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I think this is a general problem with technology as a whole. Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Somehow along the way the cable/TV comp

I think this is a general problem with technology as a whole. Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new normal. Phones and computers were at one point very fast to respond; but now we tolerate odd latencies at some points. Apps for your phone have gotten much much bigger and more bloated. Ever noticed how long it takes to kill an app and restart it? Ever notice how much more often you have to do that, even on a 5-month old flagship phone? It's not just web pages, it's everything. The rampant consumption of resources (memory, CPU, bandwidth, whatever) has outpaced the provisioning of new resources. I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it.

leadingthenet 6y ago
You call it progress, I call it regress. It seems to me that we have lower performance, exponentially higher resource consumption, and often no more functionality in a “modern” web app / Electron app compared to some desktop apps from the 90’s. And for what? To have even worse UI’s and UX’s that never conform to platform guidelines? Where’s the progress?
- coliveira 6y ago
  The big "dream" of web-based technologies was to allow designers the freedom to do whatever they want. But doing this has a lot of costs, which we are all paying today. In the early days of GUIs, a group would design the OS, and everyone would just use that design through the UI guidelines. It was, in my opinion, the apex of GUI programming, because you could create full featured apps without the need of an experienced designer, at least for the first few iterations. Now, I cannot even create a simple web app that doesn't look crap, and any kind of web product requires a designer to at least make it minimally usable. And the whole architecture became so complex because of the additional layers, that it looks more like a Baroque church than a modern building.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  The desktop apps from the 90s were better because they could actually show more information on a 600 by 800 pixel screen than a modern app can do on a full HD screen, because it puts too much whitespace. Not to mention flat design, which is without exception bad design. Buttons have borders, show them.
skohan 6y ago
I remember thinking this when OS's started butting transparent blur effects on various UI layers. As someone who's worked with computer graphics, I understood that high quality blur effects are relatively expensive. Most computers these days can handle it without breaking a sweat, but It's like why are we using these resources on the desktop environment, who's job is basically to fade into the background and facilitate other tasks? I don't think it's the nature of progress so much as it is laziness. Most developers (myself included) don't worry much about optimization until the UX performance is unacceptable. I sometimes wonder what the world could be like if we just froze hardware for 5 years and put all of our focus on performance optimization.
- rusk 6y ago
  I think it was to do with graphics acceleration becoming more commonplace. It was my guess that these additional effects weren’t originally intended to use desktop cpu .. tho I guess once they became the norm who knows .. although the recent trend towards “flat” UI seems to be reversing that trend ..
- w0mbat 6y ago
  I invented the translucent blurred window effect. It first shipped in Mac IE 5.0 in April 2000 (the non-Carbon version only), for the autocomplete window, and later that year for the web page context menu (first in the special MacHack version). The effect doesn't have to be expensive, and my original implementation was fast on millenium era machines. The goal is preserve the context of the background, while keeping foreground data readable, in a way that is natural to our human visual system. If you are doing it properly you also shift the brightness values into a more limited range to diminish the contrast and keep the tonal values away from the chosen foreground text color (this is also cheap). Done properly it is visually pleasing with virtually no effect on readability. People have coded some boneheaded imitations along the way though. They don't add the blur, or they don't adjust the brightness curve, or they make the radius much too big, or they compute some over exact Gaussian blur that is too slow. It's the nature of blur that it doesn't have to be exact to be visually pleasing and convincing.
  - 6y ago
formerly_proven 6y ago
> Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new normal. The technical reason is that digital TV is a heavily compressed signal [1] (used to be MPEG2, perhaps they have moved on to h.264) with a GOP (group of pictures) length that is usually around 0.5-2 seconds. When you switch channels, the MPEG-2 decoder in your receiver needs to wait until a new GOP starts, because there is no meaningful way to decode a GOP that's "in progress". [1] And the technical reason for the compression is that analog HD needs a lot more bandwidth than analog NTSC/PAL/SECAM, while raw HD transmission would need an absurd amount of bandwidth per channel (about a gigabit/s for 1080p30). So HD television pretty much requires the use of digital compression. Efficient digital video compression requires GOP structures.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Most video players can decode an "in progress" stream just fine. This obviously involves quite a few artifacts for the first 0.5–2 seconds or so, but seeing artifacts is generally preferable to seeing a totally blank screen.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    True, and the decoders in receivers already have this capability, since they keep decoding even if the forward-error-correction can't save the stream any more, resulting in similar artifacts. I'm not sure why it's not done on a channel change, perhaps it's the manufacturers not wanting their TVs to routinely show glitched footage, or perhaps advertisers don't want it because it would be against Corporate Design rules to glitch-effect the logos they use on the daily.
  - frandroid 6y ago
    It's obvious that TV makers have decided that seeing artifacts is not preferable. I wish that was toggleable.
    - ipnon 6y ago
      Implicitly TV users are also prohibited from making their own technical decisions. I claim this is because the TV predates the era of open computing platforms like Unix.
noja 6y ago
I swear cell phones have a slight latency compared to a landline too.
- rusk 6y ago
  Depends on your network and your landline but I guess a fairly isshy network compared with a fairly common POT landline you would definitely see a difference. Packet switching (Vs circuit switching) alone should in principal introduce a latency - then there’s a lot more interconnects - and on top of that whatever hocus pocus they use to optimise their (digital) bandwidth usage. Of course modern land lines probably are more like mobile now but not unreasonable to expect circuit switches analogue POT are still widely used.
