I honestly think it's pretty amazing how cheap air travel already is in the USA and Europe. It explains why we're seeing all time highs for air travel.
The air industry seems like a good example of just the right level of regulation: There's tons of competition, different pricing tiers with their corresponding levels of quality, and a lot of dynamism combined with a good set of consumer base regulations (24 hour cancellation period, for example).
This might be the case if all your travel boils down to off season direct flights between major airports.
In my experience, it has been rapidly going up in price and down in quality since the end of the pandemic. You have very few protections as a passenger, and while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue with the way support lines work with airlines.
To add insult to the injury, look up the history of bailouts airlines have received.
> while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue
Are you in the US? In the EU there are many websites that help you get a cancellation/delay refund, they require little more than your boarding pass, and they work very well for a small (sometimes none) fee. The fee is taken from your refund so if you don't get one, you don't have to pay anything.
As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day.
One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by it.
Font rendering is indeed complex, but the anecdote seems to be misleading readers into thinking Evan wrote obscure code.
I worked extensively in the parts of the Figma where Evan wrote a lot of foundational code, and have also worked directly with him on building the plugin API.
One of Evan's strong points as a CTO is that he was very pragmatic and that was reflected in his code. Things that could be simple were simple, things that needed complexity did not shy away from it.
While all codebases have early decisions that later get changed, I'd say that largely speaking, Figma's editor codebase was built upon foundations that stood the test of time. This includes choices such as the APIs used to build product code, interact with multiplayer, the balance between using OOP v.s. more functional or JS-like patterns, the balance between writing code in C++/WASM v.s. JS, etc. Many of these choices can be credited to Evan directly or his influence.
Subsequent engineers that joined were able to build upon the product without causing a spiraling mess of complexity thanks to those good decisions made early on. In my opinion, this is why Figma was able to ship complex new features without being bogged down by exploding tech debt, and a major contributing factor to the business's success as a whole.
+1 from another Figma engineer who happened to work on the text engine back in the day.
I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple as possible — there was no unnecessary complexity. In this case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity due to the math involved and the performance requirements, but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very understandable.
It’s a clever trick. But can it render a textured text? Transparent text, gradient fills? Maybe it can, I dont know. But why not just triangulate the glyph shapes, and represent each glyph as a set of triangles. This triangulation can be done offline, making rendering very lightweight.
The linked post was about Evan's side project, but within Figma, all of that is indeed possible. The glyphs are transformed into vector networks[0], which has a fill pipeline that supports transparency, gradients, images, blending, masking, etc.
It is incredible how easy this stuff spirals out of control and why I'm not too worried about AI yet.
Every now and then I'm writing a PoC or greenfield project that you put down for 6 months. And sometimes when I pick it up to extend it, it will just so rapidly feel like it's getting out of control (I'm actually listening to the chemical brothers song of the same name at the moment!). I can at least usually fix that with some refactoring, but why didn't I get it right at the time? I don't know.
And it's often hard to figure out why, what architectural decision did you make to cause this. Pointing at the particular interface or pattern or method call chain that is the cause of a ton of complexity that could be fixed is much, much, much harder than most jobs in programming. And beyond the ability of 90% of developers.
The -2000 story popped up here again recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252), and it's of the same vein, why had no-one else done that? Because it takes extreme skill to simplify existing code. It's beyond most developers.
I think it's why we as an industry often obsess about things like space/tabs/semi-colons or not/etc. They're obvious improvements to an architecture, and everyone can join in. But really, they're a small improvement to a codebase, not a massive one.
And then you get the Evans of the world who just do it, almost effortlessly. I've worked with an Evan, and sometimes you'd look at his code and think "why?", but any attempt to change or improve it invariably made it worse. He'd picked that pattern or structure or method call chain and it was always the right choice. And after a day of poking at it, exploring the edges, trying to change it, you'd realize why.
And yes, sometimes the code was so complex other developers couldn't get it. And then they'd call me over to help because I could get it. And I'd look at it and realize it was complicated because it had to be like that. He'd actually done it in the simplest way possible.
And years later I still make the wrong choice sometimes, and I always think of Simon and wish I had his magic touch.
Even if he used to name functions Thing() and DoStuff() and forget to update them.
