Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
I don't understand though why performance (I.e. using it properly) is not a consideration with these companies that are valued above $100 billion
like, do these poor pitiful big tech companies only have the resources to do so when they hit the 2 trillion mark or something?
> Faster sites lead to better user engagement.
> Faster sites lead to better user retention.
> Faster sites lead to higher conversions.
If it's true that nobody is getting promoted for improving web app performance, that seems like an opportunity. Build an org that rewards web app performance gains, and (in theory) enjoy more users and more money.
Ben Horowitz recalled asking Zuck what his engineer onboarding process was when the latter complained to him about how it took them very long to make changes to code. He basically didn't have any.
It's also not a problem with the react compiler.
One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is because the framework continues to improve performance without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months because the framework authors got bored.
Is it time for vanilla.js to shine again with Element.setHTML()?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set...
It's a bit unfortunate that several calls to .setHTML() can't be batched so that several .setHTML() calls get executed together to minimize page redraws.
If you look at older desktop GUI frameworks designed in a performance-oriented era, none of them use the React paradigm, they use property binding. A good example of getting this right is JavaFX which lets you build up functional pipelines that map data to UI but in a way that ensures only what's genuinely changed gets recomputed. Dependencies between properties are tracked explicitly. It's very hard to put the UI into a loop.
While more difficult, I think the unidirectional workflows of Redux/Flux patterns when well-managed tend to function much better in that regard, but then you do suffer from potential for redraws... this isn't the core of the DOM overhead though... that usually comes down to a lot of deeply nested node structures combined with complex CSS and more than modest use of oversized images.
Narcissism rises to the top, excess "enterprise" bloat seeps in at every level combined with too many sub-projects that are disconnected in ways that are hard to "own" as a whole combined with perverse incentives to add features over improving the user experience.
The problem with performance in wep apps is often not the omg too much render. But is actually processing and memory use. Chromium loves to eat as much ram as possible and the state management world of web apps loves immutability. What happens when you create new state anytime something changes and v8 then needs to recompile an optimized structure for that state coupled with thrashing the gc? You already know.
I hate the immutable trend in wep apps. I get it but the performance is dogshite. Most web apps i have worked on spend about 10% of their cpu time…garbage collecting and the rest doing complicated deep state comparisons every time you hover on a button.
Rant over.
[0] He holds the title of Chief Engineer at SpaceX.
Its quite insane
Write a “Hello World” in C++ that pops up a dialog box compared to writing the same as an Electron app.
B - a heavy runtime that is greater than 0
C - system libraries
By definition
A + C < A + B + C
>> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.
Makes no sense to me...
The ‘dashboard’, the ‘interface’? Reminds me of coworkers who used to refer to desktop PC cases as the hard drive, or people who refer to the web as ‘Google’.
Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.
Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of overhead.
When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main page and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom of the page (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) that got stuck in a SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event and thus itself to be triggered again.
I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are far from new and yet web developers have only been getting increasingly disconnected from reality.
It is to do with websites essentially baking in their own browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as possible.
It’s astonishing how bad the experience was.
Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.
Maybe we should finally regulate these addict boxes as the dangerous substances they are.
Baffles me ui like this exists in 2026.
www.linkedin.com##main:style(font-size: 16px !important;)Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
If they hate you, they're less likely to go through a termination process including severance.
I used to always worry about them finding out. Now, I'm having trouble not blurting it out from the rooftops.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
1. That’s the default presumption (rather than someone doing networking for their current role)
2. Where “looking for another job” is a point of contention
Any good senior engineer should be keeping in touch with others in the industry. And good teams are made up of people with good communication skills who want to be there.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
This works.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
But let’s be honest…
it’s not just a social media platform.
It’s a mindset. A daily ritual. A lifestyle. A place where every thought becomes a “lesson”
...
Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange staccato posts.
Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things happening in your industry you can learn about.
But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work family dribble.
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
If you aren’t in a location with meetups , the best bet is finding online game dev communities.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
My favorite is this:
The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary, Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author. Father."
That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income and achievements to shame.
It got a lot of traction with the algorithm due to lots of comments to the effect of "What??", but every time I pass by the screenshot in my photoroll, I have a little giggle about it.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix, every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff… the first answer to an HR “off limits” question will be given soon enough if I get the job.
Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
We have some responsibility as candidates to tell HR departments and recruiters that some stuff doesn't fly.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
EDIT: Data from 2023: https://medias.smart-home-fox.de/SDE/Social%20Media%20Statis...
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
How? Legitimate question.
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.
I think the dynamic you're observing is partly people just reacting to stuff (or if posting actively, fluffing up their "professional presence") as they do a job hunt.
FWIW starter kits and topical feeds are a great way to jumpstart your algorithm.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...
I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.
It's useless otherwise.
Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating
I have to say I haven't spotted anything at this brutality scale neither before, not after this incident. Also, I had no third-party adblocking software deployed, just Firefox's native defaults. (I use quite a few other extensions, userscripts and userstyles, though, so I cannot rule out some clash induced by them.)
I see LI is using protechts.net stuff in hidden iframes with charming id="humanThirdPartyIframe" and even nicer id="humanSecurityEnforcerIframe". Lovely!
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?
As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but with community servers run independently. That is, there are some "federated" identity providers so community servers can agree on identity across servers, then each community server runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community server - private channels in a community server are not E2E encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays (with a special class of relay server for people who want to DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such high latency (even locally!).
Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the void was kinda understandable, but these days you can literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.
That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.
A brutal reality to navigate if you're not acting in bad faith.
I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.
I also know that's a naive view.
hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.
A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.
When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.
Huh? On LinkedIn, the only thing that's mandatory is to have a profile that maybe looks like your resume, and that's about it. A photo helps too. Lots of people do nothing more with it than that, and use it to find jobs.
8.1. Dos
Use your real name on your profile; and
8.2. Don’ts
Create a false identity on LinkedIn, misrepresent your identity, create a Member profile for anyone other than yourself (a real person), or use or attempt to use another’s account (such as sharing log-in credentials or copying cookies);
But profile pictures are here >
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1377087/profi...
> You can use an illustration, caricature, or other artistic rendering of yourself, but your profile photo must reflect your likeness. We may remove profile photos that don’t comply with our User Agreement and Professional Community Policies, including images that consist solely of the following:
I'm pretty sure even this has been updated to accommodate all the Ghibli AI avatars that people use.
With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily determined by all users voting up articles or moderating them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that weights votes and flags differently based on some other criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags. And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if they load the page at the same time.
HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is centered around individuals and what they personally choose to post and promote.
I think in reality "social media" is a set of properties all of which lead to different effects in the discourse on the site. This site may not have individualized ranking algorithms but it has open registration and crowdsourced ranking which gives it a lot of the same benefits and failure modes of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, HN has a professional (meaning: paid) mod staff, which leads to different behaviors than Reddit.
It's all just a spectrum and I think it's more rigorous to think of these things as a spectrum rather than trying to play this silly intellectual game of defitinioneering to make the social media you don't like sound bad and the ones you like sound good. Focusing on cause and effect can be a more effective way to craft intentional social spaces rather than finger pointing.
Isn't there an algorithm on HN to boost and downvote? It might be a different algo but there is one.
i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.
For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.
Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.
Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.
Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.
So there's this "curation" for me.
Instagram and X never show me political topics or hype-related things because I am quick to enter related keywords into the filtering mechanisms.
Instagram can sometimes try to force through things but in general my feed has been pretty clean to the extent that rather than showing me random garbage it'll just say I've reached the end of the latest posts from people I follow. Besides, most people I want to keep up with these days post more often to stories. If anything the issue with stories is more frequent ads/sponsored posts but those are different from just recommendation junk.
The videos and comments on YT are superb training data, every bit as good as Google+ was.
In 2025, YouTube’s total revenue (advertising + subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60 billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies. Google+ would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular social network.
This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a bit more effort into that side of their platform.
IIRC they tried at some point incorporating G+ on youtube but that didn't work either
Yeah, it was pretty bad incorporating G+ account to everything. The way the G+ worked (at least in my friend circle), normal people had less business there. It was very hobby focused.
I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.
So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.
What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.
About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and it's a mandatory field.
There are tons though.
It's also an EEO violation. Report them. I've never had a Li account and never will because of their slimy tactics early on and their eventual conversion into a narcissist circle jerk.
AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.
