Yeah this matches up with my experience when I was working as a consultant and trying to get large organizations to buy into managed and structured changes to their enterprise IT environment. It is not an easy job and it is very necessary for enterprises to coordinate their systems development. I've seen the messes first hand, the frustration from "the business" at how "long" everything takes. I've seen tech teams struggling to communicate the complexity of certain requirements in a way leadership can understand too.
After 5 years I was done with that type of work. Way too frustrating to try and get buy-in from development teams, leadership, IT etc. to make changes necessary to support the business at the enterprise level.
I do think SaaS has relieved form pain for organizations. Hopefully legacy Peoplesoft and Lawson systems are being replaced by things like Workday etc. It does open up a new set of problems (and expenses) but these seem way more manageable than the problems and challenges with working with on-prem ERPs.
It's when a major fund(s), bank(s) or lender(s) blows up and is followed up a successive string of failures until the "big one".
Every financial crisis or recession from the last 30 years or so has had a string of failures leading up a crash.
Late 1980s S&L Crash - You had a string of larger S&Ls failing (and a ton of smaller ones). This was a contributing factor in the 1990 recession. Note that S&Ls started failing in the mid 1980s.
2000 Crash - Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be rescued due to fears of contagion. Note the market hit all time highs after this fund failed.
2008 Crash - In early 2007 - New Century blows up ... starting a cascading series of failures. The S&P hits new highs throughout 2007 after New Century, until it finally starts to crash in late 2007 leading into the 2008 recession.
And now we have Archegos, which failed earlier this year and new highs in the stock market this week.
I am watching for more failures. One of the major contributing factors to Archegos' failure was WAY too much leverage. There is a ton of money sloshing around the system right now, and margin debt has hitting all time highs.
Crypto is also going blow up and take a lot of retail with it. If you get a stock crash and folks get margin called you could see a lot of crypto selling to cover that margin.
Yep - I've ignored the many many Amazon recruiting emails I have received over the years. I have absolutely no desire to deal with their shitty employment practices and idc if it is "team dependent". I am not taking that risk.
Recently left a company with an ex-Amazon Director who was VP of Engineering. He was an absolute snake who had only really worked at Amazon for his entire career. He did his expected round of firings/PIPs at the 2 year mark, then quit himself. Many experienced engineers left around the same time since we all were tired of the shitty Amazon culture he was breeding.
The point is that now you have to watch out for who the Directory/VPs are at your current organization. If they bring in someone from Amazon expect the company culture to go downhill fast.
Yes - and it's driving people further into tribes where the only way they feel "safe" is in and around their own "kind". This isn't civilization, but a regression and if it goes on for a few more generations it could be very damaging to our social fabric.
I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.
Until relatively recently, women and people from racial and ethnic minorities were pre-cancelled. And if they got too noisy, there was far worse on the menu---the first year in US history without a lynching was something like 1952, and that's literal torture, mutilation, and death; not having people say bad things about you on the Internet.
Was it more civil? Yeah, sure. It would only be spoken about in public rarely and the better classes of people would certainly never face it. It would certainly be more civil, as long as everyone stayed in their place.
An entirely different class of bad behaviors that were commonplace in the past has absolutely no bearing on whether or not social media makes us worse people and just confuses the issue for no reason.
> I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.
I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.
It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.
This nearly always advantages businesses and the wealthy, especially in false or ambiguous situations, and whistleblowers of all kinds. Litigation is incredibly expensive and slow. Do people really want to spend a house worth and several years on this kind of fight?
(This is why the US felt it necessary to pass laws against UK libel judgements being enforced, it was infringing on US standards of free speech)
>If you can back up what you’re saying, libel isn’t a concern.
This is not true. The unfortunate reality is that facts _don't_ matter in the realm of public opinion. They never have.
BUT, you're going to say, "I'm talking about libel, which is litigated in the court of law, not public opinion."
If that is indeed your response, I would suggest you might better familiarize yourself with the actual happenings in civil court cases. They can absolutely be just as insane, and they can absolutely act with the same lack of justice we see in other places.
I really wish most people had the type of integrity you're describing, but the uncomfortable reality is that they do not. People are going to believe the thing that makes them feel better, not the thing that is true.
