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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

The cynic in me is amazed how people complain about a loss of 0-30% in performance on the desktop (depending on the workload), but are completely happy to replace native applications by Electron applications and/or web applications. Of course, these may be disjoint sets of people.

I think when it comes to most desktop workloads, the security issues are far more interesting and serious. And while Meltdown only affects Intel CPUs, Spectre affects all (?) out-of-order CPUs and there may be more/more effictive attacks in the future. So every fast, modern CPU is pretty much in the same boat and it will take some time for the dust to settle.

So, I would just stick with the Intel CPU. You can vote with your wallet once one vendor decides to axe ME/PSP and/or properly mitigates Spectre-type attacks ;).

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The problem, I think, is a psychological one.

No one likes to get stuff taken away. People were also annoyed how "bad" their VW drives after the diesel fixes. Even if you probably never hit the limits to feel the difference, just the thought that from now on your CPU could be slower than it was yesterday is annoying enough.

But I agree with you. It is the wrong crowd that complains the loudest!

> The cynic in me is amazed how people complain about a loss of 0-30% in performance on the desktop (depending on the workload), but are completely happy to replace native applications by Electron applications and/or web applications. Of course, these may be disjoint sets of people

I think this largely due to faulty bottleneck analysis. I'm not hugely slowed down overall if the switch to a chat application is 50ms slower, even if I may notice it. If the tests I need to run at various stages of the development process are slowed down by 30% however, that might actually be noticeable for development pace. More likely to context switch to something else / get out of flow.

Thank you for this comment, it is very insightful.

It's also interesting how perception of these bottlenecks differs. I wouldn't care much if tests are running 30% slower, I run them in the background from my editor anyway. I usually tidy up stuff in the meanwhile or git stage some lines (which needs to be done anyway). However, if an editor has a higher latency than I am used to, it drives me crazy.

> It's also interesting how perception of these bottlenecks differs. I wouldn't care much if tests are running 30% slower, I run them in the background from my editor anyway. I usually tidy up stuff in the meanwhile or git stage some lines (which needs to be done anyway).

Heh. I do that too, but I'm anxious enough that I rerun tests after finalizing the commit. I'll still use the time for the tests to finish to do another read through the commit, but especially when pushing to many supported branches at the same time, tests still take longer (work on a pg, which has 5 years of supported back branches...).

> However, if an editor has a higher latency than I am used to, it drives me crazy.

Oh yea, but I wouldn't use a web based editor, ever ;). The point I was trying to make was less about something as central as an editor - where I spent a lot of my time, fighting for first place besides terminals - but more around secondary non-critical path stuff like IM.

If your CPU takes a performance hit, it will affect everything, including the non-native applications.

As a developer, I'm not so sure about that: I don't use any web and non-native program by choice. In fact, I'm even stricter than that, I can tell you at a distance if a program was written using QML instead of QtWidgets (due to lag and poor behavior) and avoid the first just as I avoid non-native apps.

In fact, unless I'm restricted to a single program I don't have any alternatives to, I'll generally even select programs written in a language I understand and/or prefer.

I have several colleagues that use slightly different metrics, but still pay very close attention to performance and details of the tools they use. Especially if that's something they use for hours over the course of a day.

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