I don’t know anything about shaders and this is not personal against Evan, but if someone wrotes code that nobody understands, isn’t it bad thing and not good thing? I thought similarly (admired) many years ago, that those people are wizards and that is cool, but the older I get, less I think so. You often can write the same thing so that it is also easier for others to understand. In most cases, when we talk about compiled languages, compiler optimises it anyway, if you use some extra variables and so on.
The first startup I worked at was in typography. Writing a full typographic rendering engine in webGL shaders is going to result in code that is difficult for others not experienced in webGL and typography.
It’s inherently (and likely irreducibly) difficult, not accidentally/gratuitously difficult.
It’s a bad thing if you make a simple thing more complicated than it needs to be.
But there are plenty of Hard Problems out there, for which no sufficient code could be called “simple.” Plenty of aspects of font rendering fall within this bucket. It’s notoriously difficult.
That's what I was thinking, but then, it is very specialized and high performance code well outside of my domains (font rendering, shaders, C++, high performance / frequently called code is very much not my bread and butter). I frequently glaze over whenever trying to read a post about some optimization problem. Fast inverse square root [0] is succinct and cleanly written even though it uses math symbols instead of variable names, but I have no idea how it works and don't have the math basics to even know when / where / why to use it.
Usually it is dangerous to let such people write application level code, but according to the reports in the comments, the guy might be one of the few exceptions, who gets the low level right, but also created flexible extensible structure of code in other places, without it becoming obscure on the application level.
Usually when I see some mathematical code that's not explained at all and has obvious flaws in terms of simple improvements that could be made to improve readability or even something as simple as some comments, I just keep thinking: "Please don't let this person touch application level code!"
Computer typography is a dark art. It requires understanding a whole domain with its own terminology and traditions as well as aesthetic sense, then combine that with the programming knowledge.
As others have pointed out: if the complexity is in the domain then that's perfectly acceptable. I always remember reading some lines of code in Linux that had a comment above them: "This code is meant to be read by a CPU, not by a human."
The hard part is knowing when the code is complex because the domain/performance requirements demand it be that way vs when the code is complex because the engineer was just trying to appear smarter than they are.
Exactly, I had the same issue when I was younger. I thought if I read code I could not understand was because the other dev was a legend. Now its the opposite, I am amazed by code that does its job well, its understandable and has low complexity.
> which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by it.
I don’t mean this to throw shade, but isn’t the whole point of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked with some crazy smart people when I was in academia, and when one of them left it was not worth trying to maintain what they left behind because it was so often inscrutable.
The reason to write code is to solve a problem. If the problem domain is complex, then the code to solve said problem will be inherently complex. He solved a problem.
Font rendering code is a nightmare because the problem is really damn hard. Font files are complex, and actual real world usage is even worse.
Any code that involves parsing old school binary file formats is going to look ugly to modern day developers who are used to JSON everything, even if the code is actually very well structured.
Even well-written code can be hard to understand -- practically impossible, even -- if what it's doing is sufficiently complex. Cryptography and certain areas of graphics have humbled me, for instance. I followed the flow, and I appreciated the comments, but I did not understand.
The way you’re telling it, that feels like a really weird thing to praise. “There are majorly important parts of the code base with a bus factor of one” isn’t something to celebrate or be proud of.
I understand where you're coming from and the admiration for someone for whom no problem is seemingly impossible.
I wouldn't glorify "brilliant code" that much though because code should be made to be changed. If it isn't, it's a fragility trait, not a positive trait. Code that no one knows how to change is opportunity lost.
I do understand that it may be hard to create stuff for others when you're alone and going very fast but I don't think praising it is the right idea.
I don't think changeable code is the number one priority. The goal is to solve a problem and code that solves a problem without needing to change is sufficient.
Code that doesn't need to change is a really good sign that you've got something good.
The real world moves. If your code didn't change it must be generating value against something that is very standard but I'd be very surprised that you're not modifying, adding, etc based on usage to derive even more value somehow.
> Code that doesn't need to change is a really good sign that you've got something good.
Not really, but you're thinking in terms of "my code nailed it because I'm not touching it" and that has NOTHING to do with it being easy to change.
That it works is testimony to the intelligence put towards the code. That no one else can grep it tells me it was solved in a manner which was suboptimal.
