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We also used to write code in low-level languages, and system designs were simpler compared to our current approach of writing a lot of stuff in JS and using El

We also used to write code in low-level languages, and system designs were simpler compared to our current approach of writing a lot of stuff in JS and using Electron everywhere, having a huge dependency tree and in general - optimizing for fast development rather than efficient runtime. Having said that, optimizing for perf is rarely worth it because people don't usually care, and when it is - you can often make the biggest difference by figuring out why some step requires O(n^3) instead of O(n) like it should and fixing that, rather than rewriting the entire stack to get some 10-20% improvement...

b112 4y ago
Someone should do an accurate figure of compute power usage, including things such as cars, or media centres, and then try to analyse how the existing trend of "wasteful development" affects this. I bet all the upset over bitcoin power usage, is a tiny thing, compared to (for example) the whole node ecosystem. Even something such as gmail is massively overengineered. Heck, there are very few improvements over the interface a decade ago, yet I bet it used 5% of the power it does now. Yet think of how much gmail is used. And it's not just raw compute. 3d on a page for no reason, massive js binaries for no reason eg ram + bandwidth. A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html. But all of this means more development skill, less use of fluff and junk, care for size of page loads, and on and on. Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally. Because that's where the excess power comes from.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Hit the nail on the head. Inefficiency, which has reached gargantuan proportions, and then blown past that, doesn't just mean page loads so slow that loading a news article takes upwards of 20s on a pocket supercomputer (whereas it took barely a second or two on a Pentium II on a 56kbps connection), all the while text and buttons jump around as assets are loaded. It also means very real waste of energy and battery degradation.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I mostly agree with you, however: > A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html That's what I do. Weeks is a bit of a stretch. Maybe one of screen time is limited. That said, discord (the website) drains my laptop battery almost as fast as gaming does. They do spawn a separate WebGL context for each animated emoticon. Crazy, crazy thing > Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally. Sure. At the same time, though, a single car trip to the movies burns orders of magnitude more energy than all your gadgets running JS for an year.
redeeman 4y ago
shit like slack and other electron abominations are not just 10-20% improvement going native. We are talking a simple chat application, irc glorified to load images and preview, and this somehow takes more memory and cpu than the total resources I had in 1995 times 100. these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just ridiculous
- pbronez 4y ago
  Man I want a native TUI client for Teams.
  - btdmaster 4y ago
    This looks interesting: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli

b112 4y ago

Someone should do an accurate figure of compute power usage, including things such as cars, or media centres, and then try to analyse how the existing trend of "wasteful development" affects this. I bet all the upset over bitcoin power usage, is a tiny thing, compared to (for example) the whole node ecosystem. Even something such as gmail is massively overengineered. Heck, there are very few improvements over the interface a decade ago, yet I bet it used 5% of the power it does now. Yet think of how much gmail is used. And it's not just raw compute. 3d on a page for no reason, massive js binaries for no reason eg ram + bandwidth. A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html. But all of this means more development skill, less use of fluff and junk, care for size of page loads, and on and on. Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally. Because that's where the excess power comes from.

andrepd 4y ago
Hit the nail on the head. Inefficiency, which has reached gargantuan proportions, and then blown past that, doesn't just mean page loads so slow that loading a news article takes upwards of 20s on a pocket supercomputer (whereas it took barely a second or two on a Pentium II on a 56kbps connection), all the while text and buttons jump around as assets are loaded. It also means very real waste of energy and battery degradation.
beebeepka 4y ago
I mostly agree with you, however: > A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html That's what I do. Weeks is a bit of a stretch. Maybe one of screen time is limited. That said, discord (the website) drains my laptop battery almost as fast as gaming does. They do spawn a separate WebGL context for each animated emoticon. Crazy, crazy thing > Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally. Sure. At the same time, though, a single car trip to the movies burns orders of magnitude more energy than all your gadgets running JS for an year.

redeeman 4y ago

shit like slack and other electron abominations are not just 10-20% improvement going native. We are talking a simple chat application, irc glorified to load images and preview, and this somehow takes more memory and cpu than the total resources I had in 1995 times 100. these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just ridiculous

pbronez 4y ago
Man I want a native TUI client for Teams.
- btdmaster 4y ago
  This looks interesting: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli