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Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by soulofmischief on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:25AM (#22366245)
> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast

Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by RHSeeger on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:35AM (#22366364)
> Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's.

Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster.

That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been running commands to search/process data from the command line recently

1. Search through a directory structure with millions of files (find)

2. filter down to ones containing a certain thing (grep)

3. find certain values in the files based on pattern matching (sed)

4. filter to files where one value equals another (test)

I can't imagine that would _ever_ finish running on a computer in the 80s. It works just fine on my current computer (albeit taking a minute to run).

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by 113 on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:48AM (#22366503)
> Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement?

It's at the end of their comment.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by RHSeeger on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:09PM (#22367518)
The page in question discusses latency in terminals, not how it compares to performance of previous generations.

That being said, it also seems to have to pull in the 99th percentile behavior in order for the timings to be an issue, and even then it's not horrible; it doesn't get actually "bad" until you consider the worst performance (99.9th percentile) of the worst performer (st). It seems overly picky to me.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by ehsankia on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:40PM (#22367867)
Also, almost all performance issues come due to features, which nostalgia about the past always ignores. Some specific tasks may have been tangentially faster, but you also had orders of magnitude less features available, and said feature make your overall workflow much faster. None of these people would actually give up on their zsh/autocomplete/fzf/custom git-integrated theme for a few ms better latency.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by C4stor on Thursday February 20, 2020 @04:33AM (#22373847)
Let's face it,none of those are compelling reasons for more latency when at the same time the computing power available has ballooned to its current level. Adding auto-complete given processors litterally orders of magnitude faster should have been feasible without getting slower.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by ehsankia on Thursday February 20, 2020 @06:29PM (#22379609)
Depends, I have fuzzy search decades of command history, that's not a trivial, and it's more intensive than basic reverse search.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by soulofmischief on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:34PM (#22367787)
https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

Here is another survey which takes it from a different angle.

I should have clarified my original post but it's too late:

I am lamenting primarily against the latency introduced by the amount of layers involved both at the hardware and software level compared to yesteryear.

Compositors, virtualization, higher level languages, etc. do not come for free; despite explosive increases in computing capability, we also have an explosive increase in the number of running threads and the resources required to maintain them.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by dragonsh on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @08:42PM (#22372048)
Today's terminal has some difference, the fonts should look anti-aliased, flickering should be as minimal as possible, should be able to theme it based on preference. One terminal able to support so many different terminal type VT100, rxvt, and still need to perform fast. I have worked enough on text only and 256 graphics terminal in yester years and feel today is still better.

Another case, Google maps is a bad example in tours. Used it to explore many cities, not only turn by turn direction. It worked get although personally like openstreet maps, because I feel one company s shouldn’t control so many aspects of life and like open source nature of it.

Indeed able to discover a onsen built by community in Hokkaido. That’s based on a lake I saw by just zoom in out of the map to do exploration and saw it built by Ainu community living there. In that turn by turn map helped quite a lot to reach there subsequently just by click and dropping a pin there. Submitted a text describing it and subsequently visited by many people.

Took a journey through treacherous mountain and went up to 2500 meters high and crossed it via a tiny off-road designed for motorcycles. That too did based on exploration of map on phone.

Paper maps didn’t provide such convenience. Yes POS is slow, but then it has different expectations today. Try integrating old POS with 10 payment network working under milliseconds to authorise transactions. Worked enough since 1990 with dos based POS and also wrote IBM MQ C++ code for integration. Don’t want to go back there.

I think today is a step forward. Like always there will be good and bad as it was in 1980 or 1990. But largely today we do much more with computers than we ever did in those days.

So not everything is perceptually slow on computers. Apple Watch, iphone, androids are responsive and usually fast. Windows 10 for certain tasks might be slow but then overall it’s not that bad either.

As far as exploration goes you can do the same or even more today than before. I can discover planets. Built3D model in physical form, use CNC on desktop, do laser cutting in my home.

Built a computer like BBC micro, raspberry pi, fly a computer using fly by wire and test it using real physical model plane. Can do farming on a small scale using hydroponics at home. Can just go on and on about it. All possible thanks to advancement in speed and reduction of size in computing devices and peripherals.

So I feel it’s not slow, just the work we do with old computers is very different from what we do with modern one’s.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by soulofmischief on Thursday February 20, 2020 @11:37AM (#22376277)
The argument is that a terminal shouldn't be slower given the increase in computing power by several magnitudes. Maps has its own scalability challenges, but a terminal doesn't need a live network connection and isn't/shouldn't be maintained by 100 developers who each only know a small bit of the codebase and step on each others' toes.

Given some corrections, we certainly have the capability to build terminal workflows with less latency. So there is nothing wrong with pushing the community forward.

It's not a matter of nostalgia or just being content with the way things are. People used to argue vehemently against the features we enjoy today such as autocomplete and advanced theming, but a few people kept their heads down and made it happen anyway, because it was The Right Thing.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by cgriswald on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @11:26AM (#22366980)
That citation does not support the quoted claim.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by ModernMech on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @11:05AM (#22366710)
There's also this: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/143 (Weird slowness scolling text in the console )

""" It's caused by conhost.exe excessively hammering the registry to query the following two values:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\TabletMode HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\ColorPrevalence Having previously reported this issue through Feedback Hub (to no avail), let me offer my observations from debugging this issue:

It's not specific to Dell's XPS series - I've been able to reproduce on any Windows 10 installation from version 1703 and up It only occurs when the console application writes output that causes the console to scroll It only occurs when the console application in question is in foreground/focus Each reg value mentioned above is queried 6 times, per scroll!!! """

The solution I use is to minimize the terminal when it's scrolling. When I compile my projects if I don't minimize the terminal it takes forever to finish.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by opless on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @11:33AM (#22367072)
It's a very common problem/solution. Since the beginning of Windows NT I believe
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by mrdatawolf on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:11PM (#22367549)
"Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...item...was...written...to...the...screen. The OP has good points but the start was WEAK because it is factually inaccurate like your comment.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by carapace on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:30PM (#22367731)
Right, I can recall the first time I saw my friend's parent's 486.

I remember doing 'dir' on a large directory, it scrolled so fast, so fast. I said to my friend, "The next generation will be so fast it will have finished scrolling before you finish typing the command."

Sadly, it was not to be. DOS on a 486 is as fast as computers have ever gotten, perceptually.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by simonskoog on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:21PM (#22367648)
That still happens though, and it's not because it actually took 50ms for your computer to read a filename and 500 ms for it to read 10.

It depends on how fast you allow items to be written (pixels per unit of time) on your display and if you force writing of everything or allow line skips. If you want to experiment I think putty has pretty fine-grain control options.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by soulofmischief on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:38PM (#22367836)
The terminal is not experiencing input latency while the shell runs the dir program. The drawing program is experiencing latency. My comment is oversimplified for brevity, but not factually incorrect.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by GekkePrutser on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:34AM (#22366357)
Not really :)

Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed.

However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by jws on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @11:10AM (#22366776)
Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud…

The VMS manuals suggested that system administrators may want to keep the hard wired terminals down to 2400 buad and hide the fact from users by turning on "smooth scroll" (which only scrolled about that fast anyway) in order to keep the interrupt load down on the Vax. Something about batching of interrupts on the multiport serial cards.

Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by GekkePrutser on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:54PM (#22368047)
Yes there was that but it also just couldn't handle the full speed continuously. It depended a lot what kind of commands were sent. Full text was fairly OK but drawing commands took a while as far as I remember. In any case, flow control was a must-have in those days. Either CTS/RTS or at least XON/XOFF
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by ralusek on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @11:44AM (#22367207)
There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age...when spinners are almost exclusively used in web apps in order to denote that the web browser is yet to receive the necessary data over YOUR internet connection.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by kokx on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:42PM (#22367883)
Tell that to my former boss. They wanted me to delay sending responses from the backend, because they liked showing off their custom spinner. The spinner would not be seen at all during normal operation, without the delay in sending responses.
Re:Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower tha... by GekkePrutser on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:56PM (#22368070)
Then why do I still see them with my verified 600/600 connection :)

The problem is just that there's too much javascript running in the browser and it's too poorly written (loading each post individually in Reddit by example instead of batching them). Reddit's redesign in particular is really really bad. At least they offer the old site but it looks so bad. I'd love to have something looking more modern but without the javascript overload.