Comment by zozbot234
10 hours ago
> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
10 hours ago
> 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?
We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.
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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.
I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
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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.
> 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.
If the device is a laptop, also the thermal design (or for laptops that are in use: whether there is dust in the ventilation channels (in other words: clean the fans)) is very important for the computer to actually achieve the performance that the hardware can principally deliver.
Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an application does use it people whine about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow" it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but is there an actual problem? Crickets.
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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?
Dangit! Always the bridesmaid, never the bride
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.
Ah, so you think there’s a point where actually bloat slows because we eventually can’t keep up with demand for compute?
I guess this might be happening with LLMs already
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