- toast0 6y ago
  Cell phones have encoding/compression delay on the voice part, delays waiting for a transmit slot if the air interface is time division multiplexed, sometimes a jitter buffer to allow for resends/error correction, and often less than ideal routing (lots of people are using numbers from out of state, which may require the audio path to traverse that state). Originally POTS was circuit switched analog connection between you and the other party --- only delays from the wires, and maybe amplifiers. Nowadays POTS is most likely digitally sampled at the telco side, but each sample is sent individually --- there's no delay to get a large enough buffer to send, because for multiplexed lines each individual line is sampled at the same rate and a frame has one sample from each.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  More than slight. Stand next to a friend and call him on your cell. Then try various things like saying “ping”. The results are quite amusing. Or put one phone on speaker.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  The only thing cell phones have on copper land lines is portability. In all other ways they suck. I think we only tolerate this because most of us have completely forgotten how much better land lines were, or we never experienced them to begin with. The first big hit to phones came with the cordless models. No longer comfortable to hold against your ear, the earpieces got flat or even convex, and mashing it up against your head made for an unpleasant converation. But hey, we got rid of cords! And then the change to cell phones, with their tiny fraction of available bandwidth, terrible sound quality, high latency, high failure rate, etc. The astonishing thing is that bandwidth isn't a big deal now, and we could have improved basically all aspects of mobile calls to be within spitting distance of what we used to have 30 years ago. No wonder people don't like to talk on the phone any more.
lumost 6y ago
Alternately, the value of low-latency experiences is not as high as we believed - or it's poorly measured. Particularly in Enterprise software, the time to complete a workflow or view specific data matters a lot - the time to load a page is a component of that, but customers will gladly trade latency for a faster e2e experience with less manual error checking. In consumer the big limiting factor is engagement, a low-latency experience will enhance engagement. However it's possible to hide latency in ways that weren't possible before such as infinite scrolls and early loading of assets. The engagement on the 50th social feed result has less to do with the latency to load the result, and more to do with how engaging the content is.
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  Meanwhile, most of those ways to hide latency have other issues, like the good old "link I need is below the infinite scroll" or "I just want to go back to a specific time, but I have to scroll through every single thing between then and now instead of just jumping 10 pages at a time". Which we would avoid if instead we tackled the actual problem.
massysett 6y ago
It is the nature of progress: progress is doing more with less. That’s increased productivity. Of course software now uses more computing resources, so that’s not doing more with less. But the computer is cheap. What’s expensive is the humans who program the computer. Their time is expensive, and getting experienced, expert humans is even more expensive. So we now have websites that have rich features bolted together using frameworks. Same for desktop software, embedded systems, and whatever else. They’re optimized for developer time and features, not for load time because that’s not expensive, at least not in comparison. As a user the only solution I see to this is to use old fashioned dumb products rather than cheaply developed “smart” ones. For instance I’m not going near a smart light switch, or a smart lawn sprinkler controller. Old dumb ones are cheap and easy and fast and predictable.
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  >But the computer is cheap. What’s expensive is the humans who program the computer. This is a nice half-truth we tell ourselves, but that's not the full story. There exists plenty of optimizations where the programmer-time would be smaller than the additional hardware cost. And those losses compound. But they're a little too hard to track, and cause is a little too far divorced from effect. I did our first ever perf pass on an embedded application as we started getting resource constrained. I knocked 25% off the top in a week. Even if I had spent man-months for a 10% savings, try and tell me that's more expensive than spinning new boards. That's not to say we're opposed to hardware changes; we do them all the time. But the cost curve is weighted towards the front so it's more attractive to spend a non-zero amount of developer time right now to investigate if this other looming spend is avoidable. That's not the case when you're looking at controlling the acceleration of an AWS bill that spreads your spend out month to month through eternity. Who wants to spend a big chunk of money up front to figure out if you can change that spend rate trend by a tiny percentage? Even if you do, and get a perf gain, but someone else on the team ships a perf loss? Then it doesn't feel real, and you can only see what you spent. Even if you have good data about the effect of both changes (which you don't), the fact the gain was offset means the sense of effect is diminished. And rather than investigate perf, people can always lie to themselves that the cost is all about needing to "scale." That way they convince themselves not only was there nothing they could have done, the cost is a sign that their company is hot shit. If you don't think that kind of perf difference is real, Look at Maciej's comparison of pinboard and anonymized-del.icio.us https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (ctrl-f "ACME") And if perf has any impact on sales, cause and effect are even further apart. You might be able to measure the effect perf has on your sales website directly, but if that feedback loop involves a user developing an opinion over days/weeks? Forget about knowing. Oh, sure they'll complain, but there are no metrics, so we get the rationalizations we see in this thread.
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
> Ever noticed how long it takes to kill an app and restart it? Ever notice how much more often you have to do that, even on a 5-month old flagship phone At least car crashes are still low latency.
notyourwork 6y ago