There are several people who have severely traumatized me by actions they took to harm my body, violate my sexual consent, and/or manipulate my life so that I was under their power in ways I didn’t agree to.
I couldn’t imagine convincing a jury of any of these. If you make saying they happened a criminal exposure for me, I can’t warn others of the danger those people put me in, or even process my pain and grief, without fear of losing a court battle I have no chance of winning.
I’m sensitive to the damage false claims can do, but I think it’s unreasonable to say that people should be liable in a court of law to prove things that are private and unprovable. And it has a chilling effect, where people who’ve experienced similar trauma will be discouraged from sharing their experience because the risk is too high.
It’s already dangerous to accuse anyone with any kind of public presence of anything, people will defend them to the point of harassment, stalking and violence, out of pure loyalty.
Adding legal repercussions for stating that a thing happened where no one could produce conclusive evidence to confirm or deny it just means more people suffer privately without even the recourse of telling anyone what happened.
NAL, but I don't think talking to your friends and acquaintances privately rises to the level of libel or slander, or at least it would be very difficult to prove if it did.
What is the alternative that you would like to see? Should we be able to destroy any person we want simply by making an accusation without evidence? Should we throw out presumption of innocence and fair trials and just chuck people in jail the moment someone accuses someone of a crime?
If someone is making a public accusation with the intent of destroying someone's livelihood and reputation, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have some way of verifying that the accusation is true.
> NAL, but I don't think talking to your friends and acquaintances privately rises to the level of libel or slander, or at least it would be very difficult to prove if it did.
The suggestion was to “strengthen libel laws”, presumably to reverse this.
> What is the alternative that you would like to see? Should we be able to destroy any person we want simply by making an accusation without evidence? Should we throw out presumption of innocence and fair trials and just chuck people in jail the moment someone accuses someone of a crime?
I’m actually more or less comfortable with the existing US laws. Accusing someone publicly of harming them in an unprovable way is relatively protected speech. I’m opposed to changing that to penalize people who were hurt by someone, want to disclose the fact that it happened, and couldn’t possibly survive a trial they never initiated.
> If someone is making a public accusation with the intent of destroying someone's livelihood and reputation, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have some way of verifying that the accusation is true.
Ok, I did not interpret strengthen libel laws to mean extending them to private conversations. Instead, I was thinking of something to deter Internet pile-ons like the article discussed.
Where is that line? I keep most of my Internet life relatively private. But this means I’m already hesitant to use the platforms I do have to describe things people did to harm me. I’m the one who’d be piled on if it got an audience. Adding the potential for expensive lawsuits just means I’ll be more hesitant to warn anyone that someone did something harmful, to me or to anyone else I believe. Why do I have to keep these conversations private?
We have laws because there are dishonest people. You might as well ask why do we have laws against stealing? I'm an honest person and if I go take something from someone's house without asking, I'll just bring it right back with no harm done. Some people aren't honest, though.
I... don’t understand what you’re trying to convince me of here? Are you trying to morally equate me hypothetically naming people who’ve abused me to stealing from them, if I couldn’t defend a non-legal claim of what happened in court? I sincerely do not understand what you’re saying should change.
I understand that you are telling the truth. Do you understand that sometimes people do not tell the truth?
The question is what level of consequence are you saying we should inflict on people before some kind of evidence beyond an accusation is required?
If it's "I tell my friends about what happened, and then they turn down opportunities to work with that person". I don't think anyone would or could sue for libel about that. I am not proposing that they be able to. I apologize if I gave the impression that that is what I was proposing.
If it's "I make an accusation, and that person should then be unemployed and destitute and indelibly branded a sexual predator for the rest of their life" then maybe somewhere in between those two extremes, there is a point where some evidence is required, and the level of harm being done to the accused requires some stronger justification. Maybe current libel laws do not accurately delineate that point because of the advent of the Internet and the possibility for a person to experience widespread harassment based on a few claims going viral. Is that reasonable?
No, I don’t think that’s reasonable. In the spirit of “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”, I don’t think adding more legal liability serves anyone. Moreover, it serves even less people who already have few resources to redress wrongs.
It’s not like this concept of “mob ruined my life” is some new concept, it’s something victims of abuse experience or withhold their stories to avoid, and have forever.
