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by ohgodplsno 1098 days ago
Overprivileged HN-commenter believes that upgrading RAM is something that every user can afford, wants to afford (oh, I'm sorry, let me blow 50 bucks for your pretty eyes because you couldn't be arsed to not blast a whole javascript runtime on your app that you're forcing me to use to upgrade my drivers or launch a game), ignores physical limitations (unupgradable laptops, already maxed out configs from back in the day).

Today's software runs worse on modern hardware than yesterday's does, because you "let the engineers focus on UX and features" without teaching them to care for a single moment about _actual_ user experience instead of whatever bullshit their product owner put out.

Talk to any real engineer and not the US bullcrap of "oh sure everyone out of a code camp is an engineer" and ask them if quadrupling the weight of a bridge and multiplying resource consumption by ten is an option. You are making our profession look like fucking clowns.

1 comments

He's right though, most people really don't care about 600 MB of RAM or whatever.
> most people really don't care about 600 MB of RAM

There’s a difference between not caring that your computer is sluggish because of its programs, and not being able to tell the difference and demand less sluggish alternatives.

Normies put up with poor user experiences to the exact degree that software engineers deliver them.

That my UI should be significantly slower than my screen’s framerate is a false premise.

Go ask your parents if they're not pissed off that the laptop they bought for cheap is now struggling to run Peggle Deluxe and they don't understand why, while there's 7 Electron apps running in the background eating all that memory.

People don't care about 600MB. They care about how using their PC feels, and Electron is a massive contributor to it feeling like shit.

Most people do care, they just don't know that better performance is possible because they've been fed Electron crap for the past few years.
Our whole industry is a big joke technically. On the business side, though, we managed to get people used to downloading huge apps, that run slow, and are full of bugs. That's admittedly a big business achievement, but not the kind of world I want to live in.

Just like people learn to completely ignore popups (and are often not even aware that a popup appears, even an important one), they learn to accept bugs, overall bad apps, and the fact that they need a new smartphone every two years to keep up.

Doesn't mean at all they wouldn't enjoy better technology. They just do not have a choice.

Just found this, which I think fits my point perfectly: https://nitter.net/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960