> Ever noticed how long it takes to kill an app and restart it? Ever notice how much more often you have to do that, even on a 5-month old flagship phone? Is this an android problem? I don't really ever have to close apps unless the app itself gets stuck into a broken state and forcing close to restart can correct the issue.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it. I suspect that the root cause is that nobody understands what's going on from the UI down to the hardware, and nobody is incentivized (or even allowed) to spend the time it would take to actually do so.
Unklejoe 6y ago
> Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? I think about this every time I use the Hulu "Guide" on my Fire TV. It's extremely slow and cumbersome. I remember using the early digital cable boxes in like 2005 which were much more responsive, and honestly, the UI was much better too.
daxfohl 6y ago
Microwaves are another example. Used to just turn a knob to the number of minutes you want, and done. Now it's five button presses. (Maybe not exactly a latency thing, but a UX one that makes it slower).
- BenjiWiebe 6y ago
  At least some microwaves will run N minutes when you press the N button once. Also you can hit the add 30 seconds button a couple of times, and it starts running instantly.
cuddlybacon 6y ago
> Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Remember when turning a TV on was <0.5s? My current dumb TV takes a good while to turn on. When I press the power button, it takes about 1s for the indicator light to change than another 2 or 3 to begin displaying anything.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  .... No, actually. Most CRTs took a long time to come on. Early LCDs, maybe?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cuddlybacon 6y ago
    Interesting. I meant CRTs. Maybe my memory is a bit rose tinted. Still, I remember never having confusion about whether my CRT TVs where responding to the power on button press or not. There are plenty of times where I turn my current TV off since I think it didn't receive the first button press.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      Most CRTs made an obvious _noise_ when turned on (actually, one of the curses of good high-frequency hearing was that they made an obvious noise for the whole time they were on, though I think a lot of people couldn't hear them after warmup). That helped, I suppose.
      - kergonath 6y ago
        Exactly, feedback was immediate, which helps a lot with UX.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    The image took some time to stabilise (and was black at first), but the things turned on instantly, with the light indicator visible without delay (and the sound of the CRT turning on). Now, quite often I have to wait 5s to see whether the button push was registered, push again because the TV still does nothing, and then watch as the thing turned on just as I was pressing and interprets the second push as a signal to go on standby (5 more seconds with an obnoxious message about it going to sleep, and yet 5 more to wake it up). It’s like the USB-A that needs to be rotated twice every time you want to plug something.
Aaronstotle 6y ago
I once had a glitch on my iphone back in iOS 9.x. The glitch made it that all transitions/animations were disabled and it was a fantastic experience to click an app and have it open instantly. Turning off animations in IOS settings doesn't make it as fast as that glitch did unfortunately.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  First thing I do with a new android is turn off all animation in developer settings, much better experience. Shame that glitch isn't reproducible
wnevets 6y ago
>Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new One of the worst parts of the over the air digital switch over was how much harder it was to channel surf quickly.
dghughes 6y ago
>Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new normal Phones used to be rotary dial but then touch tone phones with number buttons were introduced. I was reading an article about human brains and its expectations. Going from a touch tone phone to an old rotary style phone seems excruciatingly slow to our brains. Depending on the number a 1 on each it's very close in duration but a 9 or a 0 on a rotary compared to a touch tone 9 or 0 seems glacial in speed.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Even worse; in some countries, touch tone exchanges took a while to roll out, with the result that keypad phones which supported both pulse dialing and tone dialing were common. And then people never switched them over to tone dialing. There were people pulse dialing into the 21st century.
  - coryrc 6y ago
    In the 90s, my family saved $2.68/mo on the phone bill by opting out of tone dialing.
fractal618 6y ago
You had me at: > Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? There's nothing less satisfying than smushing down those rubbery remote control buttons for an extra 2000 to 4000 milliseconds to change the channel. Don't get me started on entering the wrong channel numbers. That gives me PTSD.
- rohan1024 6y ago
  What's worst is the black screen in between the channel switch. If you used to watch TV with your lights off, you now stop doing that.
- thewebcount 6y ago
  Yeah, I remember when that first started happening, and I agree it was really frustrating. The funny thing is that I no longer channel surf, so I no longer hit this. I realized the other day that I haven't watched cable TV in a long time. My TiVo is empty and has been for a long time, but I watch TV every night using streaming devices instead.
  - phone8675309 6y ago
    > The funny thing is that I no longer channel surf The cynical side of my brain feels that this is exactly what TV stations and show producers wanted. If it's fast and easy to spin the dial and maybe stop on a competitor (and more importantly, watch their ads instead of yours) then you have to put our quality product and not annoy the customer with as many loud and irritating ads, which means that you don't make as much money from the content that bookends your ads.
- daxfohl 6y ago
  The worst is they "fixed" it with "digital knobs" now. But due to anti-glitching logic, they are still not as responsive as you want and annoying to use. Especially volume controls.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
DoreenMichele 6y ago
The rampant consumption of resources ...has outpaced the provisioning of new resources. I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it. Someone had to more or less decide to handle it that way for some reason. So I am skeptical that "it's just the nature of progress."
kiba 6y ago
I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it. Not really. It's just not a priority.
sandworm101 6y ago
Remember when you could look at a book, a guide, to see what was on and when? It never took more than a minute or two. Then came the TV channel with the slowly-scrolling list of channels (early 90s). Try figuring out today which shows will be available tomorrow at a particular time... and whether you have subscribed to that channel. Good luck. I don't think it is even possible anymore.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  Eh, most cable companies now have a dedicated guide menu with manual scrolling and search features rather than a scrolling channel, I'd say that's one of the few things to have improved since old days