I haven't seen this at all, but I normally do provide my LinkedIn URL to companies that I apply to through that platform. I don't really see the problem, though: I don't post anything (I'm not a LinkedIn Lunatic, though I've seen this with some coworkers), so what's the problem? To me, LinkedIn is mostly just a way to find jobs, and also maintain an online resume of sorts, and also to stay in some sort of contact with previous coworkers. I've had a bunch of recruiters try to recruit me for jobs through it. So it is helpful IMO, but only for career purposes. But I sure as hell don't post opinion crap on there, esp. political drivel. I don't mind the posts from people pointing out, for instance, interesting stuff about Python, so sometimes I read those. I also find entertainment in reading the posts about how companies with ridiculous recruiting practices fail to find decent candidates.
Their "social media" aspect sucks. LinkedIn is 99% bullshit posts about people hyping up they have "learned lessons" or sucking up to whoever just hired them.
Kafka is a neat piece of engineering though, I'll grant you that.
I’ve also gotten jobs via direct application a few times. Certainly not the greatest of jobs, but people often question if anyone gets jobs that’s way too.
The only reason I’m employed now though is basically nepotism. What a great future we’ve built for ourselves.
Knowing that doesn't make LinkedIn a better platform in my eyes, on the contrary. It's more an 'if you pay you can do whatever you want' kinda thing.
X*
No ads was a huge plus. Take away the financial incentive and you get rid of most of the worst behavior.
EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website).
> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).
But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.
The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB, mattmanser then explained that images and fonts easily exceed that, and then you called that poor resource management. Sounds like we're on the same page here, but you seemed to have missed the context of the comment you initially replied to.
It didn't, here's the comment in question:
> A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
It makes no mention that an app should be under 70kB. It just note that 100MB is still *enormous* compared to 70kB.
And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.
It can't be explained by images and fonts alone, I agree, but images and fonts alone are still enormous compared to 70kB. On my screen an "e" on this site is 10*11 pixels. Subpixel positioning means we need at least 6 copies of each letter, subpixel antialiasing means we need three channel alpha (3 bytes per pixel), we have variations of bold, italic and bold-italic, 95 printable letters in ascii, that's a low-ball of 750kB for one size of one font. This comment page alone has 4 different sizes, I'd expect a chat app to have a few more.
[1]: Realistically, you're never gonna have all 95 characters in all weights for all font size, so the actual number is going to much significantly lower than the theoretical envelope. In practice, there'll be a main (font,size), that will have all glyphs (and it's going to be more than 95 because of the ligatures) in normal weight and no italic, with a subset of the glyphs in the three other modes, most likely not evenly distributed between modes. Then you'll have additional fonts (for UI labels, titles, etc) that are going to have much less represented glyphs and almost no variations of weight or italic if at all. Obviously the font(s) used for titles in going to have a bigger budget relatively to the glyph sample size, because each one is bigger than your baseline "e"
Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves?
While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.
Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.
What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.
So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?
FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.
I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.
:)
LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.
Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.
Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.
Also, lead is extremely dense.
Um, I guess in that there are naturally occurring isotopes of lead that are unstable. But those are very rare and can be removed. By this standard, the chips themselves are radioactive since they are made of silicon. By this standard, you, everything you eat, every plant and animal is radioactive since there are trace isotopes of carbon that are radioactive (that's how carbon dating works). And sunlight is very radioactive by this standard.
However, the materials we actually use in chips is highly processed and radioactive isotopes will likely be removed if a centrifuge was used in any step in concentration process. Likewise the lead used in a space shield will probably have similar processing of the material
"Also, lead is extremely dense."
This is the real reason lead isn't used. There are plenty of other elements that shield ionizing radiation quite well and are less dense. However, they are also more expensive than lead which is why we use lead on earth for shielding (its cheap) and use something else in space (where density is more important than price).
edit: ...when you don't have the protection of the atmosphere to begin with*
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
* checks notes *
read text on the internet.
B—b-it 4K scaling! Reactive design (to read text)! Emojis, reactions, badges! Memes and gifs!
Given the web of the 90s didn't include tons of overly complex javascript most of the settings were targeted at how much ram/disk was used for caching website assets IIRC.
It's the principle of the thing though - we should have the ability to set resource allocation limits instead of potentially handing our entire computer's resources to a random website just because we clicked on a URL.
In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram, because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it’s a good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
Then I realised that it was a bit too impressive.
The possibility that a website would use 2.4gb ram did not even occur to me. What is it even doing with all that memory?
For reference civilisation 4 is runnable with 2gb ram.