Remember when this claim was made about a now sitting SCOTUS justice? His life had been ruined? Not at all. But at least one of his accusers was so afraid for her life that she went into hiding. Imagine how much more dangerous it would be for her if she were legally penalized for “ruining his life”, which she didn’t do, but absolutely became a part of the anti-cancel-culture script. Imagine how that could be abused by someone in such a high place of power.
People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so. If it’s in the court of public opinion, the truth comes out. We know this because the few cases where people lie are always repeated by people motivated to penalize truth telling.
I’m afraid to name people who’ve hurt me here, people no one on HN knows, because I fear retribution. Adding the possibility that I might be tangled up in years of legal battles I can’t afford simply for saying what happened is utterly terrifying to me. And that’s coming from a place of relative privilege where I don’t expect half the danger other accusers might expect.
No. There should not be legal penalties for describing abuse without legal proof.
So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?
> People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so.
The point is that not every person who makes an accusation is someone who has been hurt by others. If there is no scrutiny allowed, how are we supposed to tell which is which? You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.
> So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?
It always matters whether an accusation is true. Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.
> You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.
You’ve completely misunderstood my perspective. I’m looking at it from the perspective of the person afraid to make an accusation.
Nobody is saying we should penalize people for making accusations. Being asked to substantiate your claims is not a penalty. It should be understood that people will ask that when you make a public claim, especially if you are asking for something to happen as a result of that claim.
I'm not sure what we gain by encouraging people to make unprovable accusations. From the outside perspective, people will be predisposed to believe one way or another, and in the absence of any evidence they'll just go to their predispositions and a lot of irrelevant argument will take place back and forth with no possible resolution, because there is no real evidence. Why is this helpful or desirable?
> Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.
Why would the rate of true accusations go down while the rate of false accusations remain the same? My intuition is that they'd both go down, with false accusations decreasing more than true accusations.
This is absurd. The “mob” that “ruined” his life did no such thing. Multiple accusers had credible accounts, media did scrutinize their accounts and determined that one wasn’t credible while others were. He wasn’t “cancelled”, he has a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the most powerful country in all human history. This “mob” theory is ridiculous. Yet one of his accusers was so afraid for her life she went into hiding. This is exactly why I’m opposed to penalizing accusers.
This is a very challenging interaction. I will try to keep a very even tone in this message.
The parent's last paragraph seems to set up a strawman, an extreme that seems to me to covered by current libel laws. (Is it not? Explain if I'm wrong.)
It is _possible_ that current libel laws don't "accurately delineate that point", but I am looking for a stronger argument in favor of change.
Based on the posts here, I think that the role and power of "viral"-ity is not well understood. In uncertain situations I would like to seek a clearer understanding instead of simply turning to legislative solutions - surely the question that will come up is "where is the line" and if we can't say we're not ready for a law.
@eyelidlessness Thank you for a very measured set of responses; they are beyond my skill or patience.
Thank you for this. I think you’ve expressed a lot of what I didn’t have emotional space to say, with at least as much skill and patience. I appreciate you joining in
I think there is a distinction between "say" and "publish". NAL but libel deals with published falsehoods, these are not private conversations or communications. Communicating a message to millions on twitter or saying it on TV is different from talking to friends and family.
> what I can say about people who’ve sexually assaulted me
Remember you can still relatively freely say/publish your opinion; tell a million people they are a monster, creep, treated you poorly etc. But publicly accusing someone of a specific crime or sexual-impropriety is a serious allegation, and to me it seems ok that the accused has a way to legally challenge it and require proof.
So if I were to name the people who have sexually assaulted me, here in a comment—which I’ve already said I’m terrified to do even though they don’t have an audience here to my knowledge—but if I did so, just said so to an audience, I should be legally liable to prove it? Because I didn’t keep it private?
I think the accused should have the right to legally challenge a public defamatory statement. In this case... it probably wouldn't be a very strong case, just from a quick google search, my guess is they would struggle with 1 & 4 below. For 1) In civil, this is probably preponderance of evidence (>50% true) vs beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal. For 4) Theoretically this has no impact, you are just screaming into the void and they don't even know about it. But it could cause real damage, this is a highly trafficked site, maybe they loose their job or their spouse sees this and divorces them etc.