jberryman 6y ago
The history of the automobile is another such example. Brief summary: it turns out the invention of the car didn't really save anyone time, it just enabled sprawl. The purpose of technology (in the POSIWID sense) is to concentrate wealth. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/self-driving-car-sales-pitch https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/self-drivi...
- dantheman 6y ago
  Did the invention of the car lead to larger living spaces? Perhaps people decided to trade time for space.
  - jfrunyon 6y ago
    Who are these "people" you're talking about? I would much rather live close to everything and walk, bike or bus. Instead I have to have a car because work is 3 miles away, doctors are 5-30 miles away, the grocery store is 5 miles away, the nearest convenience store is a mile away. And I live in the middle of one of the biggest metro areas in the country!
    - bluGill 6y ago
      I'd like to have a farm in the middle of downtown too. It isn't possible. You get more choices in the same amount of time with a car, and get more space as well. Without a car you better like the doctor withing waking distance (my family considered them quacks and has heard plenty of stories about people almost dieing because obvious things were not caught in regular visits, instead the ER had to figure them out when it was almost too late). Ymmv, I like choices. Of course cars do take up a lot of space, but even factoring that in you have more choices in a reasonable time with a car than without. Don't read this as me approving of cars. I understand the appeal and drive, but I hate it.
  - stainforth 6y ago
    Maybe supply decided for them.
dylan604 6y ago
It used to be software would get written, and then iterated over to optimize and refine it to make it smaller/faster. That got too expensive, so the devs just depended on CPU speeds increasing and drives getting larger.
iforgotpassword 6y ago
While I can see the technical reason why channel changes take a while with digital TV, I've always wondered why switching the digital input of your TV, or just changing the resolution of the connected devices takes so long. On most TVs it's over two seconds. The signal is in most cases just a stream of standalone, uncompressed frames. Switching from HDMI1 to HDMI2 should take a few milliseconds.
- gregmac 6y ago
  There's a lot going on: HDCP handshake, resolution negotiation, HDMI-CEC setup.. HDCP obviously being consumer-hostile, but the others are decent features to make things "just work".
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    Ok so HDCP might be an explanation although I wonder if it has any impact if it's not in use. Don't really know how it works tbh. As for the rest: Resolution negotiation is optional and wouldn't matter if the device is already outputting at some resolution, also this happens on different pins, so even if the device would first query the EDID of the TV to figure out what mode it prefers, the TV could meanwhile already display whatever the device is outputting. Same with CEC, this is another protocol on different pins than where the picture data is sent. HDMI really is just DVI with some extras, at least for the older versions.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Why didn't it already do all of that, before I told it to switch inputs?
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  I don't know why (but would be interested), but even PC screens are usually very slow at switching (>1 second delay), and for some inexplicable reason practically all of them turn their backlight off while doing it.
- kergonath 6y ago
  I’ve always assumed that’s because TV manufacturers choose the most under-powered SoC they can get away with, don’t put half as much RAM as it needs, and let loose incompetent programmers who don’t have to use the damn thing ever. Still very frustrating.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Having used 14.4k dialup on a 486DX2-66MHz at 640 x 480 VGA, I really don't think 2020s technology is outstandingly slow. I don't even think most phone apps are bloated, because most phone apps - and web sites - are just electronic forms decorated with a bit of eye candy. Security and reliability worry me far more. Many sites have obvious bugs in $favourite_browser, and some just don't work at all. Some of this is down to ad blocking, but that shouldn't be a problem - and the flip side is that blocking ads, trackers, and unwanted cookies seems to do wonders for page load speeds.
- bluGill 6y ago
  I've used an 8 bit computer with a 300 baud modem. One bbs I dialed into was a 8 bit computer with a whopping 4mb of ram. It was the fastest response time of any computer I've every used. Everything was in ram, and coded in assembly with speed and low code space as the concern. Modern computers should be much faster, but they aren't. They do more, but when you do something you notice the slow speed.
minimuffins 6y ago
I don't think it's the nature of progress. There's no question we have the _capacity_ to engineer our way out of these problems. They aren't unsolvable. But a lot would have to change before the necessary resources are mobilized against these kind of problems instead of churning out yet more bloat, which, let's face it, is what most of us are doing with our time every day. Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk I'm not expert enough to say if his technical solutions are correct, but it's a pretty good explication of the problem.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  He counts Linux as 17 MLoc, half of it is drivers, tinyconfig is just 300 kLoc [1]. Is there any reason to watch? Chrome is huge though. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-linux-kernel-15-million-lines-of-code https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-l...
lazyjones 6y ago
> a general problem with technology as a whole. No, not with technology as a whole. With software ...
wanderoff42 6y ago
Your last paragraph is so true. I feel that's an issue we are facing a lot in every domain. I see people writing highly inefficient back-ends Because they believe anyways we are going to scale it horizontally, so it doesn't matter. The similar applies to frontends too I guess, people don't care to optimize apps either. They're like anyways the minimum configuration on which our apps run are getting better day by day, so why not build a resource hogger! I personally believe we should start having "bootcamps" which talk about optimizations, and the cost of stupid designs. I'm also looking forward to compile time and run-time optimizations so that we don't even have to rely on the developers for it.

