4 ms·

Love the comments. Blows my mind how diverse the reactions are. I read most HN on a 9 year old iPad. It's savage, raw compute would be fast enough, but limited

Love the comments. Blows my mind how diverse the reactions are. I read most HN on a 9 year old iPad. It's savage, raw compute would be fast enough, but limited RAM and pinned to a very old version of Mobile Safari. I generally keep JavaScript disabled, otherwise hangs are all too common. If I can't at least read the basic idea of a web article at these settings, I move on. Perhaps it's arrogant of me, but I'm exasperated by current web design practice that requires megabytes of JavaScript to render a landing page. `gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old iPad has trouble scrolling the page of text even after the font is rendered. My comments are probably irrelevant, but I'm not going to be surfing the web on a 16-core workstation with 32 gigabytes of RAM.

watersb 5y ago
There are many great suggestions in the comments, which are good advice if I were trying to solve the problem of the limits imposed by my antique tablet. But that's not quite my point. The comments helped my realize that I actually had a point I was trying to make. And I believe it's a point worth making, if not exactly a point worth reading... Well, anyway the point is: _Always write to someone._ 1. Be the person who is listening 2. and then begin to write 3. Read what you just created, as the person who is listening _Close the loop._ I've been creating web things since 1995, and it always astonishes me, how rarely anyone tests thier end product. Individuals, small business, contracts, major international brand campaigns -- at every level. It's not 100%, and the tech term of art "eat your own dog food" comes from this, so there's the ability to imagine otherwise, but all too often, we just toss it over the wall and hope it lands somewhere. Two examples that will stick with me forever: It's 1998, and we're doing a major corporate brand website. The target demographic is low to mid income pet owners, rural and urban alike. It's literally dog food. The design is done in a gorgeous glass high rise office tower, using $10,000 Macintosh computers with 20-inch displays. The target demographic uses Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, at best 640 x 480 VGA 256 colors, often 32-color palette. There is a testing lab closet with some old beater PCs running Mosaic and AOL, but no one goes in there, Windows is scary those machines are junk! I go in there. I try it. The site is a hypnagogic vomit of color on the limited palette display. It's 1997, and we're building a technology to create web sites that can be downloaded over a slow dialup overnight, then browsed offline. Look up Marimba Castanet. This isn't that product, but that's the idea... The team works for months on this. In an office. In Silicon Valley. With 100 Mb/s network connections. I'm the only person on my team to go home, dial up at 9600 baud, and give it a shot. We write for many reasons. How do we switch from writing to organize our thoughts, to writing as compassionate communication? Because they are two different things, and I've been all too often doing the one when I think I'm doing the other.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Yes. Please dogfood. I got a free handset on Boost Mobile for $15/month I can use to dog food my web designs. It suffers the same problem as your iPad - 90% of the modern web is death to this poor old Samsung. 300MB home pages are now common. I bought a decent tablet with a crack in the screen for $20 on eBay. It's perfect for testing. There is literally no excuse not to test your designs. There are so many more tools available in 2022, and the web standards have become so much kinder towards writing lighter pages (e.g. things that were Javascript now moving into HTML and CSS).
  - watersb 5y ago
    I guess it comes down to the fact that no one gets paid to fix anything. Visual redesign, sure, the client will pay for that. Fixing an existing visual design when problems are reported? Nope. And as @gwern mentioned, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961582 , the problems won't get reported. The contract didn't include ongoing maintenance or instrumentation to detect problems. So we can't do it.
gwern 5y ago
> `gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old iPad has trouble scrolling the page of text even after the font is rendered. I use the standard `display: swap;` settings on fonts, so you shouldn't be seeing blank pages at all, your Safari browser should be showing the text immediately (and then, possibly, re-rendering once the SSfP font subset downloads). When I check https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls for Safari support, I see that Safari browsers got swap like 5 years ago. (Relatively quick, as Safari things go...) So I think that explains your problem. You are just using such an ancient browser (all Safari versions that old collectively constitute like 0.3% market share now) that it lacks basic performance optimizations that web devs need to take for granted. I held up my half of the bargain and used the relevant optimizations. Perhaps it's time you upgrade?
- watersb 5y ago
  Wow, thanks for responding about this! ---- `font-display:swap` is great Font-display on CSS-Tricks: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-display/ https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-display/ MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Can I Use: https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls Last iOS for my iPad 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#11.1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#11.1 ^^^^ October 31, 2017 ---- I don't expect things to work well in these circumstances. Completely out of scope. I do wonder, though, what the wide world out there -- the non-computer-programmers -- might take away from all this. A web browser is the USB-C of software. It plugs into everything, and most people have no mental model of why things fail the way they do. Thanks very much for gwern.net, an inspiration for non-blogging me.
  - gwern 5y ago
    They just put up with it. "They'll never tell you it's broken": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... In this case, I think most people replace their iPads before they are old enough to attend middle school, so the problem wouldn't arise.
tinus_hn 5y ago
If the iOS on there is not too ancient you can use the filters in Firefox for iOS to block custom fonts. But although I’m not interested in the discussion I’d suggest upgrading to a supported device.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
galaxyLogic 5y ago
You make a good point. Medium is the message. In the recording industry they spent a lot of effort optimizing recordings for AM radios. The question is not "Does it sound great on state of the art Hi-Fi?" but "Does it sounds great for most of the listeners?"
legrande 5y ago
You could try installing an RSS app on the iPad and browse your favorite sites in an efficient way, although I'm not sure modern RSS apps even work on old iPads, so I think you might have to get the latest model of iPad for that to work. RSS greatly diminishes your screentime and it's up to you to filter out crap you don't want to see (mostly through curation of the feeds you subscribe to).

