Mastodawn

RE: https://toot.cafe/@nolan/115622706069488954

Those of you who are not web devs (good choice) may not quite appreciate what this means.
You know how websites are loads slower now, and don't work without JavaScript? Well, one of the big (dubious) arguments made in favour of this transition was that you download a bunch more code first, but then it'll make everything faster once you're there. It's front loading.
What @slightlyoff has shown is that this is not relevant, because people don't stay on the sites long enough to get the benefit.

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Stuart Langridge Nov 27

as @nolan goes on to say, he is very sceptical that this supposed "benefit" was ever actually true (and I am too), but _even if it is true_, it doesn't _happen_; people get all this front loaded code in the expectation that they'll be hanging around for ages and so it'll be worth it, and then they don't hang around for ages and it wasn't. They get kicked in the teeth up front on the assumption they'll do 100 things, and then they do 1 thing and that's it.

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Stuart Langridge Nov 27

@nolan this is like if all the shops made you buy a kilogram of nutmeg when you only need a teaspoon, because "it's cheaper in the long run". Only if I want a kilo of your nutmeg, ̶w̶e̶b̶s̶i̶t̶e̶s̶ shops, and I don't. I want a teaspoon of your nutmeg. At most.

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FoolishOwl

@sil @nolan This reminds me of how a few Windows versions ago Microsoft seemed fixated on optimizing speculative pre-caching, so you never had much free RAM, and every time you started an app it had to swap a lot out to disk. You got a major performance boost just by disabling the pre-caching, but updates kept re-enabling it. I'm not sure whether they stopped doing it or just everyone switched to SSDs so you don't notice as much.