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> What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??! Honestly, most people go for the shiniest

by db48x 6mo ago

> What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??! Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford. But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. When I had to jump six months or a year into the past to test some old build, gigabit service was the difference between a few minutes to download the binaries and 20–30 minutes to recompile them myself. But these days 100Mbps is really more than enough. An interesting technology that might become a killer app in a year or two is 4D gaussian splats. This is a way of creating photo–realistic animated 3D scenes that the user can move around in, viewing them from all angles (without any need for artists to build geometry or paint textures). Right now streaming them in real time needs about 500Mbps. I’m sure that a few years of iteration on compression techniques will lower it significantly, but it’ll always be more expensive than mere 2D images (even animated 2D images). For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.

dlenski 6mo ago
> > What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??! > Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford. Right. It's a costly and irrational anxiety or obsession over a headline number that likely doesn't matter for most people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199 > But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. Right. I thankfully don't do that kind of development much, but I agree that I'd want a faster connection if I had to. I would certainly expect to have it at the office, though I don't find a need tor it at the home. In the past when I worked as a developer for FAANG and related spinoff companies, I did most of my development on "cloud desktops" or VMs which had much faster connections. This was mainly in order to have more CPU, RAM, and storage for builds, although the additional network bandwidth was important as well. > For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream. To me, 720p seems incredibly high-quality. I think I'm living out something like https://m.xkcd.com/606 https://m.xkcd.com/606, although perhaps on a 20-year lag rather than a 5-year lag.

by db48x 6mo ago

dlenski 6mo ago

> > What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??! > Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford. Right. It's a costly and irrational anxiety or obsession over a headline number that likely doesn't matter for most people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199 > But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. Right. I thankfully don't do that kind of development much, but I agree that I'd want a faster connection if I had to. I would certainly expect to have it at the office, though I don't find a need tor it at the home. In the past when I worked as a developer for FAANG and related spinoff companies, I did most of my development on "cloud desktops" or VMs which had much faster connections. This was mainly in order to have more CPU, RAM, and storage for builds, although the additional network bandwidth was important as well. > For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream. To me, 720p seems incredibly high-quality. I think I'm living out something like https://m.xkcd.com/606 https://m.xkcd.com/606, although perhaps on a 20-year lag rather than a 5-year lag.