"To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things:
1) a false statement purporting to be fact;
2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person;
> If you can't prove it didn't happen, denying the accusation is libel. Fair is fair.
Yes, Bill Cosby was sued this way. He was accused publicly, he denied the accusations & they sued him for defamation. Everything depends though, it can be harder to show a denial caused damages or is not an opinion ie; I disagree with the characterization of events.
> Maybe the real problem is firing someone from their job due to non credible accusations
Shouldn't an accusation have real potential consequences, like employment termination? In that case sue the accuser for libel.
Truth is not an absolute defense for other legal cases in the US. The legal system is statistically successful at getting innocent people to take plea deals and legally does not require the penalties for a losing party.
I think we need to move away from the American Rule for litigation fees to the English Rule. So we incentive people for telling the truth when pursuing legal action.
> If you can back up what you’re saying, libel isn’t a concern
How are you going to pay to back this up in court? Evidencing these things is tricky. As you've spotted, it doesn't matter whether what you say is true, only whether you can back it up. Oh, and you may need to lodge a bond with court in case you lose. Best re-mortgage your house.
The UK has extremely strong libel law and yet people libel each other all the time, because cases cost in excess of £100,000.
Oh, and declaring private eyewitness testimony to be worthless makes it entirely impossible to criminally prosecute rape and sexual assault.
Except Libel isn't on the same criminal level as rape and sexual assault. Libel is a mostly civil affair and should be dealt with as a civil offense, not criminal, and since its mostly civil, it can have a higher requirement of proof, as weird as it sounds.
With the intent of siccing a mob of people on someone to harass them online? No, never. In the article, the problem is not that the women discussed the fact that they had received harassing emails, but that they attributed those emails to a particular person without any proof that that is true.
"I received an anonymous harassing email" - true statement, not libel
"I received an anonymous harassing email and it was definitely from this guy" - if you can't prove it, could be libel.
Whistleblowers have plenty of protections and can be exempted. Libel can be stated such that they only apply to private matters between individuals, where accusations that do not reach the felony level - which is exactly what is going on here. I have no doubt we could protect all interests, while limiting the power of the wealthy and powerful.
Whistleblowers have functionally no protections, I don't know how anyone could have knowledge of whistleblower cases and claim otherwise.
Any attorney will tell you - if you are going to blow the whistle on some entity that is powerful, you will lose your job, your home, your ability to work in your field, and your life will be in legal hell for decades.
> At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors.
I am unconvinced that there is anything that could be done to strengthen libel laws that would have this effect short of also shutting down essential freedom of expression, given that Western regimes with stronger libel laws are not free of it, and our libel laws tend to go pretty much right up to the limit federal courts have found the First Amendment to impose on them.
It's tricky because these accusations resonate because they remind us of things that really happen. (and in fact, lies can be formulated for maximum impact when truthtelling is usually more nuanced)
Because powerful people have strong lawyers, the tools that the falsely accused can use to clear their name can be used, to more effect, by the guilty.
There are no easy solutions here. The past looked calm only because people often had no recourse unless a newspaper took up their cause.
> You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
It would reach far less people, yes, but we used to burn witches, too, so it seems that internet mobs are just a modern manifestation of that.
Look at the actual numbers though. I think the biggest writing on the wall that the hype is starting to be weighed in valuation is Waymo.
Waymo is arguably the most technologically advanced of all the self-driving efforts. However they were initially valued at 175 billion, Morgan Stanley downgraded it to 105 billion, and their last external funding round valued them at 30 billion.
You don't need to be a VC fund to realize that is a hell of a drop (most probably because the initial valuations were hyped by the 'just around the corner' momentum).
To be clear, it's doubtless brought benefit to assistive driving systems. And we may even see full autonomy under limited conditions (e.g. specific limited access highways in good weather) in a significantly shorter period of time.
But door to door robo taxis? Seems highly unlikely.
There have been big pullbacks. And I wouldn't be the slightest bit shocked if Google/Alphabet pull the plug on Waymo one of these days--especially if they have to start tightening their belt for some reason.
Articles like this have been written for 5 years now, but the money keeps flowing into these projects. Argo, Aurora and Aptiv etc. are all still burning mountains of cash.