leadingthenet 6y ago

You call it progress, I call it regress. It seems to me that we have lower performance, exponentially higher resource consumption, and often no more functionality in a “modern” web app / Electron app compared to some desktop apps from the 90’s. And for what? To have even worse UI’s and UX’s that never conform to platform guidelines? Where’s the progress?

coliveira 6y ago
The big "dream" of web-based technologies was to allow designers the freedom to do whatever they want. But doing this has a lot of costs, which we are all paying today. In the early days of GUIs, a group would design the OS, and everyone would just use that design through the UI guidelines. It was, in my opinion, the apex of GUI programming, because you could create full featured apps without the need of an experienced designer, at least for the first few iterations. Now, I cannot even create a simple web app that doesn't look crap, and any kind of web product requires a designer to at least make it minimally usable. And the whole architecture became so complex because of the additional layers, that it looks more like a Baroque church than a modern building.
tomjen3 6y ago
The desktop apps from the 90s were better because they could actually show more information on a 600 by 800 pixel screen than a modern app can do on a full HD screen, because it puts too much whitespace. Not to mention flat design, which is without exception bad design. Buttons have borders, show them.

skohan 6y ago

I remember thinking this when OS's started butting transparent blur effects on various UI layers. As someone who's worked with computer graphics, I understood that high quality blur effects are relatively expensive. Most computers these days can handle it without breaking a sweat, but It's like why are we using these resources on the desktop environment, who's job is basically to fade into the background and facilitate other tasks? I don't think it's the nature of progress so much as it is laziness. Most developers (myself included) don't worry much about optimization until the UX performance is unacceptable. I sometimes wonder what the world could be like if we just froze hardware for 5 years and put all of our focus on performance optimization.

rusk 6y ago
I think it was to do with graphics acceleration becoming more commonplace. It was my guess that these additional effects weren’t originally intended to use desktop cpu .. tho I guess once they became the norm who knows .. although the recent trend towards “flat” UI seems to be reversing that trend ..
w0mbat 6y ago
I invented the translucent blurred window effect. It first shipped in Mac IE 5.0 in April 2000 (the non-Carbon version only), for the autocomplete window, and later that year for the web page context menu (first in the special MacHack version). The effect doesn't have to be expensive, and my original implementation was fast on millenium era machines. The goal is preserve the context of the background, while keeping foreground data readable, in a way that is natural to our human visual system. If you are doing it properly you also shift the brightness values into a more limited range to diminish the contrast and keep the tonal values away from the chosen foreground text color (this is also cheap). Done properly it is visually pleasing with virtually no effect on readability. People have coded some boneheaded imitations along the way though. They don't add the blur, or they don't adjust the brightness curve, or they make the radius much too big, or they compute some over exact Gaussian blur that is too slow. It's the nature of blur that it doesn't have to be exact to be visually pleasing and convincing.
- 6y ago

formerly_proven 6y ago

> Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new normal. The technical reason is that digital TV is a heavily compressed signal [1] (used to be MPEG2, perhaps they have moved on to h.264) with a GOP (group of pictures) length that is usually around 0.5-2 seconds. When you switch channels, the MPEG-2 decoder in your receiver needs to wait until a new GOP starts, because there is no meaningful way to decode a GOP that's "in progress". [1] And the technical reason for the compression is that analog HD needs a lot more bandwidth than analog NTSC/PAL/SECAM, while raw HD transmission would need an absurd amount of bandwidth per channel (about a gigabit/s for 1080p30). So HD television pretty much requires the use of digital compression. Efficient digital video compression requires GOP structures.

zozbot234 6y ago
Most video players can decode an "in progress" stream just fine. This obviously involves quite a few artifacts for the first 0.5–2 seconds or so, but seeing artifacts is generally preferable to seeing a totally blank screen.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  True, and the decoders in receivers already have this capability, since they keep decoding even if the forward-error-correction can't save the stream any more, resulting in similar artifacts. I'm not sure why it's not done on a channel change, perhaps it's the manufacturers not wanting their TVs to routinely show glitched footage, or perhaps advertisers don't want it because it would be against Corporate Design rules to glitch-effect the logos they use on the daily.
- frandroid 6y ago
  It's obvious that TV makers have decided that seeing artifacts is not preferable. I wish that was toggleable.
  - ipnon 6y ago
    Implicitly TV users are also prohibited from making their own technical decisions. I claim this is because the TV predates the era of open computing platforms like Unix.

noja 6y ago

I swear cell phones have a slight latency compared to a landline too.