watersb 5y ago

There are many great suggestions in the comments, which are good advice if I were trying to solve the problem of the limits imposed by my antique tablet. But that's not quite my point. The comments helped my realize that I actually had a point I was trying to make. And I believe it's a point worth making, if not exactly a point worth reading... Well, anyway the point is: _Always write to someone._ 1. Be the person who is listening 2. and then begin to write 3. Read what you just created, as the person who is listening _Close the loop._ I've been creating web things since 1995, and it always astonishes me, how rarely anyone tests thier end product. Individuals, small business, contracts, major international brand campaigns -- at every level. It's not 100%, and the tech term of art "eat your own dog food" comes from this, so there's the ability to imagine otherwise, but all too often, we just toss it over the wall and hope it lands somewhere. Two examples that will stick with me forever: It's 1998, and we're doing a major corporate brand website. The target demographic is low to mid income pet owners, rural and urban alike. It's literally dog food. The design is done in a gorgeous glass high rise office tower, using $10,000 Macintosh computers with 20-inch displays. The target demographic uses Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, at best 640 x 480 VGA 256 colors, often 32-color palette. There is a testing lab closet with some old beater PCs running Mosaic and AOL, but no one goes in there, Windows is scary those machines are junk! I go in there. I try it. The site is a hypnagogic vomit of color on the limited palette display. It's 1997, and we're building a technology to create web sites that can be downloaded over a slow dialup overnight, then browsed offline. Look up Marimba Castanet. This isn't that product, but that's the idea... The team works for months on this. In an office. In Silicon Valley. With 100 Mb/s network connections. I'm the only person on my team to go home, dial up at 9600 baud, and give it a shot. We write for many reasons. How do we switch from writing to organize our thoughts, to writing as compassionate communication? Because they are two different things, and I've been all too often doing the one when I think I'm doing the other.

kingcharles 5y ago
Yes. Please dogfood. I got a free handset on Boost Mobile for $15/month I can use to dog food my web designs. It suffers the same problem as your iPad - 90% of the modern web is death to this poor old Samsung. 300MB home pages are now common. I bought a decent tablet with a crack in the screen for $20 on eBay. It's perfect for testing. There is literally no excuse not to test your designs. There are so many more tools available in 2022, and the web standards have become so much kinder towards writing lighter pages (e.g. things that were Javascript now moving into HTML and CSS).
- watersb 5y ago
  I guess it comes down to the fact that no one gets paid to fix anything. Visual redesign, sure, the client will pay for that. Fixing an existing visual design when problems are reported? Nope. And as @gwern mentioned, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961582 , the problems won't get reported. The contract didn't include ongoing maintenance or instrumentation to detect problems. So we can't do it.

gwern 5y ago

> `gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old iPad has trouble scrolling the page of text even after the font is rendered. I use the standard `display: swap;` settings on fonts, so you shouldn't be seeing blank pages at all, your Safari browser should be showing the text immediately (and then, possibly, re-rendering once the SSfP font subset downloads). When I check https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls for Safari support, I see that Safari browsers got swap like 5 years ago. (Relatively quick, as Safari things go...) So I think that explains your problem. You are just using such an ancient browser (all Safari versions that old collectively constitute like 0.3% market share now) that it lacks basic performance optimizations that web devs need to take for granted. I held up my half of the bargain and used the relevant optimizations. Perhaps it's time you upgrade?

watersb 5y ago
Wow, thanks for responding about this! ---- `font-display:swap` is great Font-display on CSS-Tricks: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-display/ https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-display/ MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Can I Use: https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls Last iOS for my iPad 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#11.1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#11.1 ^^^^ October 31, 2017 ---- I don't expect things to work well in these circumstances. Completely out of scope. I do wonder, though, what the wide world out there -- the non-computer-programmers -- might take away from all this. A web browser is the USB-C of software. It plugs into everything, and most people have no mental model of why things fail the way they do. Thanks very much for gwern.net, an inspiration for non-blogging me.
- gwern 5y ago
  They just put up with it. "They'll never tell you it's broken": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... In this case, I think most people replace their iPads before they are old enough to attend middle school, so the problem wouldn't arise.

tinus_hn 5y ago

If the iOS on there is not too ancient you can use the filters in Firefox for iOS to block custom fonts. But although I’m not interested in the discussion I’d suggest upgrading to a supported device.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

galaxyLogic 5y ago

You make a good point. Medium is the message. In the recording industry they spent a lot of effort optimizing recordings for AM radios. The question is not "Does it sound great on state of the art Hi-Fi?" but "Does it sounds great for most of the listeners?"

legrande 5y ago

You could try installing an RSS app on the iPad and browse your favorite sites in an efficient way, although I'm not sure modern RSS apps even work on old iPads, so I think you might have to get the latest model of iPad for that to work. RSS greatly diminishes your screentime and it's up to you to filter out crap you don't want to see (mostly through curation of the feeds you subscribe to).