@sjmulder I've been screaming this at anyone that would listen for years, and everyone tells me I'm crazy. I remember having a single threaded 486 with 32 megs of RAM that was more responsive than my Windows 11 work computer that has a top end zillion core Xeon and 64 gigs of RAM.

@sjmulder For most people, I suspect that increasing RAM consumption is the big one. The PC that I'm using here is 10 years old. 2 years ago I stuck another 16GB in it and it was like a supercomputer again (relatively).

@sjmulder You're so goddamn right. I've "repaired" two different Windows 10 laptops in the past 6 months by disabling Fast Boot.

It's a checkbox in the OS. And it will cripple the OS.

@sjmulder

They are probably the same ones that think Linux has Donkey Kong grade graphics lol

@sjmulder Yup. My Surface Pro 3 is depressingly sluggish on a fully up to date Win 10. Only Office, Firefox, and a couple of tools installed.

I used to say it was "iPad fast, but with a full OS" when it ran Win 8/8.1. I don't know what guff they're doing now, but it makes using this machine feel like an old android phone.

@sjmulder I mean, I had to replace my thermal paste because my 10+ year laptop was throttling a lot, but it is not like fixing that made it run all the software that now require higher specs than it has.

@sjmulder

"Upgrading / replacing / refreshing my heatsink thermal compound" is the go-faster crowd's new "defragging my hard disk".

They're cargo-culting their way through technology, as always.

#CargoCult #faster #techie #wizard

@sjmulder Thermal paste? Yeah the newer stuff is hotter, it makes everything run faster.

@sjmulder clearly degrading hardware causes electron and other website wrappers to manifest in previously good software. It must be the reason.

@sjmulder

Ahh, that just reminded of my obsession with tinyapps.org back in the day. Hey, the site still exists! (The links may not, though.)

@sjmulder developers get lazy. Part of it is because they help push hardware adoption numbers, but also a fair part is that no one really cares to optimize software anymore.

@sjmulder I had almost no data left on my phone and I thought "I can use twitter and deactivate images and videos in the app. In the early 00s I had 5GB/month for DSL and it was more than enough." I was really surprised how much data twitter uses...

@sjmulder I was just ranting while reviewing a changeset in Gitlab, because instead of loading the whole thing at once, Gitlab insists on 1. loading it dynamically and 2. unloading it when I scroll too far away, which completely breaks searching, and makes everything slower because it has to fetch stuff from the server as I scroll around. The full .diff file is 68 kB, apparently that's too much for modern browsers to handle.

@sjmulder I mean... *technically* there are some modern CPU instructions which should improve the performance of expressions in some cases... though usually having minimal or zero difference... ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Plus, it's not like new instruction sets are being released each generation, so it isn't like that's a significant factor!

@sjmulder I think PWAs are some of the biggest offenders on that front. I seriously can't even open some apps or sites without running completely out of RAM on some of my older hardware.

@sjmulder My grandparents old computer still works perfectly fine for what they use it for. That being writing letters and such in an old version of word.

@sjmulder The web is already a perfect example of this. The mentality has seen "if the web page is slow, maybe you should upgrade your old piece of junk computer". Then when I put a badly performing web page through the inspector, well oh look at that, the person who made it decided to include several frameworks, probably because those were the answer for "how do I do X in HTML5?"

I have a lot of "junk" computers in use, yet they run just fine with my Linux setup despite others' protests.

@sjmulder@bsd.network

So much shit, any more, is soooo leaky. It's like, "you do text, why do you need a gig of RAM just to display text???"

I seem to ask that of every tool that uses Electron.

@sjmulder some sites run a whole vm in your browser just to keep you from seeing what they’re doing

@sjmulder the gerbil inside gets old and tires out, duh

@sjmulder 90% of those people have never defragged or run a cleaner app.

@sjmulder
I thought old spinning rust hard drives slowed down though?

