3 ms·

We should show this every time a Slack/Teams/Jira engineer tries to explain to us why a text chat needs 1.5GB of ram to start up.

by andrepd 10mo ago

dangus 10mo ago
> It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality. You can buy a kid’s tiger electronics style toy that plays 20 questions. It’s not like this LLM is bastion of glorious efficiency, it’s just stripped down to fit on the hardware. Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. Including Jira in the conversation doesn’t even make logical sense. It’s not a desktop application that consumes memory. Jira has such a wide scope that the word “Jira” doesn’t even describe a single product.
- messe 10mo ago
  > can render anything a web browser can That's a bug not a feature, and strongly coupled to the root cause for slack's bloat.
  - dangus 10mo ago
    One person’s “bloat” is another person’s “critical business feature.” The app ecosystem of Slack is largely responsible for its success. You can extend it to do almost anything you want.
    - spopejoy 10mo ago
      > app ecosystem of Slack is largely responsible for its success. Is that true? Slack was one of the first private chats that was not painful to use, circa 2015. I personally hate the integrations and wish they'd just fix the bugs in their core product.
- andrepd 10mo ago
  My Pentium 3 in 2005 could do chat and video calls and play chess and send silly emotes. There is no conceivable user-facing reason why in 20 years the same functionality takes 30× as many resources, only developer-facing reasons. But those are not valid reasons for a professional. If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    > If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly. By itself, I would agree. However, in this metaphor, concrete got 15x cheaper in the same timeframe. Not enough to fully compensate for the difference, but enough that a whole generation are now used to much larger edifices.
    - andrepd 10mo ago
      So it means you could save your client 93% of their money in concrete, but you choose to make it 2× more expensive! That only makes my metaphor stronger ahaha.
      - beagle3 10mo ago
        But also, there is more traffic on the bridge. The word processors of 30 years ago often had limits like “50k chapters” and required “master documents” for anything larger. Lotus 123 had much fewer columns or rows than modern excel. Not an excuse, of course, but the older tools are not usable anymore if you have modern expectations.
      - ben_w 10mo ago
        You could save 93% of the money in concrete, at the cost of ???* in the more-expensive-than-ever time of the engineer themselves who now dominates the sticker price. (At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…) * I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html
- ben_w 10mo ago
  > Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. The 4th Gen iPod touch had 256 meg of RAM and also did those things, with video calling via FaceTime (and probably others, but I don't care). Well, except "cross platform", what with it being the platform.
  - dangus 10mo ago
    Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. Remember that Slack does simultaneous multiple participants screen sharing plus annotations plus HD video feeds from all participants plus the entirety of the rest of the app continues to function as if you weren’t on a call at all simultaneously. It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      > Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. And CU-SeeMe did that in the early 90s with even worse hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323 > It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software. The *entire operating system of the phone* is more powerful, and ran on less.
      - dangus 10mo ago
        Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what specs you think Slack should run on and link me to an example program that has 100% feature parity that stays within those specs? Showing me a black and white <10FPS group video call with no other accompanying software running simultaneously in the 90s is pointless. Showing me that someone thought of a protocol is pointless. Just look at the history of HDTV. We wouldn’t really describe HDTV as being available to consumers despite it existing in the early 1990s. I’d also like you to show me a laptop SKU sold in the last 10 years that is incapable of running Slack. If Slack is so inefficient you should be able to find me a computer that struggles with it. Finally, I’ll remind you that Slack for mobile is a different application that isn’t running in the same way as the desktop app and uses fewer resources. The latest version of it will run on very old phone hardware, going all the way back to the iPhone 8 (2GB RAM), and that’s assuming you even need the latest version for it to function.

We should show this every time a Slack/Teams/Jira engineer tries to explain to us why a text chat needs 1.5GB of ram to start up.

by andrepd 10mo ago

We should show this every time a Slack/Teams/Jira engineer tries to explain to us why a text chat needs 1.5GB of ram to start up.

dangus 10mo ago

> It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality. You can buy a kid’s tiger electronics style toy that plays 20 questions. It’s not like this LLM is bastion of glorious efficiency, it’s just stripped down to fit on the hardware. Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. Including Jira in the conversation doesn’t even make logical sense. It’s not a desktop application that consumes memory. Jira has such a wide scope that the word “Jira” doesn’t even describe a single product.

messe 10mo ago
> can render anything a web browser can That's a bug not a feature, and strongly coupled to the root cause for slack's bloat.
- dangus 10mo ago
  One person’s “bloat” is another person’s “critical business feature.” The app ecosystem of Slack is largely responsible for its success. You can extend it to do almost anything you want.
  - spopejoy 10mo ago
    > app ecosystem of Slack is largely responsible for its success. Is that true? Slack was one of the first private chats that was not painful to use, circa 2015. I personally hate the integrations and wish they'd just fix the bugs in their core product.
andrepd 10mo ago
My Pentium 3 in 2005 could do chat and video calls and play chess and send silly emotes. There is no conceivable user-facing reason why in 20 years the same functionality takes 30× as many resources, only developer-facing reasons. But those are not valid reasons for a professional. If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly.
- ben_w 10mo ago
  > If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly. By itself, I would agree. However, in this metaphor, concrete got 15x cheaper in the same timeframe. Not enough to fully compensate for the difference, but enough that a whole generation are now used to much larger edifices.
  - andrepd 10mo ago
    So it means you could save your client 93% of their money in concrete, but you choose to make it 2× more expensive! That only makes my metaphor stronger ahaha.
    - beagle3 10mo ago
      But also, there is more traffic on the bridge. The word processors of 30 years ago often had limits like “50k chapters” and required “master documents” for anything larger. Lotus 123 had much fewer columns or rows than modern excel. Not an excuse, of course, but the older tools are not usable anymore if you have modern expectations.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      You could save 93% of the money in concrete, at the cost of ???* in the more-expensive-than-ever time of the engineer themselves who now dominates the sticker price. (At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…) * I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html
ben_w 10mo ago
> Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. The 4th Gen iPod touch had 256 meg of RAM and also did those things, with video calling via FaceTime (and probably others, but I don't care). Well, except "cross platform", what with it being the platform.
- dangus 10mo ago
  Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. Remember that Slack does simultaneous multiple participants screen sharing plus annotations plus HD video feeds from all participants plus the entirety of the rest of the app continues to function as if you weren’t on a call at all simultaneously. It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    > Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. And CU-SeeMe did that in the early 90s with even worse hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323 > It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software. The *entire operating system of the phone* is more powerful, and ran on less.
    - dangus 10mo ago
      Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what specs you think Slack should run on and link me to an example program that has 100% feature parity that stays within those specs? Showing me a black and white <10FPS group video call with no other accompanying software running simultaneously in the 90s is pointless. Showing me that someone thought of a protocol is pointless. Just look at the history of HDTV. We wouldn’t really describe HDTV as being available to consumers despite it existing in the early 1990s. I’d also like you to show me a laptop SKU sold in the last 10 years that is incapable of running Slack. If Slack is so inefficient you should be able to find me a computer that struggles with it. Finally, I’ll remind you that Slack for mobile is a different application that isn’t running in the same way as the desktop app and uses fewer resources. The latest version of it will run on very old phone hardware, going all the way back to the iPhone 8 (2GB RAM), and that’s assuming you even need the latest version for it to function.