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Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
alastair@mastodon.online ("Alastair Coote") wrote:

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
bp@bennypowers.dev ("Benny Powers 🇨🇦️🇮🇱️") wrote:

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

The "it's fine, we know we're losing users with these technology choices" crowd *really* needs to start showing their work.

What is the expected revenue gain in wealthy user segments per KB of JS?

What is expected revenue loss per KB of JS in other segments?

What does the distribution look like?

Reblogged by jeffsonstein ("Jeff Sonstein"):
elmiller0330@disabled.social ("Lizzy Miller") wrote:

Attachments:

• A gray and white tuxedo tabby cat sits on a cat tree staring intently out the window. His mouth is open as he chirps at the crows outside. His ears and whiskers are forward and alert. (remote)

jeffsonstein ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

“Virginia governor blocks bill banning police from seeking menstrual histories
Glenn Youngkin essentially kills bill passed in Democratic-led state senate to ban search warrants for menstrual data on tracking apps”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/16/virginia-governor-glenn-youngkin-extreme-bill-police-menstrual-histories

Reblogged by jeffsonstein ("Jeff Sonstein"):
dangillmor ("Dan Gillmor") wrote:

Reblogged by jeffsonstein ("Jeff Sonstein"):
BBCWorld@mediastodon.com ("BBC News (World)") wrote:

Reblogged by jeffsonstein ("Jeff Sonstein"):
dangillmor ("Dan Gillmor") wrote:

Reblogged by jeffsonstein ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Weld@infosec.exchange ("Chris Wysopal") wrote:

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

So don't take the next JS bro sales pitch at face value; the odds that it's wrapping a deep wisdom and understanding -- rather than an embarrassing amount of libertarian I've-got-mine-jack-ism -- is vanishingly small.

Hire people to fix problems with CSS and HTML, not to make them with JS.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

So let's stop beating around the bush: the JS community sold lemons at a furious rate, are embarassed about the terrible consequences of their predictable (and predicted) actions -- as well they should be -- and want you to continue to pretend they knew what they were doing all along.

Friends, Occam's Razor suggests they did not.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Nevermind the minor problem of them *also* being pitched into the public sector without any sort of reflection or guardrail.

Are only *some* users supposed to be able to get to government services? The "right" users? The "good" residents and citizens?

What sort of elitist, classist bullshit is that, exactly?

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

@seldo But even if you thought that was a just the plural of anecdote, we should be able, on first principles, to reject the idea that these technologies should have a market outside the wealthiest geos.

I see no such education about these supposedly explicit tradeoffs (is it tribal knowledge that spreads by osmosis?), and yet there is furious advocacy *for* these inappropriate systems in the various places where they make no sense.

This suggests, instead, a furious backfill of rationalisation

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Which brings me to the argument that *really* makes me wince; the one @seldo et. al. seem to be falling back into: that everyone knows what they're doing, so it's fine.

This bears no resemblance to the conversations I've had with teams.

Managers and TLs are universally shocked and upset to learn their JS-bro-special stack is losing them tons of money that the "legacy" site didn't. Further, they have none of the collateral one would expect if it was explicit (a financial model).

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
mmayo@hachyderm.io ("Mark Mayo") wrote:

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

So when you export technology that was barely working in the US to other markets, it's a *disaster*. And the JS bros take no responsibility for the predictable (and predicted) consequences of their actions.

Instead, they have continued to spread the (always false) narrative that CPUs are getting faster and that people can afford the JS they're sending.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

...and that's before we consider the lower price differences of electronics vs. services and other sorts of local goods.

Phones and laptops are *expensive* in much of the world, which is why Android accounts for 80+% of device shipments and the average selling price, worldwide, continues to hover near $300 (new, unlocked) even as high-end devices accelerate in price. There are just that many more sub-$300 devices being sold for every trade-up of a wealthy user from a $400 to a $1K phone.

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

I'm not supposed to be here*, but since I am, I'm sharing some good vibes I found for anybody in search of same:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db_Twgw95nE

* According to me.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

All of the data in this thread is from the US where inequality is a problem, but is not at its worst worldwide:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Technology has broken down borders in many ways, which now means that the merely 2.5x wealthier JS bros in the US may make 20-50x more than users in other geographies:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country

PPP is a thing:

https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm

But even with that caveat, $108K/yr US income is still 6-7x the effective median salary in India.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

The digital divide has a colour, and it is being excavated and widened by the actions of a well-paid upper crust that bear none of the consequences of their actions.

Wealth acts as a blanket, keeping those wrapped in it from feeling the chill as they open the windows and turn down the heating for everyone else.

technomancy@icosahedron.website ("tech? no! man, see...") wrote:

and the List of Lists of Lists of Lists of Lists has only been created and deleted one fewer time than that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=List_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists

however, there don't appear to be any further attempts

admittedly I only checked as far as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=List_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists so if someone else wants to conduct further research, feel free to pick up from there

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Lower income also correlates with increased network latency.

In the US, this is maps onto persistent income and wealth disparities between white and (specifically) black communities. Digital redlining is now A Thing:

https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service

When data is expensive and slow, you use less of it.

technomancy@icosahedron.website ("tech? no! man, see...") wrote:

now we all know that the List of Lists of Lists is one of the greatest wikipedia pages of all time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

but what surprised me is that the List of Lists of Lists of Lists has only been created and subsequently deleted by annoyed wikpiedians three times!

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=List_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists

honestly would have expected a number at least in the double digits

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

HDDs correlate heavily with lower core counts, and generally signal slower (older) cores, all of which have a big impact on desktop performance related to your web apps.

Browsers are heavily threaded today, and fewer cores means less performance on JS-heavy sites *in particular*.

Less expensive phones, meanwhile, tend to feature MANY cores, but the also tend to suck. A lot:

https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#devices-1

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

This is, in part, due to differences in replacement rate. If you, as a developer, have a laptop that's more than 3 years old and cost less than $700 new, odds are you're pretty anxious about it. Can't pack many webs on that.

But as a user? That's just *the average*. Real-world gets slower from there. Edge telemetry shows that something close to half of our users are on HDDs, not SSDs.

When was the last time *you* booted from spinning rust?

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

A 2.5x difference in earnings is a huge difference in life experience. Developers may not realise how different those experiences are because they don't go looking for them, but it's in their data if they cared to investigate.

*Most* users do not have fast laptops or phones, even in the US.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Now, let's say you decided to rebrand in the Lost Decade as "JavaScript developer"; you feel pretty comfortable packing those webs -- what does it do to the equation? A LOT:

https://www.indeed.com/career/javascript-developer/salaries

When I go on about how JS cultists have cost companies more for worse outcomes, this is what I'm talking about. A 35% cost premium, which pushes the income of these folks *as individuals* to be ~50% higher than most households, and more than 2.5x the median dual-income earner.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

This might not sound like a big gap, but recall that *most* US households are dual-earner:

https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/

This means that you *very likely* make 2x or more than *most* of your adult users.

But then there are kids and the elderly. If they're potential users, they'll skew income data further.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

If you make websites for a living, know that you are *extremely likely* to be wealthier than the people on whose devices your code will run. This matters to *how* that code runs.

Let's say you're a webdev in the US, building for the US market exclusively. There's huge variability in cost of living across geos, but even so, Indeed shows a an average base salary for a webdev of ~$80K/yr:

https://www.indeed.com/career/web-developer/salaries

Median* household* income, meanwhile, is closer to $70K/yr:

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

This process is often painful today because the output of many systems is *extremely* complex. When you understand how the systems that generated it did you dirty, only then can you go looking for a solution to the slowness.