10 ms·
It’s crazy how computers still seem to get perceivably slow every few years, given how many instructions can be executed in 1ms. Shameful, even.. What’s that
by metadat 1mo ago
It’s crazy how computers still seem to get perceivably slow every few years, given how many instructions can be executed in 1ms. Shameful, even..
What’s that law called about programmers wasting all the compute on abstraction?
- LoganDark 1mo agoHuh? A millisecond is an eternity!
- m463 1mo agoI remember reading once somewhere: If some app responds in 10ms or less, it is INTERACTIVE. makes you think.
- Xirdus 1mo agoIt is literally impossible to respond to input in 10ms on most platforms, for various reasons. The USB input lag of 12-30ms and the 60Hz refresh rate of most monitors being just the first two.
- xboxnolifes 1mo ago60Hz monitors definitely prevent it, but I'm pretty sure USB lag is far less than 12-30ms. My USB mouse can make a round-trip to a remote server faster than that.
- Xirdus 1mo agoOut of curiosity, how did you measure mouse roundtrip with sub-12ms precision?
- m463 1mo agoI stand corrected. I looked it up and it is .1 seconds (100ms) The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]: - 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result. - 1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data. - 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect. from Jakob Nielsen: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-... less readable but the original paper: https://www.yusufarslan.net/sites/yusufarslan.net/files/upload/content/Miller1968.pdf https://www.yusufarslan.net/sites/yusufarslan.net/files/uplo...
- citelao 1mo agoThat’s the prevailing statistic, but your original number isn’t that wrong either: Humans can perceive much smaller latencies. If you look at the Card & Miller reference, at least some humans can perceive differences in ~50ms vs 100ms latencies when typing (in my limited testing, it’s likely you can!). There’s some newer research I don’t have handy that I believe found error rates decreased and NSAT improved until around at least 30ms (if not 20ms). On that note, humans can definitely distinguish 60hz vs 120hz reliably (about 8ms faster per frame). Even faster: with a reference (eg when dragging on a touchscreen), humans can distinguish down to at least 1ms vs 10ms of latency: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 And you can probably distinguish metronomes that are off by about 1-2ms. Much smaller for other things (like metronomes that slightly slower or faster than one another). This is a special interest of mine XD
- inigyou 1mo ago"The human eye can see 39620Hz": https://youtu.be/Sb_7uN7sfTw https://youtu.be/Sb_7uN7sfTw
- sitzkrieg 1mo agothis is also why 60 hz refresh rate is all but dead outside of console gaming (not to mention 1000hz poll rate devices being the norm)
- LoganDark 1mo agoabsolutely not, try finding a 15" 4K OLED with a refresh rate other than 60Hz
- sitzkrieg 1mo agothere are plentiful OLEDs in 4k with refresh rates from 100Hz to 480Hz. your problem is a small size problem. 15” is targeted more towards portable work monitors, not gaming in 2026
- LoganDark 1mo agothat 4K monitor has touch and pen support too. and it was $300. you'd be hard-pressed to find such a thing for $3,000 and even then you wouldn't have high refresh rate
- Xirdus 1mo ago"Most" includes standard issue corporate hardware for office drones, bottom of the barrel laptops bought as gifts to children, and ultra cheap Android phones in developing countries.
- Dylan16807 1mo ago> The USB input lag of 12-30ms How'd you get that number? USB defaults to polling at 125Hz and a lot of devices go at 1000Hz (or higher). The rest of the pipeline should be a fraction of a millisecond. I guess bad debouncing hardware can add a lot more, but that's far from USB's fault.
- Xirdus 1mo agoIt's mostly due to OS-level USB stacks being quite terrible for latency for the most part, especially on Windows. Though I might've misremembered the exact numbers.
- faresahmed 1mo agoSorry for nitpicking but the logical inverse of this statement is the stronger and more appropriate version: If some app does not respond in 10ms or less, it is not interactive.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- HappyPanacea 1mo agoThe new windows notepad is a disgrace
- adamrezich 1mo agoThe new mspaint fucked, then unfucked, then refucked my decades-old muscle memory of Win+R mspaint Enter Ctrl+E 1 Tab 1 Enter Ctrl+V to open Paint, resize canvas to minimum, then paste from clipboard. When you press Ctrl+E now, the Units control is selected by default, for some completely asinine reason!!!
- sitzkrieg 1mo agoi’m on LTSC for this (and many other) reasons lol! don’t touch my mspaint and notepad
- fluoridation 1mo agoThat's pretty cool. I've never needed to do that because Paint remembers the last canvas size set manually.
- adamrezich 1mo agoYeah but sometimes I save images using Paint and then the default canvas size will be something else! If I were designing an OS shell I would simply give the user the ability to easily make temporary text or image buffers and copy and paste content to/from them, rather than using a Notepad or a Paint.
- EvanAnderson 1mo agoYou aren't alone in being frustrated by decades of muscle memory being disrespected by MSFT.
- mwigdahl 1mo agoWirth's Law I believe.
- inigyou 1mo agoAnd remember to call him by name, not by value!
- summarybot 1mo agoThe OS should do less not more
- RiverCrochet 1mo agovi should be a kernel-level system call, tunable with sysctls. For agentic management.
- summarybot 1mo agothat sort of rearrangement makes sense. and the likely downstream effect is the OS can ... do less [at higher levels of userspace]
- inigyou 1mo agoAndy and Bill's Law
- AceJohnny2 1mo agoThere are two aspects to compute performance: latency and throughput. There has been a ton of work to improve throughput, but that's often come at the cost of latency, because a great technique to improve throughput is batching, to avoid the per-task overhead cost. We've also added many layers of abstraction. A seminal example is Dan Luu's "computer latency" table (2017) https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/, which measures the time between a keypress and visible changes on the screen, and wherein an Apple IIe has latency 5x lower than a Lenovo X1 Carbon on Windows. From some perspective, you could say that the Lenovo on Windows example is an impressive feat of engineering, considering all the subsystems involved (USB, interrupt dispatcher, input layer, windowing system, double-buffering...) This throughput-over-latency tradeoff can be seen across the entire computer landscape design.
- loeg 1mo agoIdk man, my computers don't seem to get any slower over time -- no upgrades to any components, either.