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Finally, an influential developer who cares about the other 99%. I've lived in dozens of places. I've lived in urban areas, suburban areas, rural areas. I've e

by jart 5y ago

Finally, an influential developer who cares about the other 99%. I've lived in dozens of places. I've lived in urban areas, suburban areas, rural areas. I've even lived on a boat. With the exception of wealthy areas, reasonable internet is a constant struggle. It's also never due to the speed though, in my experience. The biggest issues are always packet loss, intermittent outages, latency, and jitter. High speed internet doesn't count for much, aside checking off a box, if it goes out for a couple hours every few hours, or has 10% packet loss. You'd be surprised how common stuff like that is. Try visiting the domicile of someone who isn't rich and running mtr. Another thing I've noticed ISPs doing is they seem to intentionally add things like jitter to latency-sensitive low-bandwidth connections like SSH, because they want people to buy business class. So, in many ways, 56k was better than modern high speed internet. Because yes, connections had slow throughput, but even with 300 baud the latency was fast and the reliability was good enough that you could count on it to be something you could actually use when connecting to a central computer and running vi. Bill Joy actually wrote vi on that kind of internet connection, which deeply influenced its design.

icedchai 5y ago
I had an ISDN connection at home in the mid 90's. In many ways, it felt faster than today's broadband because the web was still built for dial up. I later upgraded to an early cable modem sometime around 1998 (3 megabits, I think.) The web was still, very much, built for dialup and things felt incredibly fast. Despite having a connection orders of magnitude faster today, things feel far more bloated and sluggish. Bloated web sites are everywhere.
- jart 5y ago
  Just get a Ryzen CPU with business class gigabit internet and block display ads and third party cookies. The wild-eyed web frameworks and advertisements of our age were designed to consume the glut created by the cheapest silver status symbol, on which they now press the limits of not only bandwidth, but also CPUs and RAM too. For me I think it was around 2015 when I started feeling the heat of my Macbook scorching my legs each time I loaded a news website. I thought, oh my, am I being swept away by the performance tide already? So if your box is twice as fast as those things, then the modern web will feel fast. What's sad is most people aren't even granted that choice.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    The sad thing is that I have gigabit internet and a fast gaming PC, yet many websites are still unbearably slow. I recently got the chance to speed up a website that I often use myself as a part of my consulting work, and despite my best efforts a further 10x speed up was left on the table because of insurmountable apathy by the developers. In the last two decades, I've met one (1) web developer that cared about performance at all. One! The rest are blithely unaware of the profligate waste of CPU time and network bandwidth their "features" are consuming. Things like two different third-party APMs on top of Google Analytics, the CDN analytics, and in-house analytics taking up 90% of both the bandwidth and server load. I regularly see web sites with all caching, compression, and HTTP settings left on defaults. As in: private, off, and HTTP/1.1 only. It's mind boggling how slow these sites are, in an era where benchmarks show that modern servers can put out 100K responses per second!
    - jart 5y ago
      My web server can put out 1000K gzip encoded responses per second on a cheapo $1,000 Core i9 PC. https://justine.lol/redbean/ https://justine.lol/redbean/ Here's what you do. You start off by showing people papers like this https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34439.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which say "users are 1.5 times more likely to choose the fast engine". That's how you get resources to do the 10x optimization. But doing the optimization isn't enough, if you can't tie the results into something people care about. To do that, you're already paying the price for Google Analytics telemetry. You can use its API to A/B test the slow vs. fast version of your website for conversions or whatever behavior you're trying to optimize. People fall in love with stuff that goes fast in unpredictable ways. Be prepared for that. Sometimes it helps to just walk around the office and watch people using your website, to get a basic idea of how they feel about it and how they're engaging. For instance you might discover they're constantly alt-tabbing to some blog while they're waiting for pages to load. In that case you can quantify a productivity impact across everyone who's using the website that likely far exceeds your own salary. Then the people who didn't care might start paying attention. All you had to do was make a web page less sluggish.
brundolf 5y ago
> High speed internet doesn't count for much, aside checking off a box, if it goes out for a couple hours every few hours This adds an interesting dimension to things. In a roundabout way, for this kind of case, have you ever been glad to be using a PWA (with client-side caching) instead of a regular website?
- jart 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever used a website that's able to run offline before aside from Google Docs (and that requires a browser extension). When the Internet goes offline I close the browser and use regular software where my mind can context switch to offline mode to minimize any risk of being further distracted by an outage that's not within my power to address. The way I see it, these PWA client-side caching technologies are mostly used by news websites to install permanent service workers on my PC that run in the background after the tab is closed to mitm http requests, phone home every day, and have a kill switch over my data associated with their origin. What's my data? I don't even know. For example, I noticed the Western Digital Forum (I don't even remember visiting it) had a service worker that managed to store 1gb of content to my hard disk. What's in it? I don't know. Chrome doesn't let me see it. Maybe it made the whole forum available offline for me to enjoy. Or maybe I'm an unknowing member of their new cloud storage service. Can't tell. The lack of visibility, lack of consent, and lack of options to disable these emerging standards are in themselves an issue. We should be focusing on making local apps better, rather than having browsers foray into territories that are not in sync at all with expectations.

