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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you but I just... gave up. The web ate the net, the browser is the new OS. It's silly, it's lazy, it's inefficient, it's everything I dislike about software engineering but at this point it feels like preaching in the wind. I just try to ignore it, keep writing low level code and if someday I can't find a programming job outside of web technologies anymore I'll just become a shepherd in the mountains or something. I'll make cheese.

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It'll probably bounce back. We've been here before, when computing was centralized and everybody logged into the mainframe. Then it turned out that to have independent computers gave users a huge advantage and helped control costs.

Now, we're back to centralized systems- and I couldn't believe it when I watched the shift: What first caught my attention that this could get serious was gmail. Then g-office (whatever they called it then). Meanwhile a whole host of other services started.

I was developing a desktop app because I still wasn't convinced that people wouldn't prefer having their software and data "in hand," as it were.

I expect a new advantage will emerge and we'll want our machines and data back.

"You have been locked out of the G-Suite because a username closely affiliated with your IP address was discovered on the downside of a controversial reddit thread."

"at Google, we will never provide a clearly stated reason for account termination. Please read our Community guidelines for further information."

Welcome to Google. I love you.

It's the tradeoff between local computing power and bandwidth/latency. It flips back and forth every couple decades based on what's expensive and what the last big advance was.

Even within the current era, render on server, render on client, ajax (the mix), etc.

We're seeing it now in gaming. Vidcards are the cost of a whole system now, games have become huge, and fast storage is still expensive; but bandwidth is increasing along with A/V streaming being perfected, so someone figured out how to minimize apparent control latency and now games are streaming. Once vidcards get cheap and SSD storage capacities catch up to 150GB games it'll flip back until the balance tips again.

Not enough to make even moderately latency-sensitive gaming worthwhile, though. I don't see that getting better unless there's widespread building of data centers all over the place to keep the services right in your neighborhood.

I’ve been pretty happy with PS Now, Shadow and GeForce Now. I show maybe an extra 50ms of latency max, more like 30ms avg.

I wouldn’t play really competitive shooters that way but it’s low enough to not bother me even in mouse/keyboard FPS (for the PC services). For controllers it’s completely negligible, like playing with a Bluetooth device or on a 2015 TV.

That said, I’m in Santa Clara County near one of the major Shadow datacenters, probably the others too, and I have gigabit. I am in the ideal situation you describe.

So is a lot of the world though. US is super rural for its economic weight but that’s not the norm. Most developed countries have much higher density and better networks. I think we’ll probably just end up dragging behind the curve until we mesh the flyover states better.

You made me feel a lot better, actually (I'm serious). <3 Maybe one day I will open the sandwich shop I sometimes threaten to leave software for, and I can buy your cheese. (I know that is a horrible business, but there was a great article I read 15 or so years ago about a developer quitting software to open a hot dog stand, and he seemed so happy about it.)

Both of you have renewed my faith in humanity. It means a lot to run into a kindred spirit.

> It's silly, it's lazy, it's inefficient, it's everything I dislike about software engineering but at this point it feels like preaching in the wind.

It may not be conceptually beautiful but it is one of the most practical and useful technologies we've ever created, like C compared to lisp. The Web is the new "Worse is Better"

I'm also a bit disheartened by the direction of the web.

Emacs has been a decent haven for me in my search for privacy, interopability, programmability: my user agent.

I think it's conways law but applied to society as a whole. The companies, non-profits we currently have - that's what has created this situation.

Wonder when they will ship a new version of AOL CDs to access the global CDN formerly known as the Internet.

Actually HTTP could directly handle DNS. Then you can decide between a cloudflare, google, akamai or amazon browser. Who needs more freedom if we can have security...

What do you think of a new standard for delivering instant web apps that is 1% of the complexity of browsers? Something, maybe a chat-like interface with buttons and input fields, that allows you to interact with a web server in a dynamic and useful way but it's at the same time very simple and fast.

Ideally then for all more involved software experiences native software would have to be shipped.

Maybe you could try to send and email to Jeff Minter before giving up

Not to mention DNSEC is not available for every TLD. I urge operation system maker, Apple, MS, Linux to implement something like handshake.org

Stop with this stop political stuff in tech like root level zone server type of stuff.

have you looked at embedded software applications? Its bare metal, limited space, fixed point math, detail oriented. All the good stuff!

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