rusk 6y ago
Depends on your network and your landline but I guess a fairly isshy network compared with a fairly common POT landline you would definitely see a difference. Packet switching (Vs circuit switching) alone should in principal introduce a latency - then there’s a lot more interconnects - and on top of that whatever hocus pocus they use to optimise their (digital) bandwidth usage. Of course modern land lines probably are more like mobile now but not unreasonable to expect circuit switches analogue POT are still widely used.
toast0 6y ago
Cell phones have encoding/compression delay on the voice part, delays waiting for a transmit slot if the air interface is time division multiplexed, sometimes a jitter buffer to allow for resends/error correction, and often less than ideal routing (lots of people are using numbers from out of state, which may require the audio path to traverse that state). Originally POTS was circuit switched analog connection between you and the other party --- only delays from the wires, and maybe amplifiers. Nowadays POTS is most likely digitally sampled at the telco side, but each sample is sent individually --- there's no delay to get a large enough buffer to send, because for multiplexed lines each individual line is sampled at the same rate and a frame has one sample from each.
wrycoder 6y ago
More than slight. Stand next to a friend and call him on your cell. Then try various things like saying “ping”. The results are quite amusing. Or put one phone on speaker.
rootusrootus 6y ago
The only thing cell phones have on copper land lines is portability. In all other ways they suck. I think we only tolerate this because most of us have completely forgotten how much better land lines were, or we never experienced them to begin with. The first big hit to phones came with the cordless models. No longer comfortable to hold against your ear, the earpieces got flat or even convex, and mashing it up against your head made for an unpleasant converation. But hey, we got rid of cords! And then the change to cell phones, with their tiny fraction of available bandwidth, terrible sound quality, high latency, high failure rate, etc. The astonishing thing is that bandwidth isn't a big deal now, and we could have improved basically all aspects of mobile calls to be within spitting distance of what we used to have 30 years ago. No wonder people don't like to talk on the phone any more.

lumost 6y ago

Alternately, the value of low-latency experiences is not as high as we believed - or it's poorly measured. Particularly in Enterprise software, the time to complete a workflow or view specific data matters a lot - the time to load a page is a component of that, but customers will gladly trade latency for a faster e2e experience with less manual error checking. In consumer the big limiting factor is engagement, a low-latency experience will enhance engagement. However it's possible to hide latency in ways that weren't possible before such as infinite scrolls and early loading of assets. The engagement on the 50th social feed result has less to do with the latency to load the result, and more to do with how engaging the content is.

jfrunyon 6y ago
Meanwhile, most of those ways to hide latency have other issues, like the good old "link I need is below the infinite scroll" or "I just want to go back to a specific time, but I have to scroll through every single thing between then and now instead of just jumping 10 pages at a time". Which we would avoid if instead we tackled the actual problem.

massysett 6y ago

It is the nature of progress: progress is doing more with less. That’s increased productivity. Of course software now uses more computing resources, so that’s not doing more with less. But the computer is cheap. What’s expensive is the humans who program the computer. Their time is expensive, and getting experienced, expert humans is even more expensive. So we now have websites that have rich features bolted together using frameworks. Same for desktop software, embedded systems, and whatever else. They’re optimized for developer time and features, not for load time because that’s not expensive, at least not in comparison. As a user the only solution I see to this is to use old fashioned dumb products rather than cheaply developed “smart” ones. For instance I’m not going near a smart light switch, or a smart lawn sprinkler controller. Old dumb ones are cheap and easy and fast and predictable.

finnthehuman 6y ago
>But the computer is cheap. What’s expensive is the humans who program the computer. This is a nice half-truth we tell ourselves, but that's not the full story. There exists plenty of optimizations where the programmer-time would be smaller than the additional hardware cost. And those losses compound. But they're a little too hard to track, and cause is a little too far divorced from effect. I did our first ever perf pass on an embedded application as we started getting resource constrained. I knocked 25% off the top in a week. Even if I had spent man-months for a 10% savings, try and tell me that's more expensive than spinning new boards. That's not to say we're opposed to hardware changes; we do them all the time. But the cost curve is weighted towards the front so it's more attractive to spend a non-zero amount of developer time right now to investigate if this other looming spend is avoidable. That's not the case when you're looking at controlling the acceleration of an AWS bill that spreads your spend out month to month through eternity. Who wants to spend a big chunk of money up front to figure out if you can change that spend rate trend by a tiny percentage? Even if you do, and get a perf gain, but someone else on the team ships a perf loss? Then it doesn't feel real, and you can only see what you spent. Even if you have good data about the effect of both changes (which you don't), the fact the gain was offset means the sense of effect is diminished. And rather than investigate perf, people can always lie to themselves that the cost is all about needing to "scale." That way they convince themselves not only was there nothing they could have done, the cost is a sign that their company is hot shit. If you don't think that kind of perf difference is real, Look at Maciej's comparison of pinboard and anonymized-del.icio.us https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (ctrl-f "ACME") And if perf has any impact on sales, cause and effect are even further apart. You might be able to measure the effect perf has on your sales website directly, but if that feedback loop involves a user developing an opinion over days/weeks? Forget about knowing. Oh, sure they'll complain, but there are no metrics, so we get the rationalizations we see in this thread.

0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago

> Ever noticed how long it takes to kill an app and restart it? Ever notice how much more often you have to do that, even on a 5-month old flagship phone At least car crashes are still low latency.

notyourwork 6y ago

> Ever noticed how long it takes to kill an app and restart it? Ever notice how much more often you have to do that, even on a 5-month old flagship phone? Is this an android problem? I don't really ever have to close apps unless the app itself gets stuck into a broken state and forcing close to restart can correct the issue.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it. I suspect that the root cause is that nobody understands what's going on from the UI down to the hardware, and nobody is incentivized (or even allowed) to spend the time it would take to actually do so.