I cannot believe Figma hired engineers who could not follow along already-tread footsteps. That’s a nonsensical assertion. Novel code may be inscrutable but the problem-solving and techniques should have been clear and repeatable by those who follow, even if they require adaptation.
> IANA Employment Lawyer, so take everything here with a huge grain of salt, but is the separate product going to be a separate company? If it is would some mix of equity + cash work? If not, it seems like some custom contract based on the product and its dedicated revenues/profits might be necessary with lawyers involved.
It will be, yes! I do think it should work. I think I'm slightly worried about how much is appropriate given an unspecified time commitment.
> But no one, especially early on when they're small or solo, wants to go hire a lawyer to write these contracts. I wonder if we can create good templates for rev/profit shares for solo/indie/bootstrapped businesses. Think the SAFE that YC created, but more around profit or revenue shares.
Think this is a fantastic idea actually! I think there's a lot of projects out there that would benefit from this type of risk sharing in a way that would make sense for both parties.
> If this is interesting to you shoot me a msg would love to talk to others who are seeing this type of problem.
I'll definitely do that. Let me try to do a bit more research on my part too!
> Also, if you know Gumroad, they're building out a new product called Flexile.com that enables companies to hire contractors but also give them equity/dividends. It's not released yet, but may be worth looking into and getting on the waiting list. May or may not solve this exact problem but it's in a similar realm.
If it will be a startup in the more traditional sense, slicingpie.com also exists. The idea is basically dynamic equity allocated based on everyones contributions.
> The speed of history is increasing with each new generation after all.
This is the only statement in the post I honestly disagreed with. Anton is trying to talk about how his coworkers have lost historical perspective and that he, because of the geopolitical situation of the space in which he was born, has more historical perspective and therefore believes that everything might got s**. It's a very valid argument.
Yet, I have 2 questions:
- Doesn't the fact that there's a large group of people in the world (in North America, Europe, and other places) that believe in the stability of the system indicate that maybe they're actually experiencing history at a slower pace than their ancestors?
- More importantly, isn't the intent to predict history by claiming to understand a change in the way it operates (in this case its speed) also a lack of historical perspective?
Otherwise completely understood the point + liked the idea.
> The speed of history is increasing with each new generation after all.
Ok, maybe it's only for Ukrainians or something like that. Probably this statement is even more true than when I wrote it.
> therefore believes that everything might got s*
I don't believe in that to be honest. It might be one of the more pessimistic essays. But in general I do not try to connect the speed of history, the direction (going to s* or otherwise). I think it's very possible to be optimistic about future.
PS And fun fact I have 401K for 5(?) years now. So we all change all the time. But reflecting on history is interesting anyway.
We've been starting to use Sorbet at Figma and honestly it's been pretty cool! Sorbet is definitely not as good at TypeScript (yet?). It's more verbose, doesn't support things like recursive types and records (shapes are experimental), and it doesn't inspire the same confidence TS does but it's definitely worth it to add it to your codebase if it's big enough!
Also, it's fast! I'm in total agreement with the point made in the article. That makes a huge difference in developer UX.
I have some concrete ideas for how to fix shape types to make them not incremental. Just a matter of finding the time to push the prototype over the line, and do a migration on Stripe's codebase to fix or silence the ensuing errors. It's one of the most requested features for sure, and I think once we implement it Sorbet will feel much better to use, especially in smaller projects and scripts where you don't want to have to define `T::Struct` for one-off data structures.
Wow that would be awesome! Shapes/Records are definitely the #1 thing I'm missing from moving over from TypeScript.
I started thinking about this a bit and I came up with the conclusion that the single biggest difference between structs and shapes is really iterating over keys. I spent some time trying to create structs by which you could iterate over all the keys and all the solutions seemed clunky or inelegant.
huh... didn't expect figma to be using any ruby. what do you all use it for there? I'm mainly a ruby programmer lately but I used figma for my last project design and it was really lovely to use so good work!
For a lot of the people that get to that level of wealth, it was never about the money. It was always about something else. I don't think the Bezos, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of the world wake up every morning wanting to make more money. They find fulfillment in their work. The external recognition is not bad either.
I think you're right that some people who want to continue making money are mentally ill, but there are other reasons people continue working. For some, the money is just a byproduct.