LinkedIn in 2026 means a social media full of slope AI posts where folks interact with it without noticing it.
Relationship posts, and even OF alike posts that you only see on Instagram/X
Linkedin is not longer a platform focused into work and networking.
Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.
I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred), a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB transferred).
A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__` -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were fully client-side rendered.
The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195 _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
But other ideas: - all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed - FE indexed search engine - bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)
Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78
I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture. If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg. Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.
Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.
I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the reason these things take lots of memory is because these things take lots of memory.
I just took some heap snapshots of this HN discussion page. Each JS heap snapshot was about 25MB and that does not include Blink native state or GPU bitmaps. The tab itself is taking ~100MB.
This isn't rendered bitmaps. Those get passed to the GPU process and uploaded to VRAM. That is just in-memory state required to render a very simple textual page with no images on it.
Where does it all go? Looking at the 25MB, the top memory user is anchor elements, 0.75MB is just the memory needed to represent links. This is where we start to get a clue as to the problem. An HN comments thread has a lot of links next to each comment, but they're very repetitive.
How would one implement this in a classical desktop toolkit? When we compare, we can see where the memory goes.
In the desktop era you would have implemented this with virtual scrolling in a customized list view - because it's easy and because the culture is to always do that. The APIs, sample code etc always pushes you in this direction. Additionally, there's much greater use of custom widgets that draw themselves on demand. Each comment would be a simple in-memory data structure, with zero RAM spent on UI. Each entry in the view would be an item in a listbox and Windows would request a paint of the entry as it scrolled into view (as comments don't stack horizontally). You'd have implemented a custom widget to render the text and the clickable links. The per-comment links (parent | context etc) would have been measured up front and then drawn with a single GDI DrawText. Mouse clicks would have been mapped back to the underlying text by using the measurements and then dispatched. The text would have been stored in a compact, typed, reflection-free in-memory data structure that stored only the comment, the UNIX time and an integer user id whose name would be looked up in a hashmap.
That approach is extremely memory efficient. The program itself translates business-level data structures to drawing calls just-in-time, and maps mouse clicks back to business-level operations with custom code. The OS helps out by supplying clipping, text rendering and pre-canned widgets, but devs have access to all the APIs from low to high level. However, it has downsides too. There is not necessarily any accessibility tree for screen readers, and things like changing the font size or selecting comment text are treated as nice-to-haves.
In a later era, maybe Swing or JavaFX or Qt, you'd no longer measure and draw the text yourself or map mouse clicks anymore. Data structures in RAM are less efficient now and GC lets garbage hang around. But the list view would still be virtualized by default. In virtualized list view, as the user scrolls it slides widgets off the top and then immediately repositions them at the bottom, so it's a bit like an escalator. As the list item is scrolled into view it's requested to mutate its internal state to match an entry in an underlying list of business objects. In web terms, the div is moved downwards in an absolutely positioned sense and then the text properties of the sub-divs are adjusted. As a result there are only a few UI objects being managed by the toolkit at once. The engine isn't expected to keep thousands of widgets off screen.
The web doesn't support this stuff well because it was never meant to be a GUI toolkit, so the path of least resistance is to:
• Generate one set of unique DOM elements for every business object.
• Use strings for everything. JS isn't strongly typed, browsers don't support any binary data transfer formats, so you can't store user IDs as small integers and do just-in-time hashmap lookups to render the usernames.
• Duplicate everything incessantly. Every comment has a bunch of anchors and the data for all of them is nearly identical (href, id, CSS class), but the web doesn't make it easy to deduplicate this. You could do it in theory but it's not trivial and not how anyone is taught to write apps.
To fix this the web would need to support what older toolkits called owner draw controls, but I think they're reluctant to do this sort of thing because the telos of the web is to treat web devs like children - they aren't trusted with low level features because they might misuse them or get them wrong, or because it's hard to implement and browser devs don't want to support it. The web's approach to multi-threading or native code is a good example of this mentality in action. Owner draw controls and virtualized list views expect more of devs, and the HTML designers don't want to expect more, they want to expect less. So we get web pages that take gigabytes of RAM.
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
Why not?