I am shocked the industry didn't take Uber/Lyft selling off their self-driving divisions as the signal to stop funding these efforts.
I'm genuinely curious how the various self-driving efforts broke down among:
- We can do it!
- Maybe we can't do it but even partial success makes it worthwhile
- What a pipe dream but it would be morally wrong not to separate greedy VCs from their cash
I do think it's different from 5 years ago. Yes, some researchers were throwing cold water on the idea then but they were seen as contrarians. And, on boards like this one, you'd have no shortage of people going but Waymo is going to have a taxi service next year! Today, it's closer to being accepted wisdom.
Ha! I kinda stopped paying attention to most consumer-oriented startups a few years back when some kooky poetry delivery service got a few million in funding. (I am trying to find a link to it). Then there was that "pizza robot" company ...
I get that VCs will fund stupid things like that to grow entrepreneurs and build a portfolio of companies that maybe grow enough to get acquired and produce some profit. But funds/corps dumping $250 million+ annually into self-driving seems crazy. The opportunity costs of that alone are outrageous especially when there are ample and ripe opportunities to disrupt "traditional" businesses and business models across all kinds of market verticals.
> I do think it's different from 5 years ago. Yes, some researchers were throwing cold water on the idea then but they were seen as contrarians. And, on boards like this one, you'd have no shortage of people going but Waymo is going to have a taxi service next year! Today, it's closer to being accepted wisdom.
Yes, and this has always been perplexing. I work at an AI startup which actually uses it to accomplish rather straightforward tasks - and it's really hard to perfect with the minimal tolerances for error that we have to adhere to. When you start to scale the problem up to self driving it becomes evident quickly that it will take a looong time to get the level 5; yet people in this business were still insisting it was around the corner.
I'm by no means an expert but a number of years ago I saw a presentation by MIT's John Leonard (he was involved in one of the early DARPA contests). One of the interesting things he showed was dash cam footage he had taken over the course of about a week commuting from Brookline where he lived to MIT. And he pointed out all the things that would be really difficult to do.
As a non-expert but a very longtime driver this made an awful lot of sense to me. But so much money and brains were saying success was right around the corner that I was half-convinced that I and other skeptics were missing something.
I think, in addition to the scammers and dumb money, it's just that a lot of people who should have known better just looked at the pace of advance over the previous 5+ years and figured "How could we not iron out the remaining kinks in a few more?" Add to that the number of people who don't like cars much and just so desperately wanted this future where they never needed to own a car or drive again.
My family moved into our newly built home in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh in Oct. of last year. We were part of the first group of buyers in a relatively new plan of higher-end homes.
Since Oct. of last year, the base price of our model has gone up $215,000 and every lot in this phase (phase 1) has now sold. I suspect at least half of that increase is materials, and the rest is due to market demand.
The market is just crazy and in talking to my builder he has said supply shortages could last through EOY and into next.
It is for a lot of executives, especially ones which are clueless about technology or who do not have a technology background but were promoted and told to "fix the TPS submission and reporting system!". These characters are typically corporate politicians who are great at talking but couldn't manage a team of 3 to boil a pot of water.
They love consultancies. It's a total roll of the dice if their projects are successful or not. I've seen it go both ways.
> Everybody considers themselves a designer, but it is baseless optimism that is supported by little data or precedent. Good designers are unique. Design ability is a 'talent'. Being able to conceive a complex system that maintains "conceptual integrity" is not an ability that everyone has, nor is it show (yet) that is even teachable!
It's also talent that is hard to recognize and can be valued very differently from one organization to the next. I've been in the room with developers and management looking cross-eyed at me as I walk them through a top down business/problem decomposition and system design questioning the value of the entire exercise. Not surprising, these are organizations which have extremely brittle systems full of overlapping and "hard to reason about" abstractions.
I've had that experience on multiple occasions. Initially, when younger, I did attribute it to myopism. Today, I recognize that credibility also needs to be earned. All architects are unhappy except those who manage to find the right client. The client-architect relationship is fundamental. A successful architectural undertaking is minimally a two variable equation. Client (aka stakeholders) are hugely important.
On a related tangent, I've been re-reading "The Open Hand - Essays on Le Corbusier". Specifically, the "Le Corbusier at Pessac - Professional and Client Responsibilities" essay by Brian Brace Taylor.
