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   <title>uninformativ.de phlog</title>
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   <id>gopher://uninformativ.de/1/phlog</id>
   <author>
       <name>movq</name>
   </author>
   <updated>2025-06-25T19:27:35+00:00</updated>
   <entry>
       <title>2025-06-25--ui-sluggishness</title>
       <updated>2025-06-25T19:27:35+00:00</updated>
       <id>tag:uninformativ.de,2025-06-25:phlog/ui-sluggishness</id>
       <link rel="alternate" href="gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-06/2025-06-25--ui-sluggishness.txt"/>
       <content type="text">
I think I've written about this a couple of times now.

Every time I start an old PC, like my Pentium 133 from 1997, this effect becomes
immediately obvious: If that computer is running period-appropriate software,
the UI doesn't feel all that much slower than modern PCs.

Sure, individual tasks like image processing will be objectively slower. But
not the UI. Not as much as you'd expect from a machine that's 20-30 years old.

Here's an example: Compare a word processor, say StarOffice 3.1 running on OS/2
Warp 4 on that P133, with a modern web-based "document writer". Open a file.
You will notice that this takes a noticeable amount of time in both cases. Text
rendering, text layout, all that. Opening dialogs and new windows takes time.

You don't *have to* reach for web-based programs. Just compare StarOffice 3.1
with LibreOffice 25 (StarOffice is the ancestor of LibreOffice). I feel like
this should be a day-and-night difference in terms of speed, but it isn't.

It is as if the speed and responsiveness of UIs is stuck at a certain level,
even though the underlying hardware has improved dramatically.

As a comparison, run something like MenuetOS on a contemporary PC. Even if it
is just running in a virtual machine, you'll notice just how fast this thing is.
You click on something and, boom, it's there. So it's not some weird, magical
fundamental property of UIs to be "slow". They can be fast.

We just don't write programs that are *as fast as they could be*.

We instead make them *as slow as tolerable* and/or *as fast as barely needed*.

Is there a term for this? I only found the "Doherty Threshold" (but I have to
note that there is no Wikipedia page for this, so take it with a grain of salt):
It claims that there is a certain threshold after which users will no longer
perceive a program as "sluggish". And I claim that we only ever put in the
minimum amount of effort to cross that threshold, and then we call it day.

Add to this the fact that the machines of developers are often much more
powerful than those of the average user, and you have an explanation why many
modern programs are, in fact, really, really slow and sluggish.

I propose that we use Retro Computing as a tool in education. Put young
developers in front of very old machines, show them the UIs of that era. Make
them realize what these systems were capable of (not just in terms of speed)
before those devs were even born. Make it clear to them that, if StarOffice 3.1
had an acceptable speed, the dev's new program should be *blazingly fast*.

(I realize that if you want to make something web-based, like virtually all
people do nowadays, you inevitably add network latency to the equation. I'd
respond with: Maybe not make it web-based unless there's a really compelling
reason to do so. Or find ways to mitigate that latency. The main point is that
you should be *aware* of this and of how your application is suffering from it.)
       </content>
   </entry>
   <entry>
       <title>2025-06-19--rust-gopher-server-rophy</title>
       <updated>2025-06-19T08:34:16+00:00</updated>
       <id>tag:uninformativ.de,2025-06-19:phlog/rust-gopher-server-rophy</id>
       <link rel="alternate" href="gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-06/2025-06-19--rust-gopher-server-rophy.txt"/>
       <content type="text">
This Gopher hole ran on sgopherd for well over a decade:

https://uninformativ.de/git/sgopherd

I'm not happy with this approach anymore. The script itself might be
acceptable, but especially Bash could have lots of security issues. I
want to reduce the attack surface.

I'm currently experimenting with a Gopher server I wrote in Rust, called
"rophy". It uses OpenBSD's pledge() and unveil() before it reads a
single byte from the client. Similar to sgopherd, it is run through
inetd: My code never runs as root and never does any socket stuff, it
just reads from the file system and communicates with stdin/stdout.

