Edit: old post is someone is curious: https://dev.to/jamilxt/electron-vs-gpui-what-discords-290-mb-rust-rewrite-can-and-cannot-prove-34b6
Replaced with the one from The Verge
Free the code or perish🖕
On the one hand, I would love if more applications moved to native rendering instead of Electron… On the other hand, this is no doubt all vibe coded which I hate. On the third hand I somehow have, what’s gonna happen to alternative clients like Vesktop? I hope they’ll keep working because everything Discord offers by default is so bad.
They are almost for sure all going to die.
Not if Discord intends its web client to still work.
I anticipate that this is an effort to clamp users into their ecosystem
Every Discord user is already in their “ecosystem”. Even if you use a third party client, every single message you send is available to them to scan/sell to advertisers or cops with zero barriers whatsoever.
The only benefit of a third party client (besides UX enhancements and customization) is that Discord can’t execute malware/spyware natively on your PC. This is something they will inevitably do in the future in an effort to chase endless growth, but afaik it’s not happening today. They make enough money from the data they harvest from your chats, at least for now.
There are lots of Vencord plugins that allow you to get Nitro functionality (or close enough anyway) for free. I don’t expect them to be particularly fond of that.
LLM writing, just infuriating to read.
Another example of how a human could have delivered the same information in 25% the time.
The LLMs have been trained on articles written by humans, who, in turn, have been trained to draw out their conclusion into several pages in order to fit advertisements between the paragraphs and pages. It was infuriating before LLMs, and it’s equally infuriating now.
One reason I like Kagi is that it downranks ad-heavy pages. And of course I like uBO. But there are still so many web users without ad blockers that I makes sense for sites to spew slop, just like you’re saying. Blows my mind that anyone would use the web without a blocker.
Before LLMs were a thing, I would just out of sheer muscle memory skip the first few paragraphs of an article to get to the point of what the headline was about, because every fucking article starts with the big bang and works its way to the content of the headline.
Sorry, I missed it.
I spend 10 minutes trying to find an article about that news, the only other option being the post by the Discord CTO on Twitter of all places.
I’ll see if there’s a genuine blog post about it now.
Edit: updated to Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM
I’m getting worse at spotting these. What gave it away?
LLMs use the wrong language cues. They spend a lot of words emphasizing an utterly mundane point, and it’s difficult to read because it’s constantly winding you up to reveal some arcane knowledge just to drop knowledge bombs like, make sure you use good names for variables and always handle your exceptions. I’ve seen them spend two paragraphs when a short sentence would do.
Just generally it waffled on, and didnt get to a point.
That makes this a useful comparison, not a verdict
Thats the “its not X, its Y” pattern.
Not so fast.
That makes this a useful comparison, not a verdict.
Plus all the other constant flip/flop contrasting throughout the text. It’s like a comparative decision matrix converted to prose, and exhausting to read.
Not to mention the ai writing assistant pop up or whatever’s this is upon viewing the page:
Fortunately I disallow javascript execution by default, so I often don’t see this crap. Of course, about half the time I don’t see images or the article content either, since delivering text or images is apparently completely impossible without running arbitrary code.
I seem to vaguely recall we used to have some sort of hyper-text markup language that could do all that, but I guess I must’ve imagined it.
How much memory does Discord normally use?
😆 That’s insane. 1/16th of my RAM for a voice comm program. What a bunch of bloat.
Makes me curious what Fluxer is using now that I switched to that.
It uses flutter, still bloated but it’s frequently uses a quarter of what discord does for the same work load. Typically between 500 megs to 1 gig. When discord would use 2-4 gigs.
If you want a full all in one client like this your going to have to use a decent chunk of ram no matter what. But discord lost its marbles ages ago.
Yeah I definitely only want the voice features, so if Fluxer ever starts bloating I might move back to Mumble like I was using 20 years ago lol.
Positive: Rust means no more Electron.
Negative: Rust typically means massive attack surface through hundreds or thousands of third-party dependencies.
Negative: Discord likes to demand personal information.
Negative: Discord remains the gatekeeper of your creative work.
Negative: Discord has been known to lock people out of their communities if they don’t give up their personal information, or even at random.Most of that has nothing to do with a rewrite, and I don’t think the attack surface of an Electron app is actually any better because it’ll depend on bloody
left-pador whatever.
One of the main benefits to using Discord in a browser is that you can nuke all those dumb popups with uBO. And I have my browser open anyway. Not sure why I’d want the Rust native app. Definitely not sure why I’d want the electron app.