by jart 5y ago

icedchai 5y ago

I had an ISDN connection at home in the mid 90's. In many ways, it felt faster than today's broadband because the web was still built for dial up. I later upgraded to an early cable modem sometime around 1998 (3 megabits, I think.) The web was still, very much, built for dialup and things felt incredibly fast. Despite having a connection orders of magnitude faster today, things feel far more bloated and sluggish. Bloated web sites are everywhere.

jart 5y ago
Just get a Ryzen CPU with business class gigabit internet and block display ads and third party cookies. The wild-eyed web frameworks and advertisements of our age were designed to consume the glut created by the cheapest silver status symbol, on which they now press the limits of not only bandwidth, but also CPUs and RAM too. For me I think it was around 2015 when I started feeling the heat of my Macbook scorching my legs each time I loaded a news website. I thought, oh my, am I being swept away by the performance tide already? So if your box is twice as fast as those things, then the modern web will feel fast. What's sad is most people aren't even granted that choice.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  The sad thing is that I have gigabit internet and a fast gaming PC, yet many websites are still unbearably slow. I recently got the chance to speed up a website that I often use myself as a part of my consulting work, and despite my best efforts a further 10x speed up was left on the table because of insurmountable apathy by the developers. In the last two decades, I've met one (1) web developer that cared about performance at all. One! The rest are blithely unaware of the profligate waste of CPU time and network bandwidth their "features" are consuming. Things like two different third-party APMs on top of Google Analytics, the CDN analytics, and in-house analytics taking up 90% of both the bandwidth and server load. I regularly see web sites with all caching, compression, and HTTP settings left on defaults. As in: private, off, and HTTP/1.1 only. It's mind boggling how slow these sites are, in an era where benchmarks show that modern servers can put out 100K responses per second!
  - jart 5y ago
    My web server can put out 1000K gzip encoded responses per second on a cheapo $1,000 Core i9 PC. https://justine.lol/redbean/ https://justine.lol/redbean/ Here's what you do. You start off by showing people papers like this https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34439.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which say "users are 1.5 times more likely to choose the fast engine". That's how you get resources to do the 10x optimization. But doing the optimization isn't enough, if you can't tie the results into something people care about. To do that, you're already paying the price for Google Analytics telemetry. You can use its API to A/B test the slow vs. fast version of your website for conversions or whatever behavior you're trying to optimize. People fall in love with stuff that goes fast in unpredictable ways. Be prepared for that. Sometimes it helps to just walk around the office and watch people using your website, to get a basic idea of how they feel about it and how they're engaging. For instance you might discover they're constantly alt-tabbing to some blog while they're waiting for pages to load. In that case you can quantify a productivity impact across everyone who's using the website that likely far exceeds your own salary. Then the people who didn't care might start paying attention. All you had to do was make a web page less sluggish.

brundolf 5y ago

> High speed internet doesn't count for much, aside checking off a box, if it goes out for a couple hours every few hours This adds an interesting dimension to things. In a roundabout way, for this kind of case, have you ever been glad to be using a PWA (with client-side caching) instead of a regular website?

jart 5y ago
I don't think I've ever used a website that's able to run offline before aside from Google Docs (and that requires a browser extension). When the Internet goes offline I close the browser and use regular software where my mind can context switch to offline mode to minimize any risk of being further distracted by an outage that's not within my power to address. The way I see it, these PWA client-side caching technologies are mostly used by news websites to install permanent service workers on my PC that run in the background after the tab is closed to mitm http requests, phone home every day, and have a kill switch over my data associated with their origin. What's my data? I don't even know. For example, I noticed the Western Digital Forum (I don't even remember visiting it) had a service worker that managed to store 1gb of content to my hard disk. What's in it? I don't know. Chrome doesn't let me see it. Maybe it made the whole forum available offline for me to enjoy. Or maybe I'm an unknowing member of their new cloud storage service. Can't tell. The lack of visibility, lack of consent, and lack of options to disable these emerging standards are in themselves an issue. We should be focusing on making local apps better, rather than having browsers foray into territories that are not in sync at all with expectations.