Comment by kace91
8 hours ago
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.
I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?
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That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.
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Seems like the perfect target for ESG.
Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.
If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.
I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.
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It seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more bloated to compensate. Or maybe it’s vice versa.
I wonder if there’s a computer science law about this. This could be my chance!
Is your name Wirth?
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Sorry to burst your bubble:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
Not exactly the same (it's about power rather than price). But close enough that when you said it, I thought, "oh! there is something like that." There's also more fundamental economics laws at play for supply and demand of a resource / efficiencies at scale / etc. Given our ever increasing demand of compute compared increasing supply (cheaper more powerful compute), I expect the supply will bottleneck before the demand does.
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That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term, modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
This is the way
The big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times under control at work.
The constant increases in website and electron app weight don't feel great either.
3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)
That sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or PrusaSlicer.
Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? I don’t have experience with CAD, so I’m not sure if it’s due to entrenched solutions or something else.
> Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound?
A lot of commercial CAD software exists for a very long time, and it is important for industrial customers that the backward compatibility is very well kept. So, the vendors don't want to do deep changes in the CAD kernels.
Additionally, such developments are expensive (because novel algorithms have to be invented). I guess CAD applications are not that incredibly profitable that as a vendor you want to invest a huge amount of money into the development of such a feature.
My understanding is that the problems being worked on do not yield to breaking down into parallelizable parts in an efficient/easily-calculated/unambiguous fashion.
> My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
Most affordable laptops have exactly that, 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage. Think about THAT!
I've never have a personal computer that came even close to powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15 minutes, is really annoying for instance.
>My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage
That's "non powerful" to you?
The opposite. I meant that if this is what consumer grade looks like nowadays, even with a fraction of current flagships we seem well covered - this was less than 800 bucks.
I’d love it if a clean build and test on the biggest project I work in would finish instantly instead of taking an hour.
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