Unklejoe 6y ago

> Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? I think about this every time I use the Hulu "Guide" on my Fire TV. It's extremely slow and cumbersome. I remember using the early digital cable boxes in like 2005 which were much more responsive, and honestly, the UI was much better too.

daxfohl 6y ago

Microwaves are another example. Used to just turn a knob to the number of minutes you want, and done. Now it's five button presses. (Maybe not exactly a latency thing, but a UX one that makes it slower).

BenjiWiebe 6y ago
At least some microwaves will run N minutes when you press the N button once. Also you can hit the add 30 seconds button a couple of times, and it starts running instantly.

cuddlybacon 6y ago

> Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Remember when turning a TV on was <0.5s? My current dumb TV takes a good while to turn on. When I press the power button, it takes about 1s for the indicator light to change than another 2 or 3 to begin displaying anything.

rsynnott 6y ago
.... No, actually. Most CRTs took a long time to come on. Early LCDs, maybe?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cuddlybacon 6y ago
  Interesting. I meant CRTs. Maybe my memory is a bit rose tinted. Still, I remember never having confusion about whether my CRT TVs where responding to the power on button press or not. There are plenty of times where I turn my current TV off since I think it didn't receive the first button press.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Most CRTs made an obvious _noise_ when turned on (actually, one of the curses of good high-frequency hearing was that they made an obvious noise for the whole time they were on, though I think a lot of people couldn't hear them after warmup). That helped, I suppose.
    - kergonath 6y ago
      Exactly, feedback was immediate, which helps a lot with UX.
- kergonath 6y ago
  The image took some time to stabilise (and was black at first), but the things turned on instantly, with the light indicator visible without delay (and the sound of the CRT turning on). Now, quite often I have to wait 5s to see whether the button push was registered, push again because the TV still does nothing, and then watch as the thing turned on just as I was pressing and interprets the second push as a signal to go on standby (5 more seconds with an obnoxious message about it going to sleep, and yet 5 more to wake it up). It’s like the USB-A that needs to be rotated twice every time you want to plug something.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

I once had a glitch on my iphone back in iOS 9.x. The glitch made it that all transitions/animations were disabled and it was a fantastic experience to click an app and have it open instantly. Turning off animations in IOS settings doesn't make it as fast as that glitch did unfortunately.

thatguy0900 6y ago
First thing I do with a new android is turn off all animation in developer settings, much better experience. Shame that glitch isn't reproducible

wnevets 6y ago

>Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new One of the worst parts of the over the air digital switch over was how much harder it was to channel surf quickly.

dghughes 6y ago

>Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new normal Phones used to be rotary dial but then touch tone phones with number buttons were introduced. I was reading an article about human brains and its expectations. Going from a touch tone phone to an old rotary style phone seems excruciatingly slow to our brains. Depending on the number a 1 on each it's very close in duration but a 9 or a 0 on a rotary compared to a touch tone 9 or 0 seems glacial in speed.

rsynnott 6y ago
Even worse; in some countries, touch tone exchanges took a while to roll out, with the result that keypad phones which supported both pulse dialing and tone dialing were common. And then people never switched them over to tone dialing. There were people pulse dialing into the 21st century.
- coryrc 6y ago
  In the 90s, my family saved $2.68/mo on the phone bill by opting out of tone dialing.

fractal618 6y ago

You had me at: > Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? There's nothing less satisfying than smushing down those rubbery remote control buttons for an extra 2000 to 4000 milliseconds to change the channel. Don't get me started on entering the wrong channel numbers. That gives me PTSD.

rohan1024 6y ago
What's worst is the black screen in between the channel switch. If you used to watch TV with your lights off, you now stop doing that.
thewebcount 6y ago
Yeah, I remember when that first started happening, and I agree it was really frustrating. The funny thing is that I no longer channel surf, so I no longer hit this. I realized the other day that I haven't watched cable TV in a long time. My TiVo is empty and has been for a long time, but I watch TV every night using streaming devices instead.
- phone8675309 6y ago
  > The funny thing is that I no longer channel surf The cynical side of my brain feels that this is exactly what TV stations and show producers wanted. If it's fast and easy to spin the dial and maybe stop on a competitor (and more importantly, watch their ads instead of yours) then you have to put our quality product and not annoy the customer with as many loud and irritating ads, which means that you don't make as much money from the content that bookends your ads.
daxfohl 6y ago
The worst is they "fixed" it with "digital knobs" now. But due to anti-glitching logic, they are still not as responsive as you want and annoying to use. Especially volume controls.
- formerly_proven 6y ago

DoreenMichele 6y ago

The rampant consumption of resources ...has outpaced the provisioning of new resources. I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it. Someone had to more or less decide to handle it that way for some reason. So I am skeptical that "it's just the nature of progress."

kiba 6y ago

I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it. Not really. It's just not a priority.

sandworm101 6y ago

Remember when you could look at a book, a guide, to see what was on and when? It never took more than a minute or two. Then came the TV channel with the slowly-scrolling list of channels (early 90s). Try figuring out today which shows will be available tomorrow at a particular time... and whether you have subscribed to that channel. Good luck. I don't think it is even possible anymore.

