Why indeed
Why indeed
65 comments
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It kills me when I download a simple app to my phone that's 60 mb. When I was a child we built the world off 1.44 mb floppies. How did we stray so far from God's light?
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The Uber App on my phone is 1 GB!
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The fuck? (Edit: Although, does it have a map?)
Hmm...
AliExpress has no right to be that large, neither Opera. No reason to store that much cache. (Edit: cache and cookies are only around 500MB total. Hmmm...) Also, I set F-Droid to keep cached apps for 1 hour, what the hell is this?
I kind of forgot to manage my storage, as I usually do until I have like 5GB left...
Data will always adapt to storage size.
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Amen, we didn't have fancy "game engines" or "media assets" and we liked it.
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Why is it in the 2000's it took 30-60 seconds to open, Word, Photoshop, Gimp or some other program. With today's computing power it still takes 30-60 seconds to open same said programs.... Also fuck MS Teams.
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Fuck Teams, all my homies hate Teams
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Gimp opens on linux pretty much in an instance though
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Maybe I should give it another shot then, it's been a few years. But last time I used it as default to open pictures on my set up it would pop up with its image and take at least 10 seconds to load the image. I got to annoyed with it I change it to just open in my browser.
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I have bypassed this issue by exclusively using open-source terminal software. If my softwares aren't launching in 2-3 seconds, i usually try to find alternatives.
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it gets hard to do this when my bank or other assorted corporation forces me to use their shitty shit.
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shitty shit
Bloat! Somebody call the police!
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ads, tracking, and the use of shitty bloated frameworks (like electron) so the tech bro owners can save time and money at the expense of ours.
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There's sort of an unholy synergy between hardware companies wanting to sell more hardware and software shops wanting to cut development costs. The selection pressures are to build bloated software that needs fast hardware to run.
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Cause they work better. Brand new ads, awesome new subscriptions. Flashy new AI features that definitely work super well and are definitely useful.
/s
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Because storage is cheap, so it's not worth optimizing that heavily for, because the optimization creates a huge amount of headaches.
There's a reason that today you can just download an app, and it just installs, runs, and uninstalls itself cleanly.
There's no fighting with dependencies, or installing versions of libraries or frameworks before you can install an app, or having apps conflict with other apps, or having bits of app installations lying around conflicting with things.
That's because we used to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that only a single copy of each dependency was installed on a system. If two apps both relied on the same library, one would install it, and the other would then be dependent on it as well and not install its own copy. If the original is removed you have a problem. If it thinks something else is dependent on its asset still and doesn't remove it when it should you've got a problem. If they were both dependent on different major versions of a library, you could run into conflicts and compatibility issues (hello dll hell). Either the apps would have to manage all that, or the OS would, or eventually the user often would.
Now every app just bundles all its dependencies with it. It means the app comes as a clean bundle, there's no conflicts, it can install cleanly, and there's so much less time spend on packaging apps and debugging various system configurations.
Quite frankly this makes way more sense as a model for distributing anything. Yes it costs more in storage, but it pays off massively in resiliency and time savings for everyone.
Also, unless everything is done with vectors, high def image / video assets are not small and can very quickly add up.
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Except that it's not just storage, but also increased memory footprint and CPU usage in a lot of cases. Take something like Slack which is a huge resource hog.
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It's also because we started doing shit like using JS in places it really shouldn't belong. Half the programs on my PC are just webapps running in a sandbox environment, instead of using systems languages like C/C++ directly like was the case 15-20 years ago. Abstractions on top of abstractions on top of abstractions. JS was fine for embellishing elements of a web site and facilitating AJAX, it should have never been turned into an app language.
That'd be like if interpreted BASIC was taken seriously in the 80s as more than just a toy and the majority of popular software was written in it. We'd rightfully question WTF society was thinking.
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Bingo!
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No we wouldn't, and this is a crazy take when like half of Linux runs on interpreted python.
You're min/maxing for things that don't matter. You know what does matter? User facing features. You know what language in unquestionably the fastest to produce user facing features in? JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
If you want to optimize for performance you can do so after by moving things server side, writing them in web assembly, or offloading them onto other threads.
There's also massive opportunity cost in a) programming in low level languages, and b) having every developer have to learn a low level language. There's a reason that we don't all code in assembly any more.
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It's also worth noting apps have to ship higher resolution assets now, due to higher resolution displays. This can include video, audio, images, etc. Videos and images may be included at multiple resolutions, to account for different sized displays.
For images, many might assume vectors are the answer, but vectors have to be rendered at runtime, which increases startup time in the best case scenario, and isn't even always supported on all platforms, meaning they have to be shipped alongside raster assets of a few different sizes, further increasing package bloat. And of course the code grows to add the logic to properly handle all the different asset types and sizes.
All this (packaging dependencies, plus assets/asset handling) to say it isn't always malware, ads, electron, etc. Sometimes it's just trying to make something that looks nice and runs well (enough) on any machine.
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A good package manager like those commonly used on Linux solves this problem
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npm
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Electron is the devils own pile of shit
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And then you have Arch Linux. [insert chef's kiss]
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i hate that most of the modern desktop apps run a freaking separate chromium instance
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Curious if this is so broadly true without bundled resources; obviously screens are higher DPI, so even buttons are now designed for at least 8K resolutions, even if most consumers are still on 1080p.
Orders of magnitude beyond 640x480 or pre Windows 3.1 resolutions.
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Bigger monitors, smaller phones, higher color depth, lower latencies, customizable window decorations, chronal themes, AI, blockchain, more devices, trackers, architectures, platforms, malwares, internet protocols, programming languages, human languages, ads, ads, ads, ads, doom, power saving, content, content moderation and I'm sure there's plenty more reasons that might contribute to the growth.
Not saying I like or want all those things, simply that they might be contributing to size increases. Part of me wishes we could go back, then i fire up windows xp pro sp3 on an eee pc netbook i have that miraculously still works and i remember why i prefer to stay in the present, at least until AI kills us all.
Not IT though, I'm just a guy.
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Where did you get "smaller phones" from?
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I probably should have used 'smaller chips' instead. another idea would be using 'thinner phones' or 'lighter phones'. i was a weird writing headspace when i wrote that and liked the flow of going from 'bigger' to 'smaller'.
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65 comments