![]() But get an SSD for the odd times you swap. Its a problem when you're always out of ram. I don't shut down my browser before playing games to free up ram, or kill photoshop, etc. Its the same on my older desktop, which I also game on. Not a single thing is slow about anything. I've got VMs running and xCode, sublime, ios simulator, bunch of terminals, bunch of node apps, couple corporate sec products and incremental backup software, etc, etc. Rarely have less than 20 tabs open in chrome, which stays open for days/weeks at a time. My desktop has an Intel 2600k and 16gb of ram. My laptop is a macbook pro from 3 years ago. I have good gear but definitely not the latest and greatest of everything. What the hell are we actually even fixing anymore? When it felt like magic instead of digging through a trash heap of ads to find the tiny sliver of what you needed. Recall the time when one could reason about what goes on inside a computer at every level, when key presses registered immediately, when the memory allocations of applications and the OS they ran in made sense to humans. Think about all the project managers who had a hand in setting any of that up, the financial planning of each aspect, the development time spent. Think about the data centers those VMs running that app run in, the people who oversee them, the tooling they need to run those systems. Think about all the systems that file goes through, the network requests, the protocols involved, the standards required to make that happen, and the infrastructure which powers it all. Contrast saving a file to a floppy disk with uploading that same file to a "modern app" which stores it on S3 using Paperclip with Rails, as many modern apps do. Printing text to the screen in a "modern app" is now so complicated that it's effectively impossible for a human to determine the CPU instructions and memory manipulations required to do the things we're doing.Īnd what do we do? We make more transpilers, more frameworks, move more to the browser, split our systems across networks and around the world. Contrast this with what a terminal does and what happens in memory. Consider what happens in the physical memory, at the hardware layer, to have a modern React app print a line of text when a text box is modified. There are more layers of abstractions and VMs running VMs running VMs simulating DOMs listening for changes to objects to update models to trigger actions which bubble up to listeners which fire events which change data structures that eventually update some text on the screen. I argue that the UX has actually gotten worse since software is becoming more bloated faster than the hardware improvements can keep up with. In terms of UX, a lot of the stuff was near-instant vs noticeably delayed today due to everything running in browsers. Lotus 123 could do things people use Google Sheets for today with a few orders of magnitude less processing power, memory, and network bandwidth. ![]() I think about this all the time and discuss it at length with people.
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