Is the search of efficiency dead?

This is killing the web, the industry, or your potential job opportunities

[explorador]

I was alive when the internet appeared and took over the world, it was a different web, with less jokes, no memes, and mostly sharing knowledge. Those days are over, today it's quite likely that conversations will actually take place around a meme, and some friends do nothing but talk about the new memes and pranks, it's sad. But diff people = diff preferences.

Now talking about work and passion, like others around here I learned to focus on efficiency, to make some code run faster, faster web, faster queries, less turns, less energy wasted, etc. All the projects I was in charge of had calm servers with no overloads, that is multiple websites with lots of traffic in the same server. While new webmasters in the company were in charge of just one website, one that caused overloads and suddenly new servers were needed, then specialized servers, then WP accelerated servers.

My websites still load crazy fast, so much it's noticeable. During one job interview long ago the company owner said that was amazing and knew very few people in the country could do that, but most will just buy more speed, I was like WTH?, but he had a point. Being a tech passionate, most people I know talk to me about their gadgets or issues, and today it's recurring "oh my computer is too slow". Many times they have more powerful hardware than I do, but mine runs better. Sometimes they complain and when I look, they are just watching some memes compilation at 1080x60fps while they say "oh the internet is too slow, this machine sucks, etc etc", and I'm like what?

Today most people wouldn't load a video in the correct resolution, instead they would buy more ram, another SSD, more mhz, and will add "I like the crispness of the image, that's why I don't lower the resolution", all of this while using a 22" display that they are NOT looking at, instead they are doing something else. Oh, so much technology wasted.

Perhaps I should have started with this paragraph: today it seems less likely (locally) to get hired for efficiency, people seem more interested on spending money on a new server, more bandwidth, fiber options internet, better data plans on their cells, etc, in order to keep loading videos of cats. When and why did efficiency die?

[tangor]

Not sure efficiency is dead, merely has a new (lower!) bar due to code bloat, resolutions, better hardware at (generally) affordable prices, and company policies where "good enough" is the standard instead of "best possible".

Sadly, most users don't view the web as a tool, but as an entertainment source (where their data is the price the pay to play, and the cost of their systems and connections are the price of entry and ability to continue to pay.

[graeme_p]

This is not only a problem on the web, or your locality. The wider IT industry suffers from it.

There is Andy and Bill's Law that goes back to the 80s:

"what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

[en.wikipedia.org...]

The idea being that rapid increases in the power of hardware (represented by Andy Grove (then CEO of Intel) were offset by ever more inefficient software (represented by Bill Gates).

There are a lot of aspects to this. People (consumers and non-technical managers) do not understand what is going on. People want cheap, and they do not understand good. People take if for granted that computers are not reliable. Most people seem to believe that it is natural that computers get slow with age (like a car engine becoming less powerful with wear - losing horses as Jeremy Clarkson says).

Take a look at the dependencies people drag in unnecessarily. It gets stuff developed quickly but it is insecure and fragile. Remember the Leftpad incident?

[explorador]

tangor: Sadly, most users don't view the web as a tool, but as an entertainment source

so true.

graeme_p: Take a look at the dependencies people drag in unnecessarily. It gets stuff developed quickly but it is insecure and fragile. Remember the Leftpad incident?

I wasn't aware of this incident, and what surprises me the most is how something so simple is requires to "include" rather than just write the code (again, for something so simple), it's another case of extreme drag and drop sort of saying.

graeme_p: People want cheap, and they do not understand good

Yes, and many times they contradict themselves. Recently I bought something and the seller, who later by talking became a regular person, was telling me the benefits of some routers and I said "I'm happy with mine", he was blown away when I described my tomato router (custom alternative firmware for routers), using only 12v, and was shocked, then explained to me how much his electricity bill went up after installing some "magic super cool modern" router to distribute Internet to a couple of computers, and it's doing way less of what the tomato router does.

[tangor]

^Another example of "efficiency" have different values today compared to the tried and true. In business reality new products need to be rolled out on a regular basis to create "need to upgrade" when there's no real need, particularly if the "new" is merely a more bloated/complicated version of the existing (hardware or software).

Wonder how many are still running Win7Pro simply because it works? :)

More is not necessarily better, it sometimes is just "more"!

[explorador]

Yes, it's ironical when people complain about chip shortage when they still have useful tech and software at home. In most cases people still do the same things with office software they did 5, 10, 15 years ago, but using more bloated and expensive software. Yeah I actually liked Win7Pro a lot, upgraded to W8 because the developing software I needed pushed me to it, same thing happened to W10. Funny thing is these tools produced software that would run on W7, it only pushed the developer, not the final user of the apps.

