@mulander i can get by for a week with just emacs, cli and little web browser usage, it won't have any effect on my work, except it being little slower to do

@mulander 2GB? Generous.

My rule is, give developers PCs that match the smallest spec the software is supposed to run on. And plug your ears, because they'll whinge.

@mulander end result: productivity skyrockets for a day or two until everyone remembers old.reddit.com works in lynx/links2/elinks. Productivity permanently suffers after developers learn about asciinema.

@mulander I use a raspberry pi 3 as one of my dev machines so I have something like that.

Also, I agree. This is a good idea.

@mulander My #kestrel3 project starts with terribly small specs in part to encourage this kind of visibility. 6 MIPS instruction execution rate gives comparable performance to a C64, accounting for screen resolution differences. 1MB of RAM (with some used by the OS image itself) helps ensures frugality. Etc.

RAM and CPU microarchitecture can be expanded of course; but it's not defined as the minimum specs.

@mulander and give them old LCD with washed colors to emulate color-blidness

@mulander That's my home machine's specs!

@mulander And add random packet loss, averaging around 10%.

@mulander or just make everyone code in c and asm

@mulander /me encourages uses of a paper-output device, less than 1MB of RAM, and a CPU with PDP-11 speeds. Maybe, just maybe we will start to have less bloated software. ;-)

@mulander I remember this one, 2G Tuesdays https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tuesdays-slow-internet-developing-world

@mulander Commenting just to subscribe. Wonder what other sick things the commenters will come up with.

@mulander I try to do this everyday! When I go to the store I look for the most underpowered computer.

Though I've found a Raspberry Pi is too underpowered to work comfortably.

@mulander

I'm running 40+ instances of 1 "vCore", 1-2GB of memory, and 10-50GB of SSD.

Debian 9 stock eats ~400MB of memory without doing anything.

I run multiple full tables of v4 + v6, a static web server, PowerDNS, rsqlite, and Consul with some room to spare on #OpenBSD

@mulander Actually, my computer has just 2GB memory and 2 cores. But screen resolution can go up to 1600x900

@mulander for a couple of weekends I worked with a LattePanda with 2Gb RAM and Intel atom cores for this very purpose. It is quite revealing which things are slow and which runs aren't when they all feel fast on faster hardware.

@mulander 2MB!

@mulander

I just installed #voidlinux on a raspberry pi and tried i3 and dwm, (I'll let you guess wich one I kept) so yeah this is definitely a good idea

@mulander you're being far too gentle with them

256MB RAM, one 1GHz core, 800x600 resolution, 56.6Kbps internet

@mulander don't forget 600 ms latency

@mulander Just working inside a VM will do.

@mulander That’s an excellent suggestion!

Unfortunately, part of the problem is that the people who need this experience most, would be the ones most resistant to the idea.

The effort is also like pure research. The outcome may be something unexpected, and entirely not what the intended goal was. That’s a tough sell in the business world, even if the result might be better than the original goal.

@mulander 👌👍

@mulander The developer of the Boxer text editor used to keep his dev machine a generation behind (ran a 386 when 486 was common) just for this reason. He wanted it to be fast, even in slow machines.

@mulander RPi3 has 4 cores, but not as much RAM, but it is not that expensive so I'm using it anyway.

@mulander and less crappy, bloated websites.

@mulander

@mulander Maybe tell this to webdesigner 'cause 80% of the time they're the ones who ask us to do X or Y

@mulander this is in part an issue if global justice. much of the world cannot afford to constantly update computers, phones, devices to keep up with bloatware.

@mulander You probably couldn't run a graphical web browser on this hardware these days. At least not without major performance issues