Programmer Humor

The modern web is an insult to the idea of efficiency at practically every level.

You cannot convince me that isolation and sandboxing requires a fat 4Gb slice of RAM for a measly 4 tabs.

My PC is 15 times faster than the one I had 10 years ago. It's the same old PC but I got rid of Windows.

The tech debt problem will keep getting worse as product teams keep promising more in less time. Keep making developers move faster. I’m sure nothing bad will come of it.

Capitalism truly ruins everything good and pure. I used to love writing clean code and now it’s just “prompt this AI to spit out sloppy code that mostly works so you can focus on what really matters… meetings!”

Everything bad people said about web apps 20+ years ago has proved true.

It's like, great, now we have consistent cross-platform software. But it's all bloated, slow, and only "consistent" with itself (if even). The world raced to the bottom, and here we are. Everything is bound to lowest-common-denominator tech. Everything has all the disadvantages of client-server architecture even when it all runs (or should run) locally.

It is completely fucking insane how long I have to wait for lists to populate with data that could already be in memory.

But at least we're not stuck with Windows-only admin consoles anymore, so that's nice.

All the advances in hardware performance have been used to make it faster (more to the point, "cheaper") to develop software, not faster to run it.

The same? Try worse. Most devices have seen input latency going up. Most applications have a higher latency post input as well.

Switching from an old system with old UI to a new system sometimes feels like molasses.

Thought leaders spent the last couple of decades propaganding that features-per-week is the only metric to optimize, and that if your software has any bit of efficiency or quality in it that's a clear indicator for a lost opportunity to sacrifice it on the alter of code churning.

The result is not "amazing". I'd be more amazed had it turned out differently.

Windows 11 is the slowest Windows I've ever used, by far. Why do I have to wait 15-45 seconds to see my folders when I open explorer? If you have a slow or intermittent Internet connection it's literally unusable.

PCs aren't faster, they have more cores, so they can do more at a time, but it takes effort to optimize for parallel work. Also the form factor keeps getting smaller, more people use laptops now and you can't cheat thermal efficiency.

I hate that our expectations have been lowered.

2016: "oh, that app crashed?? Pick a different one!"

2026: "oh, that app crashed again? They all crash, just start it again and cross your toes."

You do really feel this when you're using old hardware.

I have an iPad that's maybe a decade old at this point. I'm using it for the exact same things I was a decade ago, except that I can barely use the web browser. I don't know if it's the browser or the pages or both, but most web sites are unbearably slow, and some simply don't work, javascript hangs and some elements simply never load. The device is too old to get OS updates, which means I can't update some of the apps. But, that's a good thing because those old apps are still very responsive. The apps I can update are getting slower and slower all the time.

Actually I can, because I use Linux.

They often are worse, because everything needed to be an electron app, so they could hire the cheaper web developers for it, and also can boast about "instant cross platform support" even if they don't release Linux versions.

Qt and GTK could do cross platform support, but not data collection, for big data purposes.

The program expands so as to fill the resources available for its execution

-- C.N. Parkinson (if he were alive today)

"Let them eat ram"

I paid for the whole amount of RAM, I'm gonna use the whole amount of RAM.

/s

Joke aside, the computer I used a little more than a decade ago used to take 1 minute just to display a single raw photo. I'm a liiiittle better off now.

Had to install (an old mind you, 2019) visual studio on windows...

...

...

First it's like 30GB, what the hell?? It's an advanced text editor with a compiler and some ..

Crashed a little less than what I remember 🥴😁

Unreal Engine is one of biggest offenders in gaming.

Yeah, my Xperia 1 (Android 3.1) still runs fluid with it's 100 MB of RAM and storage. While my Leaf2 e-reader lags in a uptodate LineageOS, despite having 10x more CPU and 20x more RAM.

For my home PC, sure. Running some windows apps on my Linux machine in wine is a little weird and sluggish. Discord is very oddly sluggish for known reasons. Proton is fine tho.

But for my work? Nah. My M3 MacBook Pro is a beast compared to even the last Intel MacBook. Battery is way better unless you’re like me and constantly running a front end UI for a single local service. But without that, it can last hours. My old one could only last 2 meetings before it started dying.