The bigger problem is that browsers these days are not very resource efficient because the programmers behind them have powerful top-of-the-line computers that hide all the inefficiencies (or at the very least, computers significantly more powerful than what their users use). This is compounded by the web developers of most websites also using similarly powerful computers for their development, which hides all of the inefficiencies in the website code. This leads to the clusterfuck of LinkedIn using up 2.4GB of RAM across two tabs (though on my computer 2 tabs only uses up about 600 MB even after a few minutes of scrolling).
It turns out that focusing on developer productivity to the exclusion of the user experience has huge negative externalities. Who would have known? (Answer: Literally everybody who was a programmer before the developer-first mentality took over tech.)
The solution: make browser and website developers use slower and less powerful computers than their average user/visitor will use. The performance issues would be identified and addressed immediately.
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
Most of LinkedIn is just garbage though, especially if you somehow connected with social-media people or marketing people. Marketing people on LinkedIn are weird, they can't form coherent sentences and they can't even sell themselves.
You could strip down LinkedIn down to your resume, availability status and your email address and it would be fine.
I've noticed that most books on software engineering are overly academic or focus too much on process. I feel like if you wanted to avoid something like the LinkedIn example you would need to make a meme book that was so simple, pervasive, and widely known that it could even reach an executive (for them to know whether or not work was actually good.)
That is probably like ... naive of me to say though.
Even for that though, I've never used it, and I don't feel like I'm missing out.
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
May be its time for browser vendors to show the consumption (right now they show memory usage) by features i.e background service, websockets, etc.,
With option to disable background service workers.
LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
If a page downloads 1MB JSON, that could easily take 10MB (maybe much more?) RAM when parsed into an object. And JS code itself probably has a similar increase in size just by getting parsed into an AST. And all that is before really executing anything - once the dozens of shitty third party scripts start whirring, they will generate tons of uncollectible garbage because they are written by miserable people who don’t give a shit, understandably. And I bet LinkedIn has a hell of a lot of junk third party scripts injected by random spies I working in various corporate departments who need to spy on users to collect data to persuade their boss to let them do some dumb project to prove they deserve their job.
Tabs also render a bunch of compositor layers as bitmaps stored in VRAM, or just RAM, for smooth scrolling. Oh and there’s the DOM, I bet that adds up. I’m probably only scratching the surface. There’s so much going on in a browser tab. The front end is a marvel of engineering. Sites like LinkedIn of course exploit this for banal evil, sadly.
I only open LinkedIn... very rarely. When done, I just close it.
Don't scroll. Don't read stories. Don't do anything except message recruiters. Get them into email or a phone call. That's it. Fuck LinkedIn.
Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine.
But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters.
Think; - vscode
- jira
There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology.
I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time.
Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine.
While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs (enables cross tab sync, great for chat apps and local caching). I recently tried to make an offline-only application with a wasm-based sqlite implementation in a SharedWorker and the API just doesn't work.
First of all, wasm won't run in my browser (I determined that by evaluating `typeof WebAssembly` in the console tab of Developer Tools), a choice made not by me, but by the maintainer of my browser (Trivalent) -- probably for security reasons. I trust the maintainer of my browser about security-related decisions.
Besides security, another reason I am going to resist wasm is that it gives the site owner more power at my expense. The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions. For example, for years, I ran an extension that deletes "fixed elements" from web page (which didn't work on 100% of sites with fixed elements, but was still a welcome assistance to me because it worked on about 70% of sites). Wasm would make it more difficult for an extension to modify a site in ways that users with various preferences and various disabilities might want -- because code is more difficult to modify than data is, and the way web pages are now, there is a lot of data in a web page stored in 'locations' that an extension can programmatically find and modify.
In summary, site owners already have too much control over my experience (relative to me and authors of software such as a browser extension acting on my behalf), and wasm would give them even more control.
It would be one thing if I used the web mainly to run sophisticated applications. I do not: I use it mainly to find simple data resources, mostly text and URLs, written by ordinary people such as yourself. When anyone anywhere wants to get some information out to the world and consider how best to do that, 99% percent of the time, the first thought that comes to mind is to put some text or maybe a video or some other kind of data on the web. I see sentiments like the one you expressed just now as interfering with the flow of this text or other kind of data to me -- by making the process more complicated, less customizable by the user and giving "middlemen" like advertiser more ways to profit from this flow.
Again: I never wanted or asked for a platform for the delivery of sophisticated applications over the internet (using web protocols) to get all mixed up and combined with the world's most important and most convenient platform that ordinary users (i.e., not site owners or professional technologists for the most part) use to publish and consume simple data objects like text and URLs and such.
