster 8086):
https://twitter.censors.us/pc98_bot @natecull Also on the hardware side, my 85 year old Mom has skin so dry her fingertips don't often get read by on-screen touch sensors, so that's a real clap up the side of the head. She used to be a nurse in an intermediate care facility, so was at the time very technically competent, but now at 85, if you even move one UI element to another corner, she can't figure it out. Because, basically, she's done thinking. Just wants to use it. @perigee @natecull Age can do that alas, my grandmother grew up with a husband who was screwing around with valve computers in the 70s at the CSIRO, so she was technologically literate as heck thanks to the utter jungle of computers and terminals and stuff my grandfather had around the place from the early late 70s onwards But by the time she hit 90, she could barely operate a phone anymore. Sad, but its the way life goes. Give your brain a hug, it wont be around forever. @natecull You may enjoy this: http://www.righto.com/2019/01/inside-apollo-guidance-computers-core.html -- the author has analyzed and reverse-engineered many of those old but awesome machines  @natecull @ellotheth I would hope Hamilton would be a bit more nuanced on her take. The memory safety of the binary, usability and accessibility of the UI and maintainability of code has increase tremendously. @chucker @natecull i mean in this hypothetical designed to make people think harder before they use "design it for an old woman" as UX engineering advice, i imagine that would be exactly her point: despite the usability/accessibility/maintainability improvements made in the last five decades, my button STILL takes ten seconds to load a 50MB video and then crashes. she's even more disappointed than i realized.    @natecull "When I was your age, we fit entire graphics demos in 256 bytes. Now, even toots won't do that." @shayneoneill @natecull @natecull That's fair. I learned to program on machines with only a few K of memory back in the day. Nothing that would get anyone to the moon of course, I'm not that good... I suspect the furthest people would get on my newbie coding back then was as far as the front door when they run away screaming about bad code. "I was waking up at 6am, 4 hours before we even went to sleep. Designed screens on VT100 and VT220 terminals before you were even *born*... no mouse - and you tell the young people of today that and you know, they won't believe you!" (needs a broad Yorkshire accent 😂)  @natecull I say this all the time. I didn't send people to the moon, but I did control and monitor power stations in a computer that has less processing horsepower than an average USB hub.    @natecull If you are interested in the practical difficulties of computer usage in space during the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs, the book Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins is interesting. He was the Command Module pilot during the Apollo 11 Moon mission. He explains extensively the steps they had to take to program their computer for a rendezvous with another spacecraft. @natecull This, on so many levels. I say this as a web engineer drowning in javascript and css. @natecull I was about to grumble at you about "why does it have to be an old WOMAN", but then read the Margret Hamilton scolding the UIX for it being slow trash and instead decided to 👍 instead. She's now my UIX consultant in my head. Though she's far less grumpy than mental Jakob Nielsen.  @natecull Sometimes I imagine Grace Hopper and her microsecond of wire, just disappointed in the piss-poor job I'm doing shuffling letters around at a place i've worked we had 0 developers with significant front-end expertise (self included) and we ended up adding padding to the bottom of a menu that appears on hover to make sure it works on touch interfaces we really just.. didn't know what we're doing in that realm, had this massive hoary legacy app, and didn't have the buy-in or expertise to do a front-end rewrite and it's kinda sad  @natecull seriously. I just switched from 20 to 100 Mbit - ask me if anything got 5 times faster...   @natecull I have no memory of liking and boosting this, but here we are again in 2022, after the eternal september, and its back. Im not even mad, infact, i am glad. @natecull the Doherty Threshold is alive and well.  @natecull One of my mentors in IT used to tell me he wrote his PhD thesis on a computer with 15k of RAM. "You learned pretty quickly how overlays worked!"  @natecull I'm briefly glad that I don't know what Margaret Hamilton's voice sounds like because if I could so much as accurately imagine this it would absolutely destroy my soul. @natecull but it was fast on my computer. Worked perfectly fine. It is your providers fault that this is slow. 😆 #LameExcuseNo1  @natecull to be fair, she also got to store programs in custom hardware ropes, which is just not supported on my intel chipset.  @natecull @adamshostack it we gotta feed all those tracking systems for ads to make money off those mouse movements and clicks! /s  This is because in the last ~decade, the majority of (proprietary) software stopped serving users' needs, and instead started serving developers' own ones almost exclusively. |
Gregory's Server
@natecull Well, people don't optimize for resources anymore