Pay as you go is really going to make a difference

[Arine]

On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 20:29:59 UTC, aberba wrote:
> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/


Wow, this person is really uninformed. They know just enough 
about something to make a naive comment but not enough to 
understand *why* it is the way it is.

> An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think 
> for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in 
> there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. 
> Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. 
> So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?

The onboard memory on an android device is generally hardwired 
into the system. That means the 
system/vendor/boot/dtbo/vbmeta/etc... partitions are going to be 
a set size. So even if my system image is 1.4 GB and vendor image 
is 500 mb. It'll still take up 6 GB if that's what was allocated 
to that partition. The device I'm working on currently has about 
4 GB for the system partition and 1 GB for the vendor partition.

So about 1.4 GB for system image, the largest  folders are for 
apps. The largest app is Webview totaling 108 MB (in app/). So 
just the webview alone can take half the space of the rest of the 
public apps. This is meant to be a minimal android build, so I 
wouldn't doubt a lot of that space does end up being taken up by 
pre-installed apps, and extra space for future updates.

12K	addon.d
225M	app
27M	bin
4.0K	build.prop
104K	compatibility_matrix.xml
5.9M	etc
20K	fake-libs
16K	fake-libs64
69M	fonts
217M	framework
149M	lib
222M	lib64
21M	media
233M	priv-app
8.0K	product
27M	usr
0	vendor
13M	xbin

> Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! 
> Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 
> times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the 
> same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 MB. But 
> whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?

Not sure why he thinks things taking up more spaces means they 
have to be better somehow? Developers have limited time, I'm sure 
they could squeeze out 500+ MB or something, but how much 
developer time would that take? Is it worth wasting the time to 
minimize it that much when people have 4 TB hdds? When they can 
download a 4 GB file in < 2 mins.

That's what he isn't getting. Doing these things isn't free. It 
takes development time to do all these things, development time 
that thanks to the hardware we have today, allows for it to be 
spent else where. Where it is more valuable. I remember using 
Windows 95, it's garbage in comparison to Windows 10. Comparing 
an OS based solely on it's file size, is just something someone 
incompetent would do.

> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. 
> Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you 
> have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text 
> editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D 
> game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) 
> of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, 
> recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. 
> How come?

I'll just assume he's talking about electron based editors here. 
They are built ontop of a web browser so yah they are going to be 
a bit more resource hungry. But if you take VS Code as an 
example. It is extremely easy to customize. There's no dozens of 
forks of it that modify little things to get certain features. 
There's more quality extensions for VS Code that integrate 
flawless, that aren't hacks than there are for Emacs, even though 
VS Code hasn't existed for nearly as long. There's a trade off 
for the ease of development and customizability. The latency also 
isn't that bad, it is pretty bad in Atom but that just shows the 
difference between the two.

Then he compares that to games and GPU rendering, just ugh. Maybe 
he didn't know it runs in a web browser, but he also goes on a 
rant about how web browsers don't render fast enough for him. Web 
browsers need to be secure, achieving performance a long side 
that is difficult. He seems to be in the mind set that security 
doesn't matter, or at the very least he probably doesn't think 
about it, as it seems to be more often than it should be. There's 
a reason why there's only so many web browsers. Hell even 
Microsoft gave up and uses Chromium's backend. Think about that, 
Microsoft, with a B.

Then the whole, oh we went to the moon with these slow computers. 
Yah going to the moon is pretty easy in comparison to some 
computer problems. As someone put, when a politician tried to 
make the same argument about going to the moon, it'd be akin to 
walking on the surface of the sun.

I could go on, this article is way too long and it's filled with 
misconceptions, terribly awful comparisons, and just so much more.