This isn't related too directly to WASM, what you want is DOM rendering only, you would theoretically reject canvas and WebGL rendering I imagine. But you could create DOM nodes with WASM. The only difference is that WASM is not as easy to decompile, but I can't imagine you're really unminifiying and patching Javascript are you?
I'm not a web dev, so maybe directing my hatred and resentment at wasm like I did in my first comment is a mistake. I don't like the idea of a site that draws its whole UI to a canvas (for reasons you can probably understand) and I have been assuming that that is impractical in just Javascript and that in practice, wasm is needed for that.
According to one of those services that gives fast answers to questions, Vanadium (the browser of the GrapheneOS project, which I also trust to give security recommendations) has wasm enabled, but that is a new development. Before late 2025, wasm worked only when JavaScript JIT was enabled, and the default was to have it disabled, which is how most users left it. It was possible for the user to enable it only on a few sites chosen by the user (per-site configurability).
I did not mean to broadcast misinformation, and will be more careful in the future. I do know that when the web gets new capabilites to make it a better application-delivery platform, my experience of the web strongly tends to get worse. The introduction of HTML5 and other technologies circa 2006 for example was a very salient example of that.
2) wasm makes serving static content practical as server side rendering is economical. My previous employer, for instance, spends tens of millions of dollars every year running SSR servers - almost all of that would be eliminated if the backend could just run the client as wasm.
3) Scrapers (think puppeteer) would be faster and more resource efficient because they wouldn't need to start a JavaScript runtime to load a page.
4) You don't use Electron apps?
5) You may not, but everyone else uses rich interactive web applications. Think of the energy usage and cost savings there would be to the world.
I've tentatively concluded the I should stay away from them for security reasons. That is what the Secureblue project recommends. I like vscode, but have no current need for it, so I did not install it the last time I installed an OS. If I ever start coding full time, I'd need something vscode-like and would try to make do with Github Codespaces. I've already made sure Codespaces runs in my browser (Trivalent with wasm, webgl and webgpu disabled) and have found a way to use it without a browser's tab bar and location bar taking up valuable screen real estate.
2) It's not just me, all of the apps listed have the same issues. I know that in addition to Atlassian, Meta and Canva have sunk millions of dollars into writing custom bundlers.
I think it could improve Photopea, the various office suite programs, and perhaps unknown unknowns.
But, much more important than the uncertain is the current Web which will become less accessible and closed.
The ease in reverse engineering JavaScript has more than once shown negligence and malice by Website developers (one example is the recent Google scandal, where they were diminishing the user experience on competing browsers).
If I wanted to run trusted programs, I would have used native binaries.
The first thing to highlight is that multithreading is possible but extremely impractical on the web, and even if you succeed, it's slow. Check out Surma's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rrv9qFMWNM
Using threads unlocks so much performance, from everything to time-to-first-paint, time-to-interactive all the way to the general feel of the application.
That sort of optimization is trivial in languages designed for it (like Rust or Go).
Developer experience on the web is unbelievably poor. TypeScript is, semantically, fantastic, but then you have to build it - do you use swc or tsc, do you use webpack, rollup, rspack, vercel's stack, etc? Once you build it, what are your transpilation targets - did you even configure them or are you building bundles that are 40% larger for no reason? The runtime overhead of bundles is also non trivial.
Languages like Rust are maybe 20% more complicated than TypeScript - but they have TSX (also Vue templates, Angular templates, whatever) baked into the _core_ language - requiring no external transpilers or LSPs.
That doesn't mean every application is a good candidate for native/wasm - but the applications that would benefit would benefit end users and developers immensely.
The push back really makes no sense to me. Everyone complains about Electron (and OP about Linkedin, and everyone about Jira) being slow or eating up half their ram - yet with the same breath say that wasm would have no benefit.
> The ease in reverse engineering JavaScript
It's not as easy to reverse engineer native binaries - but you can do it pretty easily and produce the equivalent of minified source code from it. This is how emulators and custom firmware is created. It wouldn't prevent security researchers from identifying negligence.
Electron programs differ. I would like WASM on Electron, moreso, I do not want JavaScript in Electron programs. I only run programs without the browser's sandbox because I trust it will not be hostile. Electron makes it harder to install extensions and investigate its behavior, which removes the entire purpose of an interpreted neutered language.