This is highly experimental and I'm not good at Rust yet, because this
language is super hard to learn. Time will tell if I'm going to keep it
or not.
       </content>
   </entry>
   <entry>
       <title>2025-06-14--school-was-weird</title>
       <updated>2025-06-14T12:56:16+00:00</updated>
       <id>tag:uninformativ.de,2025-06-14:phlog/school-was-weird</id>
       <link rel="alternate" href="gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-06/2025-06-14--school-was-weird.txt"/>
       <content type="text">
I have kept some of my old school books and have recently -- for reasons
that might deserve their own phlog post some day -- read a bit through
them again. Specifically math books.

What struck me as very odd was the style of those math books: They
contain very, very little explanations. They feel more like references.
If you were to put them on a scale, I'd say:

     My books
         |
         v
   |-----x-------------------------------|
   Pure                               Full
   Reference                  Explanations

I'm talking about things like linear algebra, stochastic, analysis, ...

As a consequence, you can't just take these books, read them, and learn.
You won't understand a thing.

My time in school is long over and I don't really remember anymore how
this worked. But judging by these books, I guess that our teacher
explained a certain topic and then we'd get some homework -- the
excercises came from those books. In other words, you had absolutely no
way of re-iterating the stuff you did at school, re-read it again, try
to understand it again. Either you got it when the teacher explained it
or you didn't. End of story.

How odd?

Why not have books that *explain* the topics, so I can read up on them
again?

This model means that the teacher had to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
If he/she was bad explaining a topic, that's *your* problem. Or if you
were sick for a week. Or if the other kids were noisy. Or a million
other reasons.

(These days, you have The Internet to look things up, but that wasn't an
option during my school days.)

I wonder how math classes are these days.
       </content>
   </entry>
   <entry>
       <title>2025-06-13--back-online</title>
       <updated>2025-06-13T17:50:59+00:00</updated>
       <id>tag:uninformativ.de,2025-06-13:phlog/back-online</id>
       <link rel="alternate" href="gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-06/2025-06-13--back-online.txt"/>
       <content type="text">
The Gopher server is back online.

The content is a little bit different, lots of dead stuff has been
removed. It's mostly just the phlog now.

I shut down my Gopher server last year because there were too many
overlapping "channels": Blog, phlog, twtxt, Mastodon/Fediverse. I didn't
know anymore where to post what kind of content.

After having used Mastodon for a couple of years now, I have to say: It
doesn't work for me. I had very few meaningful interactions on that
platform. I never used it as intended anyway, I used it more like a
forum or newsgroup: I subscribed to a few hashtags -- I hardly followed
any people. The thing is that I'm not interested in *people*. I'm
interested in *topics*. Mastodon isn't good for that. And it's annoying
to self-host (and the few minimalistic ActivityPub daemons do not
support following hashtags). And what I really dislike is the emphasize
on "likes" and "boosts". It's some sort of gamification, it's toxic and
addictive. Not good.

I'll probably keep scrolling through Mastodon every now and then, but I
don't think I'll post there a lot anymore.

twtxt has stagnated quite a bit. We have a nice little community, but
it's very few people. This leaves more room for Gopher after all.

My main "outlets" will be the phlog and weblog. Gopher for random
musings. Weblog for longer, slightly better researched articles. Some
phlog entries might eventually evolve into posts on the weblog.
       </content>
   </entry>
   <entry>
       <title>2024-02-03--shutdown</title>
       <updated>2024-02-03T15:42:32+00:00</updated>
       <id>tag:uninformativ.de,2024-02-03:phlog/shutdown</id>
       <link rel="alternate" href="gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2024/2024-02/2024-02-03--shutdown.txt"/>
       <content type="text">
This Gopher server is about to be shut down. It was a nice journey that
lasted over 13 years. See you around.
       </content>
   </entry>
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