4 ms·
Hey, look, it's simple: just spend $5k on a new top-of-the-line M1 Max MacBook, then it'll be as fast as IRC was on a 133Mhz MMX Pentium 1. Slack is great; it'
by seanp2k2 5y ago
Hey, look, it's simple: just spend $5k on a new top-of-the-line M1 Max MacBook, then it'll be as fast as IRC was on a 133Mhz MMX Pentium 1.
Slack is great; it's like "hey, we took IRC and added inline images, now it's three orders of magnitude slower". Google Sheets is great in the same way: "hey, we took Excel and removed half the features plus now it's a few orders of magnitude slower BUT EASIER TO SHARE THINGS". Spotify is similar: "Like WinAmp, but slow, but with a subscription you can listen to most of what you want immediately and share things easily." These are in ascending order of their actual value compared to their predecessors, I guess.
Distributing the load of webapps makes sense if you've ever had to run a few thousand web servers running PHP apps, but yeah, running a framework server-side to render the page again and calling it modern is just kinda...the same thing we had before with a fresh coat of paint and more levels of abstraction.
Back in the day, we had CPAN, PEAR, and PECL. Now we have NPM and approximately 18 trillion modules. You can get stuff that does all kinds of useful types of manipulation, but under the hood some of it is still just a wrapper around some combination of zlib, FFmpeg, OpenSSL, and maybe Boost, plus TensorFlow or OpenCV (which can use FFmpeg) these days.
The amount of truly novel problems we're solving still seems low. "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away", or I guess these days, "What Lisa giveth, Sundar taketh away"?
- jonny_eh 5y agoSlack has way more killer features than inline images, such as easy to control authentication.
- mhitza 5y agoWhat do you mean by easy to control authentication?
- jonny_eh 5y agoI was thinking OAuth and SSO.
- mhitza 5y agoI don't think extending a server bot to support OAuth/SSO can be that hard.
- stnmtn 5y agoAre you suggesting that a massive company should run their own IRC server, complete with bots that handle OAuth and access control, history saving, document downloading?
- mhitza 5y agoI'm not suggesting anything really. If anything I'd be happier for even more asynchronous collaboration via email, and realtime chat available as an exception. In the thread chain I was just curious why people think IRC could not be a Slack replacement. Related to your question about these integration services. Running an IRC server is definitely not complicated. Bots which implement authentication/authorization already exist (NickServ/ChanServ/X). History saving is also common, and for in-client message history a bouncer is a pretty good tool to have. Document downloading, you have DCC, or yet other bots you can query/download from (pretty common in the mp3 download era). If there was incentive someone could create a bundled package that unifies all these different components + a more modern client interface and people would not have any issue using. It's not in the problem space I'm interested to work on, but functionally even the more restricted existing IRC offering would be something I'd rather use than the gif meme filled, emoji overdosed chats I've had on Slack. On the other hand, I've been an independent contractor for a couple of years now and I had the pleasure of not being part of large team slack channels anymore anyway.
- Waterluvian 5y agoIRC isn’t even remotely competitive vs Slack for 99% of its users. It’s the same ignorant take you hear from people who complain about Excel files. The overwhelming majority of users do not experience the cosmos at all like you do.
- somewhatBored 5y agoOne thing about Sheets vs. Excel: Appscript for automation is a lot easier to get set up with than VBA ever was to the point where my org has a ton of things that we just throw a small amount of Appscript at (E.G. generating performance reports) because it just works and it doesn't require a lot of processing power (yay, cloud!)