11 Feb, 2025
Rent's due today, thank heavens I just got paid.
I don't set up standing orders, got burned once with unarranged overdraft fees, that wasn't a good month. Better to be late a day or two with rent payment. Not this month though! Just need to log in to HSBC and make the payment.
Shit, can't log in with without updating the app but I have no space on my phone, why's the new app bigger? I had to remove other apps and the HSBC app, then install it again.
It lost my Digital Secure Key, can't log in, crap. Call centres are closed, I need the chat. I can only keep the chat opened for a few minutes before Chrome gives me the "Aw, snap!" page. Stupid phone, I bought it just 2 years ago, it's not that old. I can't upgrade more often, who the hell can?
Rent's due today and computer said I can't pay it.
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I made that up. Not all of it, parts of it happened. And worse stuff happens, like when I needed to pay to get my visa and the website just wouldn't work if your phone was a few years old. It likely didn't have enough RAM for it to work. How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?
I'm just ranting because it makes my blood boil. When someone smugly says "micro-optimisations don't matter, networks are great, CPUs fast and memory plentiful", proceeds to make an app one degree more complicated than Hello World use 4 GB of RAM and drain half my battery, I'm having dark thoughts.
Memory is not cheap. CPUs don't really get that much faster. Draining user's battery is not free, it's a consumable and you are forcing users to replace it earlier. The 17 tracking scripts you put on your websites which added 0.004 pence to your bottom line mean that someone needs to shell out a hundred quid for new battery earlier.
It's not "fast enough". It's shit. Benchmarks and guidelines you've read probably say "if you show any text under 5 seconds on newest iPhone on 5G connection you get 100% Performance Score, blue ribbon and your parents will be finally proud of you" because otherwise the biggest websites build by The Best Engineers in the Entire World will not get anywhere close to 100%.
THE LIMIT IS BASICALLY THE SPEED OF LIGHT, A LITERAL SPEED OF LIGHT AND YOU SAY TAKING 10 SECONDS TO DISPLAY 1000 WORDS OF TEXT AND TWO IMAGES IS SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF?
And God forbid you create any sort of actual critical infrastructure and misquote Knuth to me one more goddamn time. People cannot afford iPhone 137, they need to access government services or pay their rent and if you make your payment processing website unusable on 3 year old mid-range Android because adding 10 MB more Javascript increases ✨Development Velocity✨, there's a special place in hell for you. It'll mostly consist of refactoring Javascript codebases with no test coverage.
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