I hate programming for the web, I rarely do it, because it is such a terrible experience. I don't doubt that browser-native WASM integration will improve it.
For a typical user, having a browser-equivalent experience for extensions on native binaries is practically impossible (game mods are rarely a good experience, even with developer support).
More important than all that, which you are missing, is that all these websites, are not slow because of JavaScript; I am willing to bet (I really am) that the performance of these websites will not improve with WASM. To clarify, I do not doubt that WASM is faster than JavaScript, rather, I doubt that those that made those websites, would have made a faster website using WASM. I support my claim with the following:
- The plethora of terrible native programs that are regularly made by those same organizations (Visual Studio; a native program, which should be faster than any WASM program, is much slower than VS Code. VS Code has less features, but how many features would you need to remove from Visual Studio to achieve VS Code's performance; or for a long shot, Zed's performance). - Computers have gotten thousands of times faster, and, yet those programs have gotten slower, in absolute terms. See my argument about functionality in the previous point (all AWS does is render text, how could they have made it to be that slow). - Other, more complex tasks are done in JavaScript with good performance, no doubt they would be faster executed on WASM, but it takes from their excuse when you have a demonstrative example to the alternative. - I find that it is rare if ever that performance is addressed in those organizations, only when a program is unbearably slow, does someone then try and improve it, still, a thousand cuts kill.
Please remember that through all that, I am not arguing against WASM for no reason, but for very severe usability concerns. 10 years ago, rarely did a website offer a dark mode, but, it is my belief that extensions such as dark reader allowed for mass adoption. It would deprive those many with particular accessibility needs their ability to control the execution of these programs. Websites are nowadays the primary interface with government and banking services.
My banking app requires location access to function, it is a pain for end users to spoof it (although it does not deter any bad actors who were dedicated enough to get access to your credentials), yet the same bank (and the regulators that mandate it) do not bother to require that for the web, because spoofing it there is trivial.
Unfortunately, we can't fix the whole world's problems, but we can prevent them from ruining the web.
Finally, I am sorry for writing such a lengthy reply, and thank you for your time. :/
No, people do not care. You're not a celeb. This is textbook spotlight effect.
Your life becomes a lot more enjoyable if you don't take yourself so serious, try it sometime
So to this you wish to add the increased risk of negative exposure by saying a bad thing? Or that someone, someones, or people five years from today consider a bad thing?
I love writing and posting and engaging (you can tell from my history here alone), but I'm not crazy enough to risk spilling my feelings on a site full of people in suits and ties, with Leader next to their names.
Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post was actually the cause?
Amusingly, this was someone high up in HR.
I consider them all good because ultimately if you get upset by the way I behave then that's probably going to be true if we work together also.
Sometimes people like to tell me that I'm very authentic and it's clear that I'm not trying to suck up to anyone, which they respect. Some people quietly retreat from me and I find out later that it's because I hurt their feelings inadvertently by shitting on AI or calling out web development as largely being inefficient in resources or something.
Which is today, I think we're past the point of "One social media to rule them all."
There's room for multiples, all serving important purposes. Maybe an ideal LinkedIn (work stuff), an ideal Facebook (people you know), Twitter (big public convos) -- and importantly but perhaps nonexistent, a healthy anonymous or pseudonymous space as well.
MADV_FREE (since Linux 4.5)
The application no longer requires the pages in the range
specified by addr and size. The kernel can thus free these
pages, but the freeing could be delayed until memory
pressure occurs.
MADV_DONTNEED
Do not expect access in the near future. (For the time
being, the application is finished with the given range, so
the kernel can free resources associated with it.)
After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics
of memory access in the specified region are changed:
subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but
will result in either repopulating the memory contents from
the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for
shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem-
based techniques such as System V shared memory segments)
or zero-fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private
mappings.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature comfort features like loading in chat history from the server, mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake. The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people don't even consider what memory is.
It's better not to use 2.4G RAM in the first place. Imagine LinkedIn isn't so hostile to users and instead actually cares about user experience.
www.linkedin.com##div[data-testid="mainFeed"]:matches-path(/feed)not to takeaway from the obviously bloated website discussed here, but i wonder who much of this is an overhead from the browser than the page bloat itself.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
We truly should be proud of that joke of a company
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.