thatguy0900 6y ago
Eh, most cable companies now have a dedicated guide menu with manual scrolling and search features rather than a scrolling channel, I'd say that's one of the few things to have improved since old days

jberryman 6y ago

The history of the automobile is another such example. Brief summary: it turns out the invention of the car didn't really save anyone time, it just enabled sprawl. The purpose of technology (in the POSIWID sense) is to concentrate wealth. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/self-driving-car-sales-pitch https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/self-drivi...

dantheman 6y ago
Did the invention of the car lead to larger living spaces? Perhaps people decided to trade time for space.
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  Who are these "people" you're talking about? I would much rather live close to everything and walk, bike or bus. Instead I have to have a car because work is 3 miles away, doctors are 5-30 miles away, the grocery store is 5 miles away, the nearest convenience store is a mile away. And I live in the middle of one of the biggest metro areas in the country!
  - bluGill 6y ago
    I'd like to have a farm in the middle of downtown too. It isn't possible. You get more choices in the same amount of time with a car, and get more space as well. Without a car you better like the doctor withing waking distance (my family considered them quacks and has heard plenty of stories about people almost dieing because obvious things were not caught in regular visits, instead the ER had to figure them out when it was almost too late). Ymmv, I like choices. Of course cars do take up a lot of space, but even factoring that in you have more choices in a reasonable time with a car than without. Don't read this as me approving of cars. I understand the appeal and drive, but I hate it.
- stainforth 6y ago
  Maybe supply decided for them.

dylan604 6y ago

It used to be software would get written, and then iterated over to optimize and refine it to make it smaller/faster. That got too expensive, so the devs just depended on CPU speeds increasing and drives getting larger.

iforgotpassword 6y ago

While I can see the technical reason why channel changes take a while with digital TV, I've always wondered why switching the digital input of your TV, or just changing the resolution of the connected devices takes so long. On most TVs it's over two seconds. The signal is in most cases just a stream of standalone, uncompressed frames. Switching from HDMI1 to HDMI2 should take a few milliseconds.

gregmac 6y ago
There's a lot going on: HDCP handshake, resolution negotiation, HDMI-CEC setup.. HDCP obviously being consumer-hostile, but the others are decent features to make things "just work".
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Ok so HDCP might be an explanation although I wonder if it has any impact if it's not in use. Don't really know how it works tbh. As for the rest: Resolution negotiation is optional and wouldn't matter if the device is already outputting at some resolution, also this happens on different pins, so even if the device would first query the EDID of the TV to figure out what mode it prefers, the TV could meanwhile already display whatever the device is outputting. Same with CEC, this is another protocol on different pins than where the picture data is sent. HDMI really is just DVI with some extras, at least for the older versions.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Why didn't it already do all of that, before I told it to switch inputs?
formerly_proven 6y ago
I don't know why (but would be interested), but even PC screens are usually very slow at switching (>1 second delay), and for some inexplicable reason practically all of them turn their backlight off while doing it.
kergonath 6y ago
I’ve always assumed that’s because TV manufacturers choose the most under-powered SoC they can get away with, don’t put half as much RAM as it needs, and let loose incompetent programmers who don’t have to use the damn thing ever. Still very frustrating.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

Having used 14.4k dialup on a 486DX2-66MHz at 640 x 480 VGA, I really don't think 2020s technology is outstandingly slow. I don't even think most phone apps are bloated, because most phone apps - and web sites - are just electronic forms decorated with a bit of eye candy. Security and reliability worry me far more. Many sites have obvious bugs in $favourite_browser, and some just don't work at all. Some of this is down to ad blocking, but that shouldn't be a problem - and the flip side is that blocking ads, trackers, and unwanted cookies seems to do wonders for page load speeds.

bluGill 6y ago
I've used an 8 bit computer with a 300 baud modem. One bbs I dialed into was a 8 bit computer with a whopping 4mb of ram. It was the fastest response time of any computer I've every used. Everything was in ram, and coded in assembly with speed and low code space as the concern. Modern computers should be much faster, but they aren't. They do more, but when you do something you notice the slow speed.

minimuffins 6y ago

I don't think it's the nature of progress. There's no question we have the _capacity_ to engineer our way out of these problems. They aren't unsolvable. But a lot would have to change before the necessary resources are mobilized against these kind of problems instead of churning out yet more bloat, which, let's face it, is what most of us are doing with our time every day. Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk I'm not expert enough to say if his technical solutions are correct, but it's a pretty good explication of the problem.

sergeykish 6y ago
He counts Linux as 17 MLoc, half of it is drivers, tinyconfig is just 300 kLoc [1]. Is there any reason to watch? Chrome is huge though. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-linux-kernel-15-million-lines-of-code https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-l...

lazyjones 6y ago

> a general problem with technology as a whole. No, not with technology as a whole. With software ...

wanderoff42 6y ago

Your last paragraph is so true. I feel that's an issue we are facing a lot in every domain. I see people writing highly inefficient back-ends Because they believe anyways we are going to scale it horizontally, so it doesn't matter. The similar applies to frontends too I guess, people don't care to optimize apps either. They're like anyways the minimum configuration on which our apps run are getting better day by day, so why not build a resource hogger! I personally believe we should start having "bootcamps" which talk about optimizations, and the cost of stupid designs. I'm also looking forward to compile time and run-time optimizations so that we don't even have to rely on the developers for it.