← Back to context

Comment by canto

18 hours ago

So, instead of paying humans twice for the same thing, Shopify will pay corporations to burn the planet a little bit more, waste water and energy - to build the same thing twice. Just because. There's no tech reason to do it. "LLMS are better now". There's no low level optimisations, no blockers, no app shortcomings, it's a shopping app for Christ sake. Instead of optimising, creating more with less, they will create the same with more. Yeah, that's smart. Super smart.

9 comments

canto

Reply
shawabawa3  17 hours ago

> Just because. There's no tech reason to do it.

They made a separate article on why, which they linked to. Performance is significantly better. The native Android app launches twice as fast for example

  • canto  2 hours ago

    and only 23% on iOS. Now while those can initially seems significant, it's still a web app, doh, a web page, that loads non deterministic stuff. Even in their tests, the page that loads native vs RN is simply... different. Different things take different time to load, yeah, who would have though. Not even mentioning that this "performance" is only app startup, lol. Ah, sorry, my bad, 120fps when browsing items on the web.

    Don't get me wrong I don't have anything against AI, I'm a heavy user myself, but refactoring everything just for the sake of it and bragging on HN with little to no tangible effects - that's a whole different story.

uselesswords  10 hours ago

Can someone explain the waste water thing to me, because unless they’re separating it into H2 and O2 how is it possible for water to be wasted?

joegibbs  6 hours ago

Ridiculous, the amount of energy saved from a faster native application over how ever many million users will be far greater than the amount spent to generate the tokens to do so