[MichaelBluejay]

The first Mac fit the entire graphical operating system AND a word processing app on a single-sided 400k disk. I don't know how many gigabytes the current MacOS is, but it's sure a heck of a lot less reliable. Well, it doesn't crash as much, but there's so much stuff that simply doesn't work.

I remember reading that Steve Jobs told his team to try to save something like five seconds off the boot time, telling them to multiply that by millions of people starting their computers every day and how many extra person-years of productivity would be gained by the faster boot time. I agree with that, but it's been a long time since Apple cared about boot time, or how much space the OS takes up. Now that storage is cheap the code is probably wildly inefficient.

I still try to make my web pages lean. I won't use Javascript libraries, there's generally no point, it's not just bloat, it's really unnecessary bloat. Twenty years ago I had one of my first SEO clients, and I told him the code on his site was bloated and the first thing I'd need to do was re-code it, that it wouldn't look any different to visitors, but it would load a lot faster for them. He agreed without any pushback, and was amazed at the result. I still remember how he described the new load time: "Instant Internet!" And the thing is, fast load times are generally possible for most sites, but few seem to do it that way.

[explorador]

@MichaelBluejay, absolutely!. The first Macs (in fact for a long time) had part of the software on ROM, so the OS wasn't fully on code/disks, this is the main reason emulators required ROMS (in software version) to run, even if the emulator fully recreated the processor. Besides, the graphical interface was quite effective and still using less space. It's sad how a lot of people don't know the fact that previous Macs using Motorola processors were actually very powerful, while requiring only 512 or RAM, or 1-2 gigabytes, while you need(d) way more on other platforms for the same efficiency.

Last week installed MacOS on a laptop, just the ISO installer (original) was about 5.7Gygabytes, and don't forget how much is needed just to run a music player. I guess in some way, Mac messed up crossing to Intel, but they are kind of fixing that up moving to ARM.

I did exactly what you explain on your last paragraph and people were not only shocked, but also satisfied with the results as clients willing to pay for it. Today I hear people saying "oh! the speed is amazing! but meh... people can buy more ram or get a faster processor".

[tangor]

Heh ... Today we have cms and wp and "platforms" with plug and play and themes and, and, and, when the hand-rolled static site remains the fastest, leanest, and easiest to debug---kind of like Assembly: THIS AND NO MORE REQUIRED.

Yeah, when you get to interactive processing/payment you need to add a bit. That's what Perl is for.

All that said, even the new stuff can be made lean and mean, folks just don't do it. Plug in a library, stack, whatever without even looking at the code content/needs v all the extras.

I suspect "efficiency" these days is measured by "how few hours can it be done via plug/inclusion" compared to doing it the right way.

Reminds of me "Cheap, Fast, or Good. Pick two. You can't have all three."

[explorador]

tangor: I suspect "efficiency" these days is measured by "how few hours can it be done via plug/inclusion" compared to doing it the right way.

True. Recently joined a local graphic designers group just to see what's going on, I'm shocked by the posts talking about technology and the minimum needed to work on the field, they are quite wrong but doesn't surprise me. Most opinions advice going for insane configurations, tons of RAM and tons of video memory on dedicated graphics, SSDs, expensive setups, etc. I sure know many of the fresh tools require up to date versions of Windows or MacOS that also require lots of ram, but a circle is a circle, a photograph is a photograph. So I pointed out it's insane how most designers are wasting crazy amounts of money jut to produce a final PDF with a picture and text, something that you are able to do since the 90's with 512 megabytes of ram. To make matters worse, the lack of proper technique means they are now creating the same PDF but it weights 250 gigabytes on disk.

[graeme_p]

The first Mac fit the entire graphical operating system AND a word processing app on a single-sided 400k disk.

Take a look at the size of the Facebook and Uber apps. The Facebook app (which seems less functional than the website) is over a 100MB and contains 18,000 classes. [quellish.tumblr.com...]

You can do quite a lot of stuff on a Raspberry Pi - not full featured graphics software though (arty daughter tried). For a lot of people who just use a computer for the web and office software one is fine. I use ONLY second hand computers no - I am green and mean (in the sense of stingy) and have no issues.

[explorador]

FB webpages, just as the JS includes you should use to display ONE like button (along with tons of tracking stuff) are insanely huge.

iOS apps are also insanely big. Found somewhere, the average size app on iOS is half a gigabyte, it doesn't surprise me as I've seen it myself, that's one of the key things I didn't like while owning a few iPhones as the space just goes away fast. Posted on another thread similar observations regarding mobile development, as most coding tools require you to install tons and tons of stuff that are included or "used" while building the most simple app that ends up using a lot of space.