[dangus]

> 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.

[andrepd]

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]

> 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]

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.

[ben_w]

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

[beagle3]

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.

[kiicia]

But it only shows how wasteful your new bridge is. Concrete being cheaper does not mean you somehow need to use more of it.

[dangus]

I have great doubts that you were doing simultaneous screen sharing from multiple participants with group annotation plus HD video in your group calls, all while supporting chatting that allowed you to upload and view multiple animated gifs, videos, rich formatted text, reactions, slash command and application automation integrations, all simultaneously on your Pentium 3.

I would be interested to know the name of the program that did all that within the same app during that time period.

For some reason Slack gets criticism for being “bloated” when it basically does anything you could possibly imagine and is essentially a business communication application platform. Nobody can actually name a specific application that does everything Slack does with better efficiency.

[andrepd]

You're grasping at anything to justify the unjustifiable. Not only did I do most (not all, obviously) of those things in my Pentium 3, including video and voice chat, screenshare, and silly animated gifs and rich text formatting, but also: that's beside the point. Let's compare like with like then; how much memory does it take to have a group chat with a few people and do a voice/video in MSN messenger or the original Skype, and how much does Slack or Teams take? What about UI stutter? Load time? There's absolutely no justification for a worse user experience in a 2025 computer that would be a borderline supercomputer in 2005.

[dangus]

You bring up apps like Skype doing similar work in 2005, but Skype was barely out of its 2003 public alpha by then. Version 2.0 beta came out in 2005 and was the first version to support video, and only supported video calling between two people.

And you bring up things that are supposedly bad about Slack that are basically non-existent boogeymen. UI stutter, load time, and excessive memory use, I can’t think of any time any of these things have existed at all or noticeably impacted my experience on Slack on a basic low end laptop.

Those older apps like MSN Messenger and the original Skype didn’t actually do the things that Slack does now. I mean specifically multiple simultaneous screen shares plus annotations plus HD video feeds (with important features like blurred and replaced backgrounds, added by Skype in 2019) for all participants plus running an entire productivity app in the background at the same time.

Skype didn’t have screen sharing, at all, until 2009.

https://content.dsp.co.uk/history-of-skype

You call this situation “unjustifiable” but we would struggle to find any personal computing device sold at any price point that can’t handle the application smoothly. If I go back five years and buy a $200 mini PC or a $300 iPad or $500 laptop it’s going to run Slack just fine.

Specs are just arbitrary numbers on a box. It doesn’t matter that we got to the moon using a turd and a ham sandwich for a computer.

You can’t accept that the layperson doesn’t care that back in my day we walked uphill both ways for 15 miles on our dial-up connection. If it works, it works.

[ben_w]

> 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]

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]

> 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

Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: 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]

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.

[ben_w]

> Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what specs you think Slack should run on

1 Ghz processor, 512 MB RAM (might even manage 256 MB), 1080p monitor. And "a graphics accelerator", "a sound card", and "a webcam and microphone".

Probably even less on the RAM and CPU.

> and link me to an example program that has 100% feature parity that stays within those specs?

Windows 2000. Or XP.

That's the point. The OS supports all the apps needed to do whatever.

Making Slack into a monolithic blob to do all is just an example of the inner platform effect.

But if you insist: IE 7 would have been able to do all this. It's an app. It's also an example of the inner platform effect.

> Showing me a black and white <10FPS group video call with no other accompanying software running simultaneously in the 90s is pointless.

You should've thought of that before trying to "well akshually" me about which versions of FaceTime support multi-user video calling.

You want video calling? We had that 30 years ago on systems with total RAM smaller than current CPU cache, with internal busses whose bandwidth was less than your mobile's 5G signal, on screens smaller than the icon that has to be submitted to the App Store, with cameras roughly comparable to what we now use for optical mice, running over networks that were MacGyvered onto physical circuits intended for a single analogue voice signal.

Out of everything you list that Slack can do, the only thing that should even be remotely taxing is the HD video calling. Nothing else, at all. And the only reasons for even that to be taxing is correctly offloading work to the GPU and that you want HD. The GPU should handle this kind of thing trivially so long as you know how to use it.

All the "business logic" you mention in the other thread… if you can't handle the non-video business logic needed to be a server hosting 2000 simultaneous users on something with specs similar to a Raspberry Pi, you're not trying hard enough. I've done that. Business logic is the easy part for anything you can describe as "chat". Even if you add some minigames in there and the server is keeping track of the games, it should be a rounding error on a modern system.

[fc417fc802]

If these applications only hogged memory when under stress (outgoing screencap plus video, multiple streams incoming, display to 3+ monitors) you might have a point. But that's not the case so you don't.

Meanwhile I can play back multiple 1080 videos on different monitors, run a high speed curl download, saturate my gigabit LAN with a bulk transfer, and run a brrfs scrub in the background all most likely without breaking 2 GB of RAM usage. MPV, VLC, and ffmpeg are all remarkably lightweight.

The only daily application I run that consumes a noticable quantity of resources is my web browser.

[dangus]

If you didn’t babysit your task manager would you know which program used more RAM or not?

This argument is just so endless and tiring.

Saturating my bandwidth or running a btrfs scrub isn’t accomplishing the business logic I need to do my job, that’s what my web browser is doing.

[fc417fc802]

So is it the "business logic" or is it the multiple HD streams that are supposed to account for the resource consumption? You've changed your story. But do please explain how the "business logic" to handle the chat box, UI, and whatever else is supposed to justify the status quo.

People making excuses for poorly designed software is what's tiring.

[numpad0]

The problem with that kind of feature/benefit based thinking is that it won't correlate with code or computational footprints well. That's like justifying price of cars with seatback materials. That's not where the costs are.

Modern chat apps like Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. are extremely resource intense solely by being skinned Chrome showing overbloated HTMLs. That's it. Most of the "actual" engineering of it is outsourced and externalized to Google, NVIDIA/Intel/AMD, Microsoft/Apple, etc.

[messe]

> 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]

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]

> 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.