4 ms·

We don’t need to worry about memory efficiency until we stop getting gains via hardware improvements. For now developers can just slap a web app into some chrom

We don’t need to worry about memory efficiency until we stop getting gains via hardware improvements. For now developers can just slap a web app into some chromium based wrapper, make sure their code doesn’t have any n^2 in it and you’re good to go.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Tell that to the person on a fixed income who has to invest in an expensive new machine because their 2015 laptop (which still has a whopping 4 GB of memory and a CPU that would have been top-of-the-line twenty years ago) has become unusably slow. Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.
- arbitrage 4y ago
  Expecting your 8+ year old laptop to run as well as it did when it was new is completely unreasonable. That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Why? Are the types of things I want that laptop to do different today than they were 8 years ago? Sure, apps and websites are heavier, but I'd posit the things most people do on their computers haven't changed in a decade at least. > That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing. Yes, but again, why? As I see it, everyone has been conditioned to this lie that computers naturally slow down over time, because that's the way it has always been relative to the speed of current software. Originally, that was for a good reason—I'm glad programs now use full-color GUIs. But now? What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow, and we were no longer able to make computers faster than they are today? I suspect that a (slim) majority of computer users would actually benefit. Not hardcore gamers, not scientists, and certainly not software developers--some people really do need as much performance as they can get. But for the people who just need to message friends, write documents, check email, etc., the experience would be unchanged—except that their current computers would never slow down!
    - josephg 4y ago
      I absolutely agree. It seems like most software developers only start optimizing code once our software starts feeling slow on our top-of-the-line development machines. As a result, every time we get faster computers we write slower code. When the M1 macs and the new generation of AMD (and now intel) chips came out 18 months or so ago, I spent big. I figured I had about 2 years of everything feeling fast before everyone else upgraded, and all the software I use slowed down again. Years ago while I was at a startup, I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday. I wanted to write some code over the weekend. Well, I had a raspberry pi kicking around, so I fired up nodejs on that and took our project for a spin. But the program took ages to start up. I hadn't noticed the ~200ms startup time on my "real" computer, but on a r.pi that translated to over 1 second of startup time! So annoying! I ended up spending a whole morning profiling and debugging to figure out why it was so slow. Turns out we were pulling in some huge libraries and only using a fraction of the code inside. Trimming that down made the startup time ~5x faster. When I got into the office on monday, I pulled in my changes and felt the speed immediately. But I never would have fixed that if I hadn't spent that weekend developing on the raspberry pi. Since then I've been wondering there's a way to do this systematically. Have "slow CPU tuesdays" or something, where everyone in the office turns off most of our CPU cores out of solidarity with our users. But I'm not holding my breath.
  - ndriscoll 4y ago
    I've never expected my computer to run worse over time. There's no real mechanism for that to even happen; it works fine until it fails completely. Recently it's become less possible to run the same software for 10+ years because so many things are subscription only and have unnecessary networking, which makes it necessary to patch security flaws, and then you have to accept whatever downgrade the vendor forces on you. Older applications that you used to be able to just install run just as well as they did the day they came out on the hardware available at the time. The idea that computers "get worse" is entirely a phenomenon of the industry being full of incompetence. Even (or perhaps especially) programmers at FAANG companies are just not very good at their jobs. Check out the argument Casey Muratori got into with the Microsoft terminal maintainers about how slow the thing was. He got the standard claims about how "oh it's so complex and Unicode is difficult and he's underestimating how hard it is", so he wrote a renderer in a few hours that was orders of magnitude faster, used way less memory, and had better Unicode support.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      There is (or at least was) some truth in computers getting worse over time. File system fragmentation was a very significant problem when most people still used HDDs as their primary mass storage media. SSDs are far less affected by fragmentation because of much faster random access times, but HDDs and thus performance suffered. The Windows Registry is an arcane secret not even Microsoft fully comprehends at this point, and it can get very messy if a user installs and uninstalls lots of programs frequently. This is, of course, a problem with uninstallers not uninstalling cleanly and not a problem with Windows or the users. With so much crap moving to Chrome online-software-as-a-service outfits, users aren't (un)installing as many programs as frequently anymore, but an unkempt Windows installation can definitely slow down over time. Software in general also just gets more and more bloated as the moons pass. More bloated software means less efficient use of hardware, meaning less performance and more user grief over time.
- DrewRWx 4y ago
  It is depressing that I had this same argument in college a decade ago and people are still so cavalier about not optimizing their code.
  - josefx 4y ago
    To be fair, if you forced programmers to write efficient code you would just make everything more expensive and flood the market for unskilled labor with university graduates that can't find their own ass.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      If it really did come down to that, I would still rather people had to pay more for software and less for hardware, because software has a comparatively minuscule environmental impact.
    - MrYellowP 4y ago
      Actually no. If programmers actually learned how to properly program the machines, we'd not be in the mess we are in right now. Abstraction is the cancer that got us to where we are. Nobody has any actual clue what they're doing, everyone keeps writing code for the compiler hoping for the best and the rest of the world has to buy new machines because the programmers of the last decades sucked. That, btw, includes most of you people reading this. You're fucking welcome.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Because the person on a 2015 budget laptop isn’t the one paying their wage to optimise apps. Companies will invest in what pays the bills. And hyper optimising for customers with no money isn’t it.
