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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

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752 points dceddia | 1 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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yomlica8 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:32 UTC] No.36447314[source]▶
It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

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sidewndr46 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:35 UTC] No.36447344[source]▶
Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.
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leidenfrost ◴[23 Jun 23 14:40 UTC] No.36447430[source]▶
There was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.
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amaccuish ◴[23 Jun 23 14:46 UTC] No.36447524[source]▶
The one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?
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1. phist_mcgee ◴[23 Jun 23 22:45 UTC] No.36453231[source]▶
My guess for this is that the average user doesn't parse text on pages as fast as more tech-savvy users. That delay is perfectly timed for the average user to grab their attention.

For me, I use google so often that I can rapidly parse information without really needing to read much of the text, the link just sort of 'looks' right. I've observed my wife reading google results and she is much slower and more methodical, probably because she doesn't google things 20+ times a day every day like I do.

That's how I end up misclicking, because i'm not working at the speed of a normal googler.

It is really annoying though, there are some css tweaks you can make using browser extensions to make that disappear if you're so inclined.