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Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

I am a total diva about latency. I am impatient with computers to a fault. The slow animations in iOS. Waiting for some god-foresaken lambda function to spin up for seconds to serve me a list of fucking email addresses in the dozens. Even the few seconds of latency of a LAN screen share is enough to drive me up the wall.

Software is hard to use for me now.

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You should talk to musicians about digital equipment. They talk about latency in terms of how far away the instrument feels. It’s wild, good musicians can describe latency on the order of low tens of ms. What’s crazy to me is how good they can get at adjusting. If 8 play a game like rock band, if I don’t adjust for video and audio latency, I just can’t play at all.

And it gets worse, since equipment gets chained. If you add more than a few ms to the wet channel, it accumulates and can be very problematic if you ever feed the wet back into the dry signal.

Source: have shipped multiple digital pedals

i would intentionally drag my old crt tv to rock band sessions in college because it had zero latency compared to the lcd flatscreen in the commons area.

good times...

Animations make me crazy. Computers used to respond at the speed of thought, and now we've deliberately slowed them down for no good reason. Just show me the thing!

I used to be able to whip through 3-4 keyboard shortcuts in a fraction of a second and the computer would keep up. This was on an 80 MHz machine, by the way. Now I have a supercomputer and I have to wait for a quarter-to-half-second zoom/pan/slide/whatever with nearly every single interaction. It's maddening.

I disabled all animations in iOS. I don't need the distraction anyway. I hope they don't take away this function in future releases..

How do you deal with it? I try to write my own versions of apps. For example, I use a scraper for movie times written in pure HTML with the most minimal of CSS and JS (1-2 functions max). It looks like 1994 but is fast and clean...however there is just so much software that I can't recreate everything so I suffer in silence.

I also generally just suffer in silence. I'm want for time to spend vibecoding fixes too. I just try to spend as much time as I can in a terminal.

> I just try to spend as much time as I can in a terminal

GUI are useful, but I spent so much time trying to find the perfect ones while I could quickly draft a quick CLI script for my specific problems. These days, I focus on finding libraries and utilities that solves the core of my problem, then wire them up in a way that solves my workflow. After a while, you just find that most of your computing needs are solved.

This is exactly what I did. I'm glad I started reimplementing everything when I was younger because I might not have had the patience for the grind. But after 7 years of that, I have enough momentum that it's easier and easier. It also helps to have good architectural principles. I don't treat my hobby projects like throwaways because that's how you end up with frustration.

The end result is being completely unaffected by version changes, the trends in programming that go up and down (javascript, python, whatever, doesn't matter to me what's happening in their world).

It helps that I was also an early adopter of Rust from pre-1.0 in college around 2011, and so I've had a relatively stable implementation language. That combined with C and Luajit is my permanent stack right now, but I'm in the progress of migrating to my own programming language.

The natural terminus of the path you are suggesting is to reimplement everything. Be prepared for a long road, even with LLMs at your disposal now. An LLM can't design what you want because it can't read your mind.

If you want stable, try Common Lisp.

I regret not getting addicted to Lisp early. At Berkeley for EECS, the normal CS61A curriculum was based on scheme, but instead we had a guest lecturer from Google who did it on Python. Sure, I got an A+ and I know Python’s internals well, but damn what a miss for me. I much prefer the functional train.

What’s the best way to get started with Common Lisp now for a very very experienced programmer?

I can't claim to be very very experienced, but I learned a lot from this piece. In particular it convinced me to try Common Lisp precisely because it is stable and boring. Common Lisp has allowed me to focus on solving my problems rather than keeping up with language or ecosystem changes. It's nice to be able to read decades-old books and have them still be good, in contrast to the much newer books I have for other languages where those books are already ready for the trash heap.

But I'm the sort of person who shrugs when someone says "this software is not updated anymore, it must be out of date." I say: maybe that's good, cat(1) hasn't been updated much, isn't that good?

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

Absolutely. Many CL libraries when you see them on Github have last been updated 10 or 15 years ago. In most cases it just means they are done and done need further updates.

And CL is just an absolute joy to develop with. Definitely my "stranded on an island" language.

The worst I've seen is a revenue dashboard lazy loading a list of ~50 currencies in a dropdown filter for 5 seconds. Ridiculous. Just hard code it.

> I am a total diva about latency

You should be! CPUs these days are so goddamn fast, there is zero excuse that things don't respond instantly to user input. Sure, you can't escape the latency of the speed of light, but so much software lags and feels like shit even on things that involve no network interactions. I have to use notion at work sometimes and it feels like trudging through a lake of mud. Absolute garbage latency because the devs (and their clanker handlers) apparently don't know any better.

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