This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If there's any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.
Morgan Freeman: ”They couldn’t”
I wish we could, but it’s tough to maintain optimism in the face of these sociopathic corporations’ seemingly ever-growing power
Open source developers are just like you and me. They'll get fed up with the bullshit and start developing things they need with the resources they have, just like they've always done.
It's always been there, why is there so many great Open Source Software out there ? Even Linus started the linux kernel because he could not afford Unix.
If there’s any silver lining to this, fuck JavaScript, fuck JavaScript wrappers and fuck all people picked JavaScript for the programming language of anything cross-platform.
It’s unbelievable I would need 6 gbs of RAM to say a simple “hello” to my friends. It used to take 300kb with IRC.
that has very little to do with JavaScript though 🤷♂️
Maybe not Javascript as a language, but the framework it requires to get applications written with it running, which is a lot. And in a roundabout way, it kinda has a little to do with the language itself, as the reason electron got so popular in the first place is because it catered to web developers who either couldn't be bothered or couldn't figure out proper desktop app devlopment, so they went with the easy short-term path. And Javascript kinda is an easy language to pick up and write simple.projects in - now, maintaining more complex applications with it is another story.,.
I’d love to see games do this because they are clearly not being optimized. Can’t wait to see that not happen.
Good thing, I’m happy with retro games and the occasional indie.
3/5 of the way through 100% Final Fantasy II. Figure by the time I catch up to modern final fantasy either hardware will be better again or people will optimize again. Either way I got time
Why would you do that when you can pull 50 JavaScript libraries and wrap it in Electron?
"It sounds like you want low-end devices to be turned into thin clients for cloud-based operating systems. Do I have that right?"
I wouldn't mind them all using HTML for UI if they'd learn to share the same one, and only load it when they need to show me something.
No, Razer, your "mouse driver" does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I'll only ever look at it once.
No, Razer, your “mouse driver” does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I’ll only ever look at it once.
It's funny; on Linux such devices work perfectly but many users complain that they "aren't supported" because there's no UI (that sits uselessly in your notification area and eats memory).
I guess the prices give us a new kind of issue ticket template; "new RAM is too expensive for me, please consider optimizing"
Less abstract, more concrete than "take less of a share please"
I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.
I wonder if we'll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.
Isn't the bloat basically being coded by the same ai that's eating up the ram to begin with?
I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on "virtual memory" on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.
I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.
Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.
Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven't really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.
But TL; DR; I'd be more inclined to blame "bloat" on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.
It's because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it. Yes, you have Flutter, KML or Qt but those are often hard to work with (looking at you, Flutter) or it's difficult to find devs that can work with them. You choose web (JS/wasm) and you have plenty of devs familiar with the tools and you can support all the platform easily. I'm using Tauri for my personal projects because it's fun and easy. I could use Qt but I don't want to work with C++ or Python, at least not in my spare time. If anyone can recommend me a nice framework supporting Linux and Android and using modern language I might switch. I haven't found one.
It’s because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it.
Just use the website then? There already is a suitable browser installed on every system. But no, must have apps. Makes it easier to stop people from having opinions about data collection and such. And the full browser stack needs to be fully reproduced each time. It gets really ridiculous when these apps sit idly in the notification area. Not to speak of security implications because electron apps and such usually don't get timely updates.
It's because there is no such thing as optimisation anymore. Websites are bloated to the gills with terrible animations and tracking scripts.
Programs. They are called programs . We are talking about desktop machines, not mobile devices
Tauri is the way to go ; so that every app doesn't each embed another web browser that makes for 90% of the file size.
Windows Latest discovered Discord and other Chromium and Electron-based applications with high RAM usage
Lol, this is news? Where have they been the last 15 years?
In other news, the sky is blue.
Limitation breeds innovation
Just another AI agent bro, that will fix th
Out of Memory or System Resources. Close some windows or programs and try again.
Yeah, the RAM shortage is definitely to blame on Electron. Won't someone please think of the poor AI companies who have to give an arm and a leg to get a single stick of RAM!
And here I am resurrecting Dell laptops from 2010 with 1.5gb DDR RAM and Debian
I remember when they changed the backronym for Emacs from "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" to Eighty. Megabytes. Or when a Netscape developer was proud to overtake that memory use.
What's the point of more RAM and faster processors if we just make applications that much less efficient?
"unused ram is wasted ram"
yeah yeah yeah, great. but all you motherfuckers did that and i'm fucking out of ram.
Native apps are so much better, on every platform.
The JavaScript must flow….
Just for reference: My Current cpu (5700x3d) has more cache than my windows 98 computer had ram. And win98 wasn’t that bad.
It is amazing how bloated software has gotten. Used to be, your computer's OS fit on a floppy diskette.
cough Windows START MENU cough cough
Meanwhile, on my Linux system I use about 20% of my ram idling around and it doesn't really budge. I've only got 16gb
I left windows just 2 months ago to use a MacBook for work.
In both computers I had 16gb of ram.
Windows usage was significantly higher in regard to ram usage.
I use today Linux is way more efficient, but after seeing similar efficiency with Mac, I’m changing my language to say Windows is extremely inefficient.
I have an M1 Macbook Air with 8 gb of ram, it performs great for everything I want to do with it – except for the fact that a ”few” active browser tabs are enough to bring the memory pressure to the pain point. Editing HD video? Reasonably snappy for an old, base spec laptop. Browsing a news site? Potato.
And the Apollo was launched with 4KB of ram.
4kb of RAM and an office packed with hundreds of engineers using slide rules, sure.
This is a trade off. Many of these apps work on osx and Linux because they are browser-based. If they go back to native apps you lose that portability.
There are plenty of cross platform frameworks and libraries that don't involve web tech
electron was a steaming pile of shit 8 years ago. still is. what's changed?
our acceptance of shitty corporate software.
