7 ms·

Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296, if anyone

Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296, if anyone is confused by the stream-of-consciousness style. It is frustrating that I've got a machine on my desk more powerful than supercomputers a generation ago, and it locks up and can't refresh the screen as fast as my relatively slow typing on a regular basis...

sushibowl 9y ago
> Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296, if anyone is confused by the stream-of-consciousness style. I don't mean to detract from the point, but this piece would be helped so much by properly fleshing it out into an article. presenting it as a sequence of 92 tweets is combining the worst of both worlds.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 9y ago
  I thought the choice of medium was itself an ironic comment on the crappiness of modern computer usage. Tweetstorms are essentially unreadable, even with a tool like this thread aggregator.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Precisely my response on first encountering the content. Wherein I discovered that this particular tweet aggregator could be initiated by a third party (others ... cannot). https://plus.google.com/+TimWesson/posts/VSGs2BddARD https://plus.google.com/+TimWesson/posts/VSGs2BddARD
dredmorbius 9y ago
I'd created the Tttthreads variant because reading tweetstorms is (ironically) another horribly bad interface.
katastic 9y ago
Not only that but due to an existing bug/oversight in Windows, you can actually freeze your mouse pointer with a machine... even with 24 cores sitting idle. (Great read.) https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant-move-my-mouse/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and... We have gigantic, steamrolling, bullet train machines capable of going nearly infinite miles-per-hour. And everyone's "design" solution... is to add their own stops along the way so the train has to come to a complete stop, [un]load some passengers and start chugging along again. And surprise surprise, a gigantic train takes awhile to accelerate back up to speed. We've built faster and faster trains, but filled them with so many stops along the way that it's sometimes faster to take the bus.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Similarly, with Gnome on top of Wayland the mouse is hitched to the main refresh loop...
  - katastic 9y ago
    Holy crap. That seems like such an oversight for something so crucial.
- gugagore 9y ago
  I enjoy that this applies pretty directly (almost aesthetically) to deeply-pipelined CPU architectures. Though for general computing, I am pretty sure it's still a win.
samstave 9y ago
I’m constantly stunned by the fact that chrome basically allocated a gig of men to each open tab... Can anyone eli5 why this is? I typically have thirty tabs open at any given time.
- sp332 9y ago
  Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M. Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)
  - danaliv 9y ago
    Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?
    - sp332 9y ago
      Because... it's not at all the same application? Email used to keep everything on disk and load up one message at a time. Now everything is on the server and has images embedded, so it all gets cached into RAM. If I switch to the "HTML version" of Gmail, the tab takes only 3MB to list my emails. There's also inflation of the content itself. That same HTML view uses over 100MB to render one email with a lot of pictures.
      - geofft 9y ago
        Wow - I was going to make a counterargument about how alpine is perfectly capable of keeping everything on disk (and how I usually don't care about images), but my alpine process, which has been running for a bit over a month and is connected via IMAP to a remote server with about 220,000 messages in the inbox, is using 250 MB virtual and 100 MB resident if I'm reading ps right. So maybe Gmail is actually pretty efficient!?
samstave 9y ago
Yeah, but now you can buy an SGI onyx or some other model of cray and turn them into a super-computing-kegerator When we built out Lucas arts presidio complex, ILM had several of these husks of rendering past on the loading dock waiting for the scrap heap. I still regret to this day I didn’t take one.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  I wouldn't sweat it too much. I had a working Octane workstation complete with sgi monitor and sgi keyboard. It's not easy to figure out a good use for it unless you can use the tanky case for something (ceramic grills over the case fans!). I even got shake to work on it, but it ran about the same speed as a 1ghz PIII.
r00fus 9y ago
Is it all the corporate mandated spyware? Because it's really fun when your work computer goes into a CPU spinup because of this.

sushibowl 9y ago

> Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296, if anyone is confused by the stream-of-consciousness style. I don't mean to detract from the point, but this piece would be helped so much by properly fleshing it out into an article. presenting it as a sequence of 92 tweets is combining the worst of both worlds.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gumby 9y ago
I thought the choice of medium was itself an ironic comment on the crappiness of modern computer usage. Tweetstorms are essentially unreadable, even with a tool like this thread aggregator.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Precisely my response on first encountering the content. Wherein I discovered that this particular tweet aggregator could be initiated by a third party (others ... cannot). https://plus.google.com/+TimWesson/posts/VSGs2BddARD https://plus.google.com/+TimWesson/posts/VSGs2BddARD

dredmorbius 9y ago

I'd created the Tttthreads variant because reading tweetstorms is (ironically) another horribly bad interface.

katastic 9y ago

Not only that but due to an existing bug/oversight in Windows, you can actually freeze your mouse pointer with a machine... even with 24 cores sitting idle. (Great read.) https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant-move-my-mouse/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and... We have gigantic, steamrolling, bullet train machines capable of going nearly infinite miles-per-hour. And everyone's "design" solution... is to add their own stops along the way so the train has to come to a complete stop, [un]load some passengers and start chugging along again. And surprise surprise, a gigantic train takes awhile to accelerate back up to speed. We've built faster and faster trains, but filled them with so many stops along the way that it's sometimes faster to take the bus.

digi_owl 9y ago
Similarly, with Gnome on top of Wayland the mouse is hitched to the main refresh loop...
- katastic 9y ago
  Holy crap. That seems like such an oversight for something so crucial.
gugagore 9y ago
I enjoy that this applies pretty directly (almost aesthetically) to deeply-pipelined CPU architectures. Though for general computing, I am pretty sure it's still a win.

samstave 9y ago

I’m constantly stunned by the fact that chrome basically allocated a gig of men to each open tab... Can anyone eli5 why this is? I typically have thirty tabs open at any given time.

sp332 9y ago
Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M. Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)
- danaliv 9y ago
  Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?
  - sp332 9y ago
    Because... it's not at all the same application? Email used to keep everything on disk and load up one message at a time. Now everything is on the server and has images embedded, so it all gets cached into RAM. If I switch to the "HTML version" of Gmail, the tab takes only 3MB to list my emails. There's also inflation of the content itself. That same HTML view uses over 100MB to render one email with a lot of pictures.
    - geofft 9y ago
      Wow - I was going to make a counterargument about how alpine is perfectly capable of keeping everything on disk (and how I usually don't care about images), but my alpine process, which has been running for a bit over a month and is connected via IMAP to a remote server with about 220,000 messages in the inbox, is using 250 MB virtual and 100 MB resident if I'm reading ps right. So maybe Gmail is actually pretty efficient!?

samstave 9y ago

Yeah, but now you can buy an SGI onyx or some other model of cray and turn them into a super-computing-kegerator When we built out Lucas arts presidio complex, ILM had several of these husks of rendering past on the loading dock waiting for the scrap heap. I still regret to this day I didn’t take one.

CyberDildonics 9y ago
I wouldn't sweat it too much. I had a working Octane workstation complete with sgi monitor and sgi keyboard. It's not easy to figure out a good use for it unless you can use the tanky case for something (ceramic grills over the case fans!). I even got shake to work on it, but it ran about the same speed as a 1ghz PIII.

r00fus 9y ago

Is it all the corporate mandated spyware? Because it's really fun when your work computer goes into a CPU spinup because of this.