3 ms·

I find https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ to be quite convincing and a direct contradiction to your point. He has some analyses of vari

I find https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ to be quite convincing and a direct contradiction to your point. He has some analyses of various other elements of computing, too. We certainly haven't gotten faster across the board and I'm still amazed at how slowly many of the programs I use today actually load.

bee_rider 4y ago
I tried to follow his advice for a while but didn't ever notice a perceivable difference between, say, st and alacrity. I think the justification for why we care about latency, there, is a bit fuzzy -- the examples he provides are about stylus inputs, the feedback loop there is more direct and there's more physical experience. I can't tell you what you feel of course. Currently I use kitty. Perhaps I'm blessed by unusual latency insensitivity....
kelnos 4y ago
I remember reading that piece, and found it to be interesting and accurate, but somewhat irrelevant. Most people just don't care about latency that much. If we go back to an ancestor high up in this thread, "low latency input and display" is not a goal of computing. "Enabling people to do things they find useful and/or have value" is the goal. And it just turns out that, for most tasks -- even most gaming tasks (or other things where you might say "low latency is important") -- low latency just is nowhere near as important as just being able to do these things at all. Sure, we might sometimes notice the latency and find it vaguely annoying, but we put up with it because modern computing (with all the attendant "complexity" or whatever that makes low-latency hard) enables us to do things that computers of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago were just completely incapable of doing. And for the people who really do care about low latency, they can usually build something custom that gets them where they want to be -- as Dan Luu points out in his piece.

bee_rider 4y ago

I tried to follow his advice for a while but didn't ever notice a perceivable difference between, say, st and alacrity. I think the justification for why we care about latency, there, is a bit fuzzy -- the examples he provides are about stylus inputs, the feedback loop there is more direct and there's more physical experience. I can't tell you what you feel of course. Currently I use kitty. Perhaps I'm blessed by unusual latency insensitivity....

kelnos 4y ago

I remember reading that piece, and found it to be interesting and accurate, but somewhat irrelevant. Most people just don't care about latency that much. If we go back to an ancestor high up in this thread, "low latency input and display" is not a goal of computing. "Enabling people to do things they find useful and/or have value" is the goal. And it just turns out that, for most tasks -- even most gaming tasks (or other things where you might say "low latency is important") -- low latency just is nowhere near as important as just being able to do these things at all. Sure, we might sometimes notice the latency and find it vaguely annoying, but we put up with it because modern computing (with all the attendant "complexity" or whatever that makes low-latency hard) enables us to do things that computers of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago were just completely incapable of doing. And for the people who really do care about low latency, they can usually build something custom that gets them where they want to be -- as Dan Luu points out in his piece.