I very much doubt that bezos, zuck, and musk share a common purpose. And whether you're clamoring to amass more wealth, recognition, or control, the top posts point stands; obsession over a singular purpose to the detriment of everyday life is a bad pattern. at the worst, it will cause emotional stress and mental disorders - at best, it will divorce someone from an understanding of shared human experience.
In theory, sure, some are just motivated because they are driven types after a vision of conquering something or other. But this is just a story. In reality, incentives change behavior. Money motivates people. They tell themselves other things, but money motivates people. There's a reason why bonuses and equity are enormous. They attract and amplify financial greed in a vicious cycle.
I used to be a free market/libertarian type, so I understand the whole "let people do whatever the heck they want with their money, as long as it's not violent" but I'm not now. It's surprising that you can just...stop...believing that. Money and its protection, the market place, property...anything that is not a banana in your hand, anything you didn't literally make yourself from rocks and sticks, requires cooperation and dealing with other people, and obeying the rules. Today's instruments of wealth aren't chickens and bread; currency, money, debt; these are social constructions and social agreements. Everything from the government to the police to the courtesy not to rob someone in plain daylight makes currency and money possible; the entire structure of society is a protection scheme for money and property. It's a "safe place" for transactions. It took a ton of work to get here, and a ton of people to keep it going! Without the protection of society, we'd be at chests full of gold surrounded by people with spears. Instead, the system we have now is a social contract--a complex one--that requires a huge amount of cooperation from a lot of not very rich people doing their jobs so rich people don't get eaten alive.
I think it's entirely fair that as participants of that system, we decide what the cap on the number of gold coins you can put in your chest is. Because you can't really defend that level of wealth on your own, you need all of us to do that. So we have a say. (I would put that number, personally, at less than $1 billion. I literally believe that there should be a personal wealth cap of $1 billion. Full stop. It's actually OK to believe that, and I promise you, no one is going to die.)
The rich have so thoroughly blinded and corrupted our thinking about property. They hate scrutiny. They hate people thinking seriously about what the structure of society is. They hate when people notice how insanely unfair it all is. They'll just say Marxism, or Communism, or Socialism. And you're supposed to shut up because you're a monster like Stalin or Mao, apparently. And then the lies. The denial. The koolaid. It's amazing to me that people just accept their roles in holding up the pyramid so willingly. But I guess society would have fallen apart long ago if it didn't select for people willing to hold it up, no matter what the dumbness of the day is.
China does absolutely scare the crap out of both it’s own people and people abroad, but economically it’s clear they’ve done a lot of things right over the last 40 years. The US could learn a thing or two from the communists when it comes to Capitalism.
I don’t think they’ve done things right; they were granted access to the global trade network and had wages at pennies on the dollar from other countries. It would be almost impossible not to grow under those circumstances. Let’s see if their decisions are as effective when wages are more on parity and they are competing as peer economic levels.
> I don’t think they’ve done things right; they were granted access to the global trade network and had wages at pennies on the dollar from other countries. It would be almost impossible not to grow under those circumstances.
I’m guessing you don’t know that this was also true of America in the 18th and 19th centuries and a large part of how it became so wealthy. Especially when they kept using slaves long after it was banned elsewhere.
Does anyone know a lot of personally who have personally done this?
One of my friends is travelling+working across western states, but he's the only person I know. Another friend tried going to Truckee (Tahoe) and eventually ended up back with his parents after a couple of months.
So far, I would guess this is happening but to a much lesser extent that what most think. It'll definitely be a trending in that direction though.
The problem is that supply at such places is quite limited (why would there be excess build up if there was no demand?), so it takes just small increase of demand to dry up supply and drive up prices.
I know few people who are unsuccessfully try to buy "non-metro" houses: either prices are to high, or deals closed in just couple hours of property being listed.
The people you know are likely constraining their search to only the kinds of places white collar urbanites find "nice".
There is no shortage of non-dilapidated double wides and 1500ft^2 houses in rural areas.
What there is a shortage of is recently constructed nicely optioned turnkey 1500-3500ft^2 houses. Basically if you're looking for the kind of house you find in an inner suburb with good schools in BFE it'll either be hard to find or expensive.
