[celurian92]

I work sometimes in frontend and mostly in backend but I cant still comprehend why are we going backwards. shouldnt the websites be so optimized that they should be able to run in normal pc / smartphone rather than s23 is failing to load it. I guess at least bigger companies have that kind of resource for optimization but still not doing it why?

[duskdozer]

Any hardware gains and more are used up by stuffing in additional telemetry, ad/engagement scripts, and animations. Devs have grown up on "unused RAM is wasted RAM," work on the latest high-spec Macs, and get incentivized by higher-ups demanding things be ever "modernized" and not to waste time on optimization, which they see as annoying nerd stuff. But even that doesn't explain everything I guess, because I still see a lot of these things in open source projects.

[heavyset_go]

Google is pushing ads on Android that are literally 3D games, as in the ad is a game and the game is controllable via the ad itself.

You have to play it for a minute before it lets you dismiss the ad and continue doing whatever you were doing.

[duskdozer]

Thanks, I'm angry just reading about it.

[heavyset_go]

Black Mirror didn't go far enough

[applfanboysbgon]

The explanation for bloated OSS is that the software development field has opened up to be accessible to non-programmers. There are at least 10x as many developers publishing software now as there were in the 90s, and the class of people who know how a CPU works are a tiny, tiny minority of the field now, where 30 years ago it was the norm. The vast majority of developers operate on 15 layers of abstractions and are literally offended by the idea that they should understand even a single layer below the one they're currently on. They will invoke a retort like "might as well learn assembly while you're at it", which I have heard literally dozens of times by now, as though it is actually unreasonable to have an understanding of assembly even if you don't write it every day.

Game development suffers greatly from this, too. So many games run like dogshit and some take literally 100+ GB more disk space than they need to (with the counterfactual proven when a dev eventually "optimizes" their game 3 years later by doing some really trivial thing, like what hapened with Helldivers 2 and some other game I can't recall). There is a whole generation of "Unity devs" and "Unreal devs" who work no-code or as close to it as possible, only being able to develop games through a GUI and light scripting, with even the latter usually involving copy-pasting existing scripts written by other people and tweaking the numbers.

In some ways this is a good thing, of course. There are a lot of useful software and fun games in the world that would not have been created if software development were not accessible. But with the cost to performance and security breaches becoming the absolute norm, I do really wish there was a culture for developers to continue improving, to continue learning, instead of a culture of learning the very top of the stack, declaring it good enough, and becoming a "React dev" for the rest of their career instead of becoming "a programmer" who can use more than one abstraction.

[wiseowise]

Who pissed in your Java this morning, gramps? Performance has nothing to do with whether you’re “the programmer” (whatever that means, I assume that’s what you consider yourself among this sea of mediocrity around you) and “React dev”. It’s all about incentives, and truth is that performance isn’t very high priority for majority of software.

[applfanboysbgon]

There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually. There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.

With open source it's not even about incentives. I still put effort into the software I make on my own time because I create the kind of software I want to see in the world, ie. software that doesn't feel miserable to use. It's simply about culture. People build up assembly and lower-level abstractions in general to be the scary monster in their closet, and not something they could actually learn if they just tried.

[wiseowise]

> There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually.

for Google and other hyperscalers, not for mom and pop shops and electron apps.

> There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.

Nonsense. You seriously think there’s some arcane knowledge in optimizing things? Sure, if you’re pushing microseconds and optimizing network stack just to squeeze last drops out of it. But majority of software runs stupid quadratic loops, overuses map/filter/reduce, instantiates too much and is bloated with useless features. It takes one capable programmer to optimize this mess to roughly 90-98% of what’s possible. It takes world class to squeeze last 2%, but majority of software doesn’t need or care about it.

[applfanboysbgon]

No, I don't think there's particularly arcane knowledge in optimizing things! That's rather my point. It's not even hard to learn, but the current developer culture is one that treats learning anything outside of their framework as a bogeyman. There are real game developers, with jobs, who are paid many tens of thousands of dollars, who do not even know what an "int" is, because it's all been abstracted away for them and they think that understanding why their game runs like shit is something only Carmack himself could handle. In reality, we could easily produce enough capable programmers to create performant software, we simply choose not to as a culture.