The INTERNET is killing old PC hardware [video] | Hacker News Reader

The INTERNET is killing old PC hardware [video]

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7 pointspopcalc4 comments

PWAs were the beginning of the end. The crossplatform time savings got Node off the ground and then young webdevs fresh out of 2010s bootcamps never learned why MVC separation exists. 99% of bundled web apps would be faster to develop, more maintainable, more secure, and be snappy on a 20 year old laptop if built in dotnet MVC or RoR. How is there no movement against this virus? Javascript frameworks are the only reason the average person has had to buy a new PC in the last decade.

> Javascript frameworks are the only reason the average person has had to buy a new PC in the last decade.

It's really sad but there's lot of truth in what you wrote. At first I was thinking: "but my compilation keeps getting faster and faster" and "some local AI models are really sweet" but that's not your average PC usecase.

My Core i7-6700K from 2015 still works totally fine. I moved to faster PCs: an AMD 3700X (which the wife now uses) and for me an AMD 7700X. But that Core i7 from 2015 simply just still works (as a proxmox machine, running VMs and containers: no ECC sadly).

And what can bring the AMD 3700X / 32 GB my wife is using to its knees? JavaScript. Fucking Wix and Slack and Canva (? not even sure the name is right) webapps that are dog slow and suck up all the CPUs and RAM.

Situation is so out of control with these JavaScript webapps that I'm seriously considering moving to a "one website / one container with quota" scheme.

After switching my wife from Windows to OS X to Ubuntu and now to Debian, I'm now planning to switch her to Proxmox, install a VM, and have her use containers with CPU and RAM quotas to keep these misbehaving pieces of turds webapps written by totally clueless developers in check.

FWIW I did for me, in the past, when I had that one webapp I was using that would manage to bring my beast of a machine to its knees (forgot which one webapp it was though).

Buying her a faster machine / with more RAM would be pointless: the JavaScript developers are vampires and would find a way to suck up all the CPUs and RAM anyway and have this thing swap to disk as if the early 2000s called.

I don't think a browser deserves to run on bare metal anymore. These things do seriously need to be put in a straightjacket. I think I'll got the container and CPU/RAM quota way again (because in my experience it's much easier to put quotas directly on a container than it is to try to CPU pin / RAM limits on a full browser).

P.S: and that's with serious ad blocking in place...

Slack is the worst I have to deal with on a daily basis. Fans always spin up on my T490 and it takes 10-15 seconds for all DOM elements to fully render. This is a laptop I have no problem compiling browsers on and it gets hammered by what could be replaced by existing XMPP clients that initialize faster than a blink of an eye.

https://once.com/campfire

Haven't tried this but it's a Slack alternative from the Basecamp folks, source included and works on airgapped networks.

Second worst offender I have to deal with is Jira web. I've had CTOs tell me they know it's crap but they force their startups to use it from the get-go because it makes getting acquihired easier because the other company likely already uses it. Truly Kafkaesque.

I don't doubt that your i7-6700K still works fine. I work on an i7-4xxx. My laptop is from February 2014 and went through all Ubuntus since 12.04 to 20.04, then I switched to Debian 11. I should upgrade to 12 or wait for 13.

Replacing the HDD with a couple of SSD did a lot and maxing out the RAM to 32 GB helped too. Browsers got faster in these 11 years and uBO + uMatrix are great at speeding up web sites.

I have no problems working with Slack (the desktop app) and Jira inside Firefox.

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