Moby Dick Workout (2022)

7/5/2026 at 2:14:38 PM

Oh that’s a great test case. I’ve been annoyed by the speed issue too. For a while I had json and Md files bound to Zed because it was faster with highlighting than anything else.

But even that takes seconds to start on my M1 Max from cold. So then I just wrote (avec Claude) a viewer app and it turns out computers are so fast you can not only open multi GB JSON files instantly you can even pretty print them so fast the user won’t lose attention.

But I just generated those. Moby Dick is a great real-world test case.

by arjie

7/5/2026 at 3:43:23 PM

This is why you use Emacs in Daemon mode for instant starts. Does zed perhaps offer something similar?

by zipy124

7/5/2026 at 3:53:43 PM

One can keep it open without a window on MacOS I think but in the end the vibe-coded solution outperforms it on this specific task (which is not its primary task) at a few orders of magnitude. It is perhaps on the frontier for speed-features but I don’t need the features so when I move backwards along the curve I can extract more speed myself.

by arjie

7/5/2026 at 7:06:45 AM

That reminded me of how fast/instant Winamp loads the huge directory (recursively), while other players struggle. Scrolling reveals that files are being loaded lazily (obviously), but the most interesting part is that Quick search and Jump to file works immediately.

by zerr

7/5/2026 at 7:44:58 AM

This reminds me of ‘The Jules Test’. Popularised (hyper locally) by my friend Jules.

When renting a flat, simply head straight to the bathroom and flush the toilet. If the toilet flush is good, the flat is fine.

by jonplackett

7/5/2026 at 2:30:14 PM

Turn on the sink before you flush so a sizeable drop in header pressure becomes obvious.

by black6

7/5/2026 at 8:20:42 AM

You can use "20,000 leagues under the sea" instead of Moby Dick.

Both were written at the same time, both deal with ocean adventures, and both (IMHO) are much longer than they need to be.

Then you can have multiple Jules tests, depending on occasion!

by sam_goody

7/5/2026 at 11:58:58 AM

Moby Dick had a much worse ratio of "size of good novel trying to get out / actual size", in my opinion.

by BoingBoomTschak

7/5/2026 at 6:35:22 PM

I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novels.

by jhbadger

7/5/2026 at 1:26:46 PM

Moby Dick has a bad (high) ratio of “people who try to read it like a thriller novel” to “people who read it for what it is”.

by velcrovan

7/5/2026 at 1:57:28 PM

If they want a short and lean "man fights fish/sea animal", they should stick to "The Old Man and the Sea". I'll stick with the investigation into finding purpose in a purposeless ocean.

by miltonlost

7/5/2026 at 2:20:35 PM

Huh, that’s surprising to me. The beginning details about the whales and whatnot surprised me but once I got going it was just marvelous. I’m not a very good book critic but it just had such a sensation of the sea and being crew on a ship run by an obsessive (that in itself somewhat interesting in that the narrator is just side character to the protagonist). And I loved the characterization of his obsession as a “cruel emperor” and the way men love water (“set a man to walking and he will infallibly lead you to water”).

It’s been a long time since I read the book but it was doubtless one of the most enjoyable I’ve read.

by arjie

7/5/2026 at 11:06:11 AM

> both (IMHO) are much longer than they need to be

I haven’t read moby dick but i dropped 20’000 leagues under the see a bit past half the book because of this. At some point the author spent pages and pages and pages describing the environment under the see, often repeating himself.

I’ll get back to that book at some point but yes, it’s longer than it needs to be.

by znpy

7/5/2026 at 11:17:56 AM

I think at that point in my life I quite enjoyed how much he laboured the details. But the book Ready Player One had a few areas where the author just listed pop references, on and on, which reminds me of that.

Something that helps me is just giving myself license to skip stuff. It's usually better I finish a book since I will never come back to it. So I just jump around a few pages if I get bored.

by ehnto

7/5/2026 at 6:29:06 AM

And here I thought this was going to be, “do a push up every time you have to look up a word in the dictionary while reading Moby Dick.”

by keiferski

7/5/2026 at 6:51:00 PM

No, that would be doing curls with a printed copy of the book.

Alternatively, I'm sure recreating the drum solo from the Zeppelin song of the same name would get you sweaty. For advanced athletes, do the live version.

by mikestew

7/5/2026 at 7:32:26 AM

Or how to stay fit like an 1800s whaler. Where am I going to find a hook and a 200 pound chunk of whale blubber though?

by Cthulhu_

7/5/2026 at 9:46:20 AM

Find your nearest Discord Mod Meetup.

by nehal3m

7/5/2026 at 3:33:03 PM

Could substitute a tractor tire, maybe? Would certainly smell better long term…

by jzb

7/5/2026 at 6:39:41 PM

Here I was, thinking it would be a very, very odd workout set to Moby's music.

by nixosbestos

7/5/2026 at 7:00:26 PM

This made me test my own app with the book. And even though it had no issues loading it, it still left me thinking I can get much better performance on scrolling.

small video I made for demonstration purpose: https://youtu.be/fiJ0vJLhcN8

I am overall pretty happy with iced-rs

by t_mahmood

7/5/2026 at 5:38:53 AM

I use "War and Peace" for this.

by miiiiiike

7/5/2026 at 10:56:00 AM

I used war and peace to explain to a CEO how wasteful a mobile API was; twelve distinct items of data to display but we sent JSON larger than war and peace.

by timclark

7/5/2026 at 1:44:22 PM

I used to use this as my example for how big a megabyte actually is. I think the entire text is 4 MB uncompressed (a nagging voice in my head says 16 MB, but I think that's just the residual part of me that never really believed how big a MB actually is).

by chucksmash

7/5/2026 at 8:24:05 PM

An ASCII page is about 4k, so roughly 1000 pages.

by mixmastamyk

7/5/2026 at 6:11:18 AM

Good idea, I might use Crime & Punishment!

by N_Lens

7/5/2026 at 8:13:15 AM

A bit amusing. I took Anna Karenina off Gutenberg and used that as test data for some of my flashing algorithms. I called it the "Anna test". I could have used random data, but where's the fun in that? Besides, during dev, structured text showed the kind of error I got much better than random data would have.

by RealityVoid

7/5/2026 at 8:23:50 AM

not to pile on the particular software but the example just stuck in my memory, two years ago or so I tried out Logseq for note taking, and I still remember that it put a five page file (not even Moby Dick) into 'read only' mode because apparently at about 1k characters or a few hundred lines of text the app couldn't handle the performance impact, stumbling across discussions like this[1]

With the quasi supercomputers we have, that somehow apps that exist to edit and display text crap themselves on ordinary <1mb files is just weird. There should be no trade-offs.

[1] https://discuss.logseq.com/t/logseq-unusable-for-long-form-p...

by Barrin92

7/5/2026 at 12:26:34 PM

did jesse write this? i presume so but maybe hog bay has an anonymous forum

by 0gs

7/5/2026 at 4:54:56 PM

I did! And I'm still using it to test Bike 2.0. Will will be release about 2 years ago. :\ Well soon anyway!

by jessegrosjean

7/5/2026 at 4:32:20 AM

(2022)

by gnabgib

7/5/2026 at 7:53:30 AM

You had me at "dick workout".

by hnbad

7/5/2026 at 8:02:00 AM

And to Moby music! What's not to love?

by muvlon