alt Hacker News^F Latency - no hits found.
Latency is one metric by which computing has gotten noticeably worse over the years.
Daily, I encounter multiple situations in which I take some action (click a button, type text in a text field, etc.) and the response is visibly delayed - from several hundred to several thousand milliseconds.
This used to happen only on websites, but lately is also happening on apps installed on my computer. The cause? My theory is that everything is now some sort of monstrosity of React or similar web app, running inside a browser process, and possibly even that local apps are sending data round-trip up to the mothership for tracking, surveillance, synchronization, etc.
And the UX is terrible - often while this is happening, stale data is showing, or there is no visual indication a process is underway.
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It's a 2017 article, but according to this, the two personal computers with the lowest input latency of all time are the Apple //e (1983) and the TI-99/4a (1979)
iTunes.
Skype.
Windows File Manager.
It has been a thing for a long time in consumers software from the big guys. The people working on it don't care about UX or performance.
Now a lot of the small-company software we used to use has been replaced by slow bloated and buggy apps usually running on Electron (Slack et al) so we're seeing it everywhere as opposed to in a couple of bad apps.
Haha this is true but I have rewritten many things now. I use so much of a custom software stack. You can go down to primitives you like.
Most of the software I use is custom now but not in like a deep way. E.g. it turns out that browser engines are blazing fast. So what’s slow? The chrome around it, the extensions. These things I just rewrite.
It turns out that MacOS GUI primitives are also really fast. It’s just that most software poorly uses it. I rewrote text viewer applications, and a terminal emulator chrome that uses libghostty. I don’t claim originality or skill. I only claim annoyance.
Now that I’ve reached the point where the thing in the way is my OS which I have trouble modifying I suddenly understand why Omarchy is compelling to so many people. And I get why DHH is so excited about it.
You can have a bespoke system on a fast, reliable base. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why suffer?
Spotify on iOS has been actually literally unusable more often than not for me lately.
I am a total diva about latency. I am impatient with computers to a fault. The slow animations in iOS. Waiting for some god-foresaken lambda function to spin up for seconds to serve me a list of fucking email addresses in the dozens. Even the few seconds of latency of a LAN screen share is enough to drive me up the wall.
Software is hard to use for me now.