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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 7 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 2.067s | source | bottom
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kar1181 ◴[22 May 20 16:03 UTC] No.23273511[source]▶
I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work.

Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

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tragomaskhalos ◴[22 May 20 16:17 UTC] No.23273690[source]▶
That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be afk for long enough for my Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.
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1. karatestomp ◴[22 May 20 16:35 UTC] No.23273933[source]▶
I remember being able to watch network traffic and if you (or some other actual person on you network) weren't doing anything nothing would be there. Yes even if you had a few webpages open but weren't clicking anything. Now your machine's "idle" and you capture on your network interface and it scrolls at hyperspeed.
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2. dvfjsdhgfv ◴[22 May 20 17:09 UTC] No.23274406[source]▶
This is upsetting for me, too. And for a few others. But actually very few people care because they just don't see it. The people who designed it this way take care that users at large have no idea what is going on.
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3. saagarjha ◴[22 May 20 17:46 UTC] No.23274874[source]▶
It's really very sad, because users have no idea what is going on and there is no incentive for bad programs to improve (actually, there is generally incentive in the opposite direction, because it's work to write well-behaving apps). Users just know that they need to keep buying new computers and that their battery life is worse, but they can't figure out why so they point fingers at everyone but who they should actually be blaming.
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4. karatestomp ◴[22 May 20 18:36 UTC] No.23275401{3}[source]▶
Remember when shitty user-hostile spying wasn't a library you included that assured you in its readme it was "made with [heart] in California"? Ah, the days when only criminals and bigcos casually engaged in shady crap.
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5. saagarjha ◴[22 May 20 19:11 UTC] No.23275764{4}[source]▶
That's a somewhat unrelated discussion, but yes, I am not very happy with the current state of software where people think they are entitled to out-out analytics information coming off my machine.
6. kar1181 ◴[22 May 20 19:45 UTC] No.23276095[source]▶
I've been doing some network programming lately, specifically low level raw socket work. Sitting there with wireshark running the sheer volume of traffic with applications dialing home was kind of shocking.

I mean, I know it's happening, I (sadly) expect it to happen now. But seeing all the bits whizzing over the wire brought home just how much your machine is reporting about what you're up to.

7. dvfjsdhgfv ◴[22 May 20 22:54 UTC] No.23278002{4}[source]▶
Well, I remember the days when a message in Windows cropped up saying (standard at the time when a program crashed): "Do you want to send the error report to Microsoft" and my boss called me, asking a bit concrened, "Please, tell me honestly, what do you think - should we send them this error report?"