That project basically failed its intended purpose. The client, M. Frugès, was apparently an enlightened capitalist, willing to invest in the vision of the young architect, even when incurring financial losses, because of Pessac. Corbu also learned, on the job, how to, and how not to, build his modernist vision. The whole thing was a fiasco on many levels. But it was a necessary project for progress in the field.
Which is the point: architectural innovation is costly and even great architects leave a trail of failed early projects. Yes, Corbu went on to master his field, and he did deliver (opinions of course vary) on the program of modern, afforadable, mass housing for the urban working class:
> Use the right technology for what you're trying to build.
Yep .. so if you want a rich responsive user experience, DON'T use any web technologies. GMail (AND Gsuite) is a perfect example of how a relatively simple concept like email can be turned into a slow, unresponsive piece of garbage.
I'm about 99% sure the store on the PS3 was webtech. That beast of a machine could barely run its own store. They lost a lot of money from me as a result of the store being super-slow, input laggy, and crashy (OOM I assume), and I can't be the only one.
PS4 feels like they've taken webtech all over the OS interface. Its store's snappier than the 3 but the rest of the interface performs way worse. Usable, but far less pleasant.
[EDIT] store should be snappier than the 3, mind, since it's way more powerful hardware—it's still kinda slow, considering.
Previous versions of GMail had a good experience but was significantly faster than the current version of gmail. Loading basic HTML mode can get you a previous version of it.
GMail is a poorly built app, that's all. There are plenty of great examples. Both Outlook and Fastmail have fast and feature-rich email clients. Gmail was good back in the day and got carried away by project managers and feature creep.
Meanwhile Google Docs continues to be a pinnacle of what you can achieve on the web.
My experience with the Outlook web app (not the "basic HTML" mode, which is perfectly usable in contrast) is the exact opposite --- it's extremely slow and consumes a ridiculous amount of memory for what it does (I've seen it take over 2GB of RAM, and this is with an account where all the emails with their attachments total less than 100MB.) When composing a message it lags so much that it will delay each keystroke by several seconds and drop keys intermittently, and I have resorted to writing in a real (native) text editor and copy-pasting. In contrast, the native client has memory usage in the dozens of MB and is far more responsive --- I've never experienced it being sluggish to that extent.
What I wish for every Christmas is that web developers across the globe finally learn that syncing a draft server-side onkeyup is the worst idea, and it should never be pursued in implementing it.
Reality has rtt and shitty 2G slow, and will drive people away from your web product if you are too silly to cache things locally.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.
Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.
Says the OS developer, says the browser developer, says the webapp developer, says the developer of whatever else you have running.
Developer time is expensive. Says one.
Look it runs fine and is snappy. Says another on his maxed out development pc forgetting about his grandma.
Why should i care about that extra memory load when most pc's nowadays have x amount. Says yet another.
And so the slugfest continues.
>Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.
Browser extensions can definitely make a browser sluggish but most don't interfere with the content.
The only ones that do AND are common are adblockers which have a tendency of making it less sluggish.
Vacuuming up RAM while all the other applications have to fight over the leftover scraps or wait for paging to get the data from disk (1) is NOT a good thing as much as Electron-zealots want to normalize running a multi-GB browser instance for every single application.
(1): burning through an SSD's limited number of write cycles OR being at least an order of magnitude slower to access in the case of HDDs
Who says it was otherwise unused? Web apps aren't used in isolation, the additional RAM you're using to speed things up by 3% has caused my code look-ups to slow down by 30% because you've consumed what was my file cache.
Bloat RAM is also wasted RAM. If it's not being used as a cache of reasonable size, or in a time/speed tradeoff, all you're doing is making things worse.
> If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.
That's a statement that only really applies to people misunderstanding RAM used by the page cache or suspended programs. And both of those depend on active applications not allocating that memory!
After 5 years I was done with that type of work. Way too frustrating to try and get buy-in from development teams, leadership, IT etc. to make changes necessary to support the business at the enterprise level.
I do think SaaS has relieved form pain for organizations. Hopefully legacy Peoplesoft and Lawson systems are being replaced by things like Workday etc. It does open up a new set of problems (and expenses) but these seem way more manageable than the problems and challenges with working with on-prem ERPs.