On a related note: Transporting a human in a car is (in relation to weight and size) like using a standard shopping cart to transport two 1L bottles of water. So the next time you walk through a pedestrian area, imagine everyone carrying a bag would use a shopping cart instead. That would be a huge traffic jam -- exactly like what you see on the road!

I like your username, and what happened to WD-41?

> it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside

I think this is not the case. E.g., we replace our computers every few years, but not because the new ones can do things that you can't do with your current computer. It's because the software you use to do the same things keeps getting more resource-hungry.

That analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space…

When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.

People usually think that but when it comes to attack surface, change management, upgrade issues, etc —- the extra stuff isn’t entirely free…

Upgrades shouldn’t ever break things, bugs and vulnerabilities never exist, and Rube-Goldberg machines should work 100% reliably day in and day out.

Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way…

> Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo

Qatar might even give you a plane!

This has to be Soviet Shoe Factory Principle in action, not just ignored negative externalities. Everyone relies on shipping more code for their employment, rather than more values, which incentivizes that behavior.

1: https://wiki.c2.com/?SovietShoeFactoryPrinciple

I think you're conflating "no incentive" (which might be true) with "no downsides" (which is not).

Well, the apps often come bundled with a bunch of other stuff. Automatic updates, background workers, telemetry …

All of which sucks up your compute resources and battery. Repeat for every such little utility app you have on your Mac. Some may implement that random stuff inefficiently (eg very frequent telemetry), which sucks even more. Some of it may even be wrong, vibe coded, or copy pasted.

Personally, puts me off installing random utility apps, even if the single utility would be useful.

In the human analogy, the human has to be the entire computer too. It's all functional, not much bloat. For the app, the computer is external. It really is bloat.

Yuck! Funny though I wrote a program for making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms using TkInter/Python. Stereograms work best when you can put important objects at the plane of the paper/screen and this is done by sliding the left and right images relative to each other.

Tk has no color management, unlike newer frameworks, which was good in this case because I asked for (255,0,0) and got (255,0,0). When I exported to JPEG and views on a web browser though I got something like (186, 16, 16) because on my wide gamut monitor the native primaries are more saturated than sRGB primaries so some white gets blended in to make them less saturated. Turns out in Windows, screenshots are in the color space of your monitor! It’s something you’d never notice unless you made stereograms because that little bit of green and blue goes to the wrong eye.

Every framework under the sun gives you a `main()` func to call your program code. But if all you’ve ever used is blogs telling you how to hack together an electron app, you’d probably assume electron was the gold standard for simplicity sake but in reality is the gold standard for Google’s sake (and whatever marketing company’s).

Microsoft seems to have given up on guidance for how to write desktop apps, Windows 8 had that Metro thing that got rejected by the world. I guess you could use Win32, WinForms, WPF or something else. The incoherence is second only to the Linux world, I remember how developers were crazy about theming in Win32 in the ‘95 age so something like Back Orifice or the app for your scanner looks atrocious. WPF added really great support for theming but at the point everybody was burned out in theming so it hardly ever got used.

Yeah, and I think it’s worth asking why there. Why do we not just have a standard for PWAs with privileged OS access?

There are two obvious answers. The first is portability. And sure, but Electron provides an answer here, so why can’t we provide one with PWAs? We could even have OSes define this interface for different browsers to target in a standardized way. Yes, you need platform specific code, but that’s often the situation with Electron too.

The other answer is security. But how is Electron / any other installed app any better? Because we require more explicit consent before installing a “real” app than for installing a PWA? OK so, just let’s just do that for PWAs too.

They likely mean that you already have in there all what is needed to change your laptop WiFi card's MAC address, without needing an additional application.

Why do you need that in gui when you already have it in cli through pid?