| > It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality. You can buy a kid’s tiger electronics style toy that plays 20 questions. It’s not like this LLM is bastion of glorious efficiency, it’s just stripped down to fit on the hardware. Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. Including Jira in the conversation doesn’t even make logical sense. It’s not a desktop application that consumes memory. Jira has such a wide scope that the word “Jira” doesn’t even describe a single product. |
| |
| ▲ | ben_w 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. The 4th Gen iPod touch had 256 meg of RAM and also did those things, with video calling via FaceTime (and probably others, but I don't care). Well, except "cross platform", what with it being the platform. | | |
| ▲ | dangus 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. Remember that Slack does simultaneous multiple participants screen sharing plus annotations plus HD video feeds from all participants plus the entirety of the rest of the app continues to function as if you weren’t on a call at all simultaneously. It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. And CU-SeeMe did that in the early 90s with even worse hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323 > It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software. The *entire operating system of the phone* is more powerful, and ran on less. |
|
| |
| ▲ | messe 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > can render anything a web browser can That's a bug not a feature, and strongly coupled to the root cause for slack's bloat. | | |
| ▲ | dangus 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | One person’s “bloat” is another person’s “critical business feature.” The app ecosystem of Slack is largely responsible for its success. You can extend it to do almost anything you want. |
| |
| ▲ | andrepd 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My Pentium 3 in 2005 could do chat and video calls and play chess and send silly emotes. There is no conceivable user-facing reason why in 20 years the same functionality takes 30× as many resources, only developer-facing reasons. But those are not valid reasons for a professional. If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly. By itself, I would agree. However, in this metaphor, concrete got 15x cheaper in the same timeframe. Not enough to fully compensate for the difference, but enough that a whole generation are now used to much larger edifices. | | |
| ▲ | andrepd 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | So it means you could save your client 93% of their money in concrete, but you choose to make it 2× more expensive! That only makes my metaphor stronger ahaha. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You could save 93% of the money in concrete, at the cost of ???* in the more-expensive-than-ever time of the engineer themselves who now dominates the sticker price. (At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…) * I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html | |
| ▲ | beagle3 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But also, there is more traffic on the bridge. The word processors of 30 years ago often had limits like “50k chapters” and required “master documents” for anything larger. Lotus 123 had much fewer columns or rows than modern excel. Not an excuse, of course, but the older tools are not usable anymore if you have modern expectations. |
|
| |
| ▲ | dangus 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have great doubts that you were doing simultaneous screen sharing from multiple participants with group annotation plus HD video in your group calls, all while supporting chatting that allowed you to upload and view multiple animated gifs, videos, rich formatted text, reactions, slash command and application automation integrations, all simultaneously on your Pentium 3. I would be interested to know the name of the program that did all
that within the same app during that time period. For some reason Slack gets criticism for being “bloated” when it basically does anything you could possibly imagine and is essentially a business communication application platform. Nobody can actually name a specific application that does everything Slack does with better efficiency. | | |
| ▲ | andrepd 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're grasping at anything to justify the unjustifiable. Not only did I do most (not all, obviously) of those things in my Pentium 3, including video and voice chat, screenshare, and silly animated gifs and rich text formatting, but also: that's beside the point. Let's compare like with like then; how much memory does it take to have a group chat with a few people and do a voice/video in MSN messenger or the original Skype, and how much does Slack or Teams take? What about UI stutter? Load time? There's absolutely no justification for a worse user experience in a 2025 computer that would be a borderline supercomputer in 2005. |
|
|
|