We just bought an RV and plan on living out of it and chasing powder across Colorado. Always been a dream, I figured now’s the time to do it. Curious how crowded the slopes will be though.
I can't speak to skiing, but many rock climbing areas have been feeling the strain from large crowds this year. It's a bit of a perfect storm, though: a combination of the reality of COVID and remote working plus the explosion of urban climbing gyms over the past few years exposing more and more people to the sport.
I've been using my work flexibility to avoid the popular crags and boulderfields on the weekends, but on the rare weekends I have been out, the popular crags at the New River Gorge have been absolutely packed.
Have you done this before. The I70 resorts, Summit County, Eagle County, and even the Roaring fork valley make it really difficult to park overnight. Even in summer where dispersed camping is available, it's not a no brainer affair. You might have luck out in the far west like Silverton, Telluride or Durango.
I live in Salt Lake city for the winter and work remotely so I can snowboard, but I was doing this prior to the pandemic. I also have a friend who lives in Austin, Texas normally, whos planning on moving to Colorado for the winter to snowboard as well. Those are just anecdotes, so who knows how prevalent this trend is.
I would love to do this, but lodging near slopes tends to be quite expensive - do you stay a bit further away, or have you had success sharing a house with a group of people doing the same thing?
Salt Lake city is quite affordable and im ~45 minutes to Brighton, Park city, Solitude, Snowbird, etc, excluding traffic. But pretend i didn't say that, traffic in the canyons already sucks, and more people will only make it worse.
Montreal? For Snowboarding? No offense, but snowboarding conditions in the western United States and western Canada is so much better than Montreal. For example Mont Treblant only gets 164 inches of snow on an average year[1], while Snowbird, Alta, Brighton and Solitude in Utah average 500 inches a year.
My aunt and uncle live near Binghamton, NY and their new neighbors are high income people (a Googler + Attorney) who plan to stay for a year or two. Fixing up the house and putting a pool in is still less than what their Manhattan apartment cost.
I changed jobs in August, and the new job is in a high rent city, where I'll pay $75/night for a 1br apartment (i.e. $2300/mo). We're all remote until at least January, so I decided to not rent and instead work while traveling -- you can live in hotels and AirBnBs quite comfortably in many places on a $75/night budget.
Yea I moved to Colorado from Texas two weeks ago. Was planning to move to Central America pre-covid, though - so my move wasn't covid-related or initiated though definitely impacted.
I would like to do this, but my big (and therefore slow moving) company didn't release any guidance on when we were coming back to the office, so I just renewed my lease for a full year.
That being said, when we're scheduled to go back (next June), I plan on trying to work completely remotely, and then attempt to travel in a much more extensive way.
Right here with you. I don’t even know when I’m supposed to go back into the office, but I definitely thought about taking out an AirBnB for a couple months in somewhere like Provo.
I took half work Airbnb’s throughout the pandemic. Worked great for me.
The only problem is finding good internet. All they’ll tell you is if that have wifi or not even consistently working wifi. I learned quickly You gotta research this part deeply yourself.
The WiFi thing is definitely an issue. I've found good results on AirBnB by filtering for business reviews. I figure that business travellers are going to hold a quality WiFi connection in higher regard than someone who's just travlling for fun.
So far I've seen friends move to Tahoe, Sacramento, San Diego and (temporarily) to Colorado from the Bay Area. Mostly when given the green light to go remote permanently but in at least one case they bought a house with no promise of long-term remote work.
This summer I bought a house in Tahoe (Carnelian Bay) and am now going through some mostly DIY renovations, with a little local contractor help here and there.
We also still have a place in San Francisco, but we're spending 70-80% of our time in Tahoe.
We spent the whole month of June here, and when we booked our place to stay, Placer county was not allowing short term rentals, so we booked for a full month to get over the threshold. While we were here, restaurants and other things opened back up.
About mid-June we started looking at houses. We made one offer for asking price, and got it accepted, right at the end of June. Overall I think we were fairly lucky. There were some stories of places going for substantially over asking price, which is rare for the area. But the largest impact was that housing supply is low, and houses moved really quickly.
It's typical for houses in this area to sit on the market for 3-6 months and sell for right around or slightly under asking price. This summer we saw a house go up on Zillow, on Wednesday, and we hemmed and hawed about it until Friday, then told our agent we wanted to tour it. The house was already off the market by that time. We saw plenty of places hit there market, and go into contract within 2-5 days.
