Athena L.M.if you had a key on your keyboard that sent a ping and you chose a typical nearby-but-not-LAN server as the destination, the ping would travel through all the routers in between getting processed and queued at each, reach its destination, and the reply would return, again through all the routers in between, and arrive back at your machine, probably in the time it would take your finger to lift away from the key
Duncan ᚛ᚇᚒᚅᚉᚐᚅ᚜computers are really fast and it's a shame on the software industry that they don't act like it
Jan 
Software disenchantment - by Nikita:
https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
Tom Walker@alilly Servers are even faster but people hand millions to AWS instead of doing basic optimisation
chmod 777 Kayfox@alilly Gawd YES THIS.
Every bit of "software" now is 4 levels deep in abstraction, running a local browser to sent its commands over APIs to a server running in a virtual runtime inside a container inside a hypervisor to do anything.
It's mainframe 2: API boogalloo
🚲@alilly Vaguely related, I found this comparison of input lag very interesting: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
More on topic, this is why I am unconcerned about Moore’s law perception breaking down any time soon: in the even that we hit a wall with transistor density, there’s still a ton of software efficiency headroom to attack.
malevolent dictator for life@alilly oh, they do act like they're fast. they just think they're faster and more capable than they actually are and overuse the computer resources
@astrid software acts like the computer is fast, leading to the computer acting like it is slow
lizzy 
@alilly Have you ever tried playing a "modern" game or browsing the "modern" web or use a "modern" app (read: web app) or like, even just using a terminal or desktop user interface on a more low end machine?
Software gets less performant quicker than computers get faster.
Websites are bloated and take ages to load on mobile or on slow connections in general (and every app has to be a webapp, so this affects that as well). YouTube has definitely gotten much, much slower in the past few years.
Konsole (KDE terminal) takes around 5 seconds to open on a low end machine with a HDD. Fancy GPU accelerated terminals don't even run because they require hardware that isn't present. I had to resort to using suckless' st terminal on that computer.
And after picking well written software I was able to get work done on that machine, and even play a 3D open world game at 45 FPS with proper configuration.
The gaming industry shits out games with ever increasing CPU, RAM and disk space and speed as well as download speed demands that have only marginally better graphics than games that came out in 2004 or so and run flawlessly on an average laptop (literally, compare a modern title to Half-Life 2 or Portal 2) and you're just supposed to suck it up and buy better hardware every few years.
I simply refuse that we should consume, consume, consume, buy better internet, buy better hardware, spend more money, use more resources, just because software developers can't get their shit together. This is not sustainable.
Steven Sandoval