@sjmulder that games run worse and worse without any noticable graphical improvements while simultaneously requiring ssds

@sjmulder preach!

@sjmulder The older of us grow up with "what Andy gives takes Bill away" ...

@sjmulder
History shows that machines that have fixed specification get noticeable better software as their commercial lives go on as programmers get to grips with the hardware and squeeze every last bit of performance out of them.
The games at the beginning of the original Playstations life vs. games a few years into its life is a good example. Plus all the home micros from the 80/90's were getting much superior software by the end of their commercial lives.

@sjmulder if you need me, I'll be in my bunker with my Apple IIe

@sjmulder Yep, planned obsolescence at work. There are many factors going into this, some are software industry and some are the the nature of hardware. Contingencies for memory access escalation, such as Row-hammer and it's ilk, mean the microcode and/or have have changed such that throughput is reduced. Your disk(s) (platter or solid state) both will degrade in speed for different reasons. A new driver might introduce some chaos into how your OS kernel behaves.

@sjmulder hey kid, you ever heard of plan 9? 😎️ On a more serious note I have an old thinkpad T400 I still use. still the single best laptop I've ever owned, 16:10 display, best keyboard I've ever used and a trackpoint. Still runs surprisingly well too but yeah it's definitely showing it's age. Really the only thing I like better about modern machines is the battery life.

@sjmulder it's fascinating the things people choose to believe instead of reality.

@sjmulder Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away.

@sjmulder real

bloat is Evil

@sjmulder

To quote a colleague:

"Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away"

@sjmulder I once had a sales rep at a major U.S. cell phone carrier tell me, "we find that dirty SIM cards are the main reason for dropped calls." I managed to refrain from laughing at him, but when I told engineers working at AMD and Nokia about what this guy said, they almost fell on the floor laughing. Hint for corporate America: such BS might work in rural Oklahoma, but don't try it in Silicon Valley.

@sjmulder For similar example, some years ago, a friend wanted to copy a large number of images, and get rid of spaces in file names. I plugged his disk into a System 76 Ratel (several years old), ran ls, used emacs to create a script with a series of 'cp' commands, and started the script. After a minute or two of us chatting, I looked at the screen and the program had finished. He was blown away - it would have taken over an hour on his Apple system: showing progress is expensive.

@sjmulder@bsd.network gotta admit though, Epic games launcher is bloated no matter what machine you run it on

@sjmulder
Developers can find a lot of joy in designing for thrift and efficiency but it requires more thought and planning than throwing together a splashy, bloated product generally does.

@sjmulder People also believe that neural networks became faster to train because of GPUs. Software is just too abstract for most people.

@sjmulder truth. I love putting #ZorinOS on old laptops and handing it back to people.

@sjmulder “Software is a gas”

https://itlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Laws_of_Software

@sjmulder I hate that everyone in software development now uses VSCode, a glorified editor in a full browser. In the meantime I'm using (neo)vim and get 90% of the features, but using a fraction of the cpu and ram.

@sjmulder as a javascript developer i both hate this trend and am guilty of furthering it 😅

@sjmulder yeah well. thats what you get when people have zero understanding of the tools they use.

@sjmulder yeah i have users in my company that complain that their computer is slow when they're trying to access network file shares on the other side of the world. And i have to explain that it's not a problem with their computer but it's a normal network behavior when accessing remote files....

@sjmulder reminds me of this. yeah, lets waste millions ofhours in loading screens because of shitty json parsers:https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

@sjmulder

@sjmulder it saved some developer a couple hours, thus improving the bottomline. Progress!

@sjmulder I had an unusable Macbook Air from around 2011, just so slow, sluggish, and laggy.

Not had one single issue with it since I removed macOS and installed Linux on it. First Mint, and now Manjaro. Both work perfectly fine.

It's the software.

@sjmulder@bsd.network tbh thermal paste in laptops is really shit but all i've seen that do was temperatures getting over 65 degrees on light load and fans getting really loud