We looked at several that we're real fixers. Like an 1100 square foot A-Frame that had a terrifying set of disclosures, probably needed at least a down to the studs renovation. All the electrical replaced, plumbing replaced, etc. Everything was DIY, not to code, etc. It sold in a handful of days for at least $500K, and certainly needed another $150K in work.
The place we did end up getting, we only got to see because our agent knew the seller and the selling agent. We got to tour it before it hit the multiple listing service and we had an offer in before it actually went on the market. It did hit the MLS for a few hours, but the buyer ended up wanting an easy sale, so accepted or asking price offer.
This kind of quick sale is typical for the Bay Area, but not at all for Tahoe.
I'm not keeping as close an eye on the market now, but overall asking prices are up, and people are still buying quickly. Also all the local contractors are very busy.
The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away. SFGate has an article about this exact issue here: https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Bay-Area-transplant...
The other anecdote is that up until a couple of weeks ago it was still quite busy in town. People working at the local grocery store were commenting that it's the busiest shoulder season they've ever seen. Typically this time of year, this place is nearly a ghost town.
Both me and my partner have been working remotely since the start of March and expect to continue at least well into next year. Perhaps permanently.
> The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away.
This has been happening for years, at least around South Lake Tahoe, due to rentals being put up on AirBnB. I've talked to numerous locals over the years while on ski trips and they've all said the same thing: if they're renting it's usually in Nevada and they drive to town every day. During big storms a lot of folks can't even make it to work at all.
This is basically happening all over the world in tourist spots. For example, there's a town called Dingle in Ireland which is super beautiful and beloved by (mostly American) tourists.
Anyone who doesn't already own a house there and works in any of the businesses is unable to rent, and they normally commute from one of the larger towns, 40-60 mins away (over pretty bad roads, up and down mountains). It's gotten so bad that businesses are considering putting on buses for their staff.
And if you want to hear a 45 minute rant, mention AirBnB to anyone who lives in Santa Cruz and doesn't own property :)
I don't know people who have done this but I know people that are impacted by people that have (e.g. small towns along the Hudson river being inundated by people fleeing NYC).
> How does signaling between clients work? Is this going to a server you control?
Yes, this is going to my own signaling server. No way around that. The signalling logic is very minimal though and no audio or video data touches the signalling server.
> And what about encryption, is that enforced by WebRTC per se?
In WebRTC, all communication between peers is encrypted once the connection has been established.
> Lastly, are you routing calls through TURN servers if NAT tunneling with STUN/ICE fails, or always?
I do have one TURN server based in SF in case STUN/ICE fails , yes. If I see a lot of usage in other geographies, we'll probably deploy more in different regions.
I do agree with you that Electron is an amazing platform and definitely has a lot of cool, solid use cases, but that doesn't mean that every single app we use _should_ be written in Electron. Recently, it feels like every app uses Electron. Even the ones that shouldn't.
Video Conferencing is one of those apps that in my opinion should definitely be native for two important reasons:
1. Performance: Video conferencing needs great performance. As a user, you want the best video possible at the best FPS possible. Mostly Electron/JS video conferncing apps are not bad (Facebook Messenger, Google Meet) because Chrommium just provides a JS wrapper for native APIs implemented in C++. But, if you want to do anything outside of that you're screwed. You will eventually run into the limitation of what Chromium gives you and this gives you an upper limit to what you can do to optimize this.
2. Memory Usage: Video conferencing is usually used alongside other apps (while sharing your screen for example). For that reason, you want to minimize memory usage as much as possible to make it easier for the user to have the app open while using as many apps as they can. Electron uses a lot of memory.
A third reason is that the human interaction guidelines provided by Apple for their UIs (and embedded into their APIs) is very, very good. It keeps the user experience consistent across your platform and makes your app easier to understand. And this is coming from someone who is not really an Apple fanboy. What you see with Electron apps is a steeper learning curve for having to learn how to use every new app you install.
The air industry seems like a good example of just the right level of regulation: There's tons of competition, different pricing tiers with their corresponding levels of quality, and a lot of dynamism combined with a good set of consumer base regulations (24 hour cancellation period, for example).