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> It's [Element X is]...sluggish...

I regret to concur. On an iPhone PRO MAX with iOS 18.7-latest, my stopwatch says:

  - Element X loads to list All Chats in 3 seconds.
  - Element Classic loads to list All Chats in <1 second.
And Element X is supposed to be the "fast one", due to Rust SDK, etc. etc.

I'm giving Element X etc. the benefit of the doubt and will see them through.

But there NEEDS TO BE a user-advocate or project-manager just wailing on usability internally at Element. If you need such a person, find someone, and if you can't find anyone, hit me up, but I would think someone should be filling this role already.

In addition to bundling and network effects, one magic thing that helped grease the skids for some apps like AOL Instant Messenger or Facebook Messenger (in its glory days) or WhatsApp/Discord/Telegram or whatever gain very wide adoption was their relatively seamless user experience.

As much as the Parent sounds like complaining, I think it's complaining in good faith. We want Matrix to succeed.


Hm. Something sounds wrong here, then. On my iPhone 12 Pro Max on iOS 26, my account (~5000 rooms) opens in about 2s in Element X iOS. On the classic app it’s about 10s (ie unusable).

Roughly how many rooms are you in? and what server is this on (it could be a serverside problem)? And what precise build of the app?


  > how many rooms are you in?
8 on both (same account)

  > and what server is this on (it could be a serverside problem)?
It's a hosted SaaS personal homeserver. So yes, quite possibly a server-admin issue. I've just put in a ticket to find out.

EDIT: Synapse 1.139.0

  > And what precise build of the app?
Element X Version 25.10.0 (190)

EDIT: After updating to Element X Version 25.10.1 (192) [latest Update from App Store], about 2 seconds is observed -- still slower than Classic, but a little better than before. I will still finish following up regarding Server issues/info with server admins; hopefully that fixes it.

Thanks a ton for all you do! Good to know it's not the expectation.


This is really surprising. Can you do a clean launch (ie kill the app and relaunch it) and then submit a bug report from both apps and let me know what mxid to look for? (DM to @matthew:matrix.org if needed). The logs will say where the time difference is coming from. EX should always be way faster than classic Element.

Sure, both are uploaded, I'll DM you what to look for

thanks - both received; we'll dig into it. thanks!

> opens in about 2s in Element X iOS

I think we're getting closer.

Your "good experience" on Element X iOS matches my "bad experience" on Element X iOS.

See, with my Server and Chats, Classic is actually very snappy:

  - Element X: ~1.5 seconds avg (rounds to 2 sec if using a non-decimal stopwatch, but more like 1.5 when measured more precisely)
  - Element Classic: ~0.6 second avg (actually slightly faster visually, this includes my response time to stop the timer, probably more like just around/under 0.5 sec)
Anyway, Classic is very fast for me to open. I like it a lot. It feels almost instant.

But X loads in 2-3 times the time. I sit there waiting for content to load, even if it's just for a second.

Is this the best Issue to watch?: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102

Because I really hope speed does not regress for people already with very fast load times in Classic, when X becomes the only flagship App in the App Store.


To be complete, for anyone following along: the above hypothesis was allegedly incorrect. 2 seconds is not supposed to be normal for so few chats. Element X is supposedly normally nearly instant to load & list chats for such a small number of chats.

So, I'll try to come back here and comment if I get it resolved.


For Desktop, use nheko as the client app. It's lightning fast.

Probably a confluence of reasons. Maybe:

1. It is much more profitable to introduce new features very, very slowly.

2. If everyone's doing the same thing... one has got to wonder what the people running those companies are up to. My gut says most of the founders/boards are probably largely all on the same WhatsApp/Signal group chat(s), and feel pressure to follow a certain groupthink.

3. It's much easier to profile individual users when the signals are nice and clean. I suspect modeling individual users (building digital twins) could be a really big and mostly quiet part of the longer play for these companies. That pristine initial data might be pretty nice to have.

4. Maybe it would be really boring or doesn't test well. A good thing about talking to the computer is the lack of having to deal with pesky other humans and all the issues they have. Many people instinctively despise reading text generated by a computer that SOME OTHER HUMAN PROMPTED IT TO WRITE (with some exceptions, of course). This might be called the "default conciseness" problem.

Nothing stops one from hosting their own LLM, hooking a web UI to it in such a way that multiple users can access it. Or using a commercial/networked API to do that.

Not a bad idea to try, really. Maybe you're the first one who thought of it...


IMO, 996 is kind of a scam to get people to work less and therefore be less competitive.

Real silicon valley works 24/7, only taking breaks to sleep.

The more people that work only 996, the better people can do who work 24/7.

Unless this means hourly wage workers. In which case, is that really "silicon valley" working? In which case, yes, web search show that generally California caps that at 72 hours/wk in general. So, 12 hours/day with 1 day off makes sense.

What is the fuss? People do what they sign up for. You don't like it, do something else, inventing the alternative if necessary?

I would do it if the rewards were good, if it was fun, or if I had to.


The normal approach would be:

1. Get a college degree in the engineering field of interest.

2. Get a job as an engineer in that field.

3. Optionally, become a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) according to however that is done in your location.

It's not really like software engineering, in which liberal arts or self-taught people get to be called engineers without the matching blood, sweat, and tears.

(If all you want to do is make stuff, you could learn the requisite sciences to know how things work, teach yourself CAD to design something close enough, and then either put in the hours at community hacker spaces or contract someone overseas to actually make whatever you came up with. But, it seems like you are considering a much more serious career shift?)


https://archive.ph/e8FAY

Not that I agree or disagree, just the link


I appreciate it. The Atlantic is one of the sites that throw 403 at me, due to canvas blocking and other extensions I run.


Small Bets chat [0], an extensively modified fork of Campfire by 37signals (the group chat app in Ruby on Rails), is now FOSS, as announced at [1].

Changes added to the Small Bets edition of Campfire chat include those on this list: https://github.com/antiwork/smallbets/blob/master/campfire-m...

Notably, the rooms lists appears different in Small Bets chat vs. in the original Campfire, with the "star to pin favorite rooms" mechanism in the Small Bets fork.

Previously, 37signals recently changed the license of Campfire to be FOSS: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

[0] https://github.com/antiwork/smallbets/

[1] https://x.com/dvassallo/status/1970489062185185497


> regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me.

When picking up macOS, two things really help:

1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.)

2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.


The main problem I had was that apple is a really closed system. I'm not a one OS guy, i always need my stuff to work on windows, Linux, android etc. I don't even use iOS anymore because it's too limited.

Most of the things Apple offers in terms of cloud sync don't work on everything so it's a pretty but useless walled garden to me.

It's a shame because I was a long standing mac user. Because it was a good and fairly open Unix with a good UI. But since iOS became popular macOS has moved into a direction that didn't work for me anymore. They care more about locking users into their ecosystem now than anything else.


How do you maintain tests, in order for LLM edits to not keep breaking things?

  - As a formal test suite in the program's own language?
  - Or using a .md natural language "tests" collection that must pass, which an LLM can understand?

To answer the OP, I learned use different models for reasoning vs. coding.


If it's a great swag item from a unicorn that you were at early enough to feel special about, you could frame it and put it up on the wall to look back fondly on.


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