- nine_k 4y ago
  No need to invest into an expensive new machine; a device from 5 years ago, with some more added RAM, would already be pretty adequate. Typing this from a Thinkpad T470 which was introduced in 2017, which is my main workhorse machine. A top-of-the-line laptop CPU from 20 years ago likely just doesn't support addressing more than 4GB or RAM. Forcing it to work on modern resource-heavy Web pages and media is like forcing a GPU from 20 years a go to run Skyrim. It's just not adequate.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    20 years ago is pushing it a bit. But 12 years ago, in 2008, I used a computer with 4GB of RAM in order to: • Read the news • Post on social media • Make video calls • Use instant messaging • Create and edit word documents/presentations/spreadsheets Today I use my computer for all of those same things... and yet they all require drastically more memory (and CPU, GPU, etc). What happened, and how does this benefit consumers? Yeah, modern web pages are resource-heavy—but to what end†? In some cases, the requirements really did change. For example, I can now watch videos in 4K; my 2008 computer could handle 1080p, but I imagine it wouldn't have handled 4K as well. However, I suspect many users of old machines would be perfectly happy to drop down to a lower resolution. --- † Something I find amusing in all this... people often say they're glad Flash applets died because they were slow. Nowadays, instead of Flash, we use browser apps written in Javascript. I wonder how "slow" those apps would run if you threw them on a computer from the Flash era. (This isn't to discount other problems with Flash, although I do think it has a worse reputation than it deserves.)
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      You can use computer with 4 GB of ram today for all things you've mentioned. It might swap here and there and not be as snappy, but generally it'll work. I think that Apple just recently stopped to sell 4 GB computers. And their phones from the last year sells with 4 GB RAM while being perfectly able to do all the things you've mentioned as well.
- NovaPenguin 4y ago
  This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. Microsoft and Apple are either too closely nit or drectly provide hardware to be prolonging the liftime of hardware they sell. In optimizing open OS's it can prolong the life time of hardware by a significant margin and it means that lower in come folks are not left in the dark. I don't just mean in well off countries, but if you are in the lower classes of the global south - there is no other option. These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. " http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox... This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
  - RulerOf 4y ago
    >This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. But isn't the primary application for these machines going to be the web browser, which is pulling in so much JS insanity that the web sites won't render well anyway?
    - NovaPenguin 4y ago
      Yeah, that is unfortunately a big part of it. Via NoScript I generally run the web very lean but there is only so much one can do.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  While I do agree with this, it seems worse than that - I've observed with a number of systems that used to run well 5 or so years ago that they simply don't any more, even with exactly the same OS and essentially the same software. I don't know to what degree that is because of actual hardware deterioration (or least, file system fragmentation), vs additional gumpf getting automatically installed and slowing it down (but every time I've tried to remove such gumpf, it hasn't really helped), or even because of user perception (but I don't buy that this explains cases of apps that now take over 30 seconds to start up, when they used to take 5 at most). I have one 8+ year old Windows 7 machine in particular that I use for music streaming, and basically can't be used for 30 seconds at least after logging in - but then seems mostly fine after that.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    "Windows Rot" is definitely a thing but it can be cleared out by doing a clean reinstall of the OS. While this can be time consuming, you'd likely be doing it anyway if you got a new machine.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      No idea where I'd even find an installer for Windows 7! It does make me wonder whether upgrading it would actually help. But for now it works well enough I'd rather not risk it (the other thing I use it for is some old software that requires a FAT partition for its licensing to work!).
      - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        I have a retail copy of Windows 7 on a DVD! But yeah, if you didn't buy it back in the day I'm not sure where you'd get it now. Windows 10 (and I assume 11) has an option to "refresh" Windows in Settings.
retrac 4y ago
I have a netbook from around 2010. It has 2 GB of RAM and a single core Atom processor. It boots to a full Linux GUI desktop in a minute or so. It can handle CAD software, my editor, and my usual toolchain, if a bit slowly. It even handles HD video and the battery still holds a 6 hr charge. But it doesn't really have enough RAM to run a modern web browser. A few tabs and we are swapping. That's unusably slow. A processor that's 5 or 20x slower is tolerable often. Working set not fitting in RAM is thrashing with a 1000x slowdown. And so this otherwise perfectly useful computer is garbage. Not enough RAM ends a machine's useful life before anything else does these days, in my experience.
- anthk 4y ago
  Enable ZRAM. I run luakit with just 1GB of RAM and a compressed GB of ZRAM. Atom n270 netbook, go figure. Also, run this to get a system wide adblocker: git clone https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts cd hosts sed -n '/Start Steven/,$p' < hosts > hosts.append sudo cat hosts.append >> /etc/hosts EDIT: wrong URL
- teo_zero 4y ago
  Same here, except I fine-tuned the kernel to boot under 10 s. Of course it can't run all today's bloated software, but we're talking about the operating system, here, not the applications.
est31 4y ago
That's fine for those desktop users which don't care about spinning fans, but many users are on laptops, and care about battery life. An inefficiently coded app might keep the CPU in high levels even if it's absolutely not required for the app because it is just a chat app or such.
MrYellowP 4y ago
You're part of the reason why we're stuck in the mess most people, actual idiots, don't even acknowledge as a mess.
- ShaneMcGowan 4y ago
  True but the products I build in this inefficient way solve other messes so you win some you lose some
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Prices per GB of RAM are starting to plateau, or at least not fall as quickly: https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/ https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/ DRAM density and cost isn't improving like it used to. Also memory efficiency is about more than just total DRAM usage; bus speeds haven't kept pace with CPU speeds for a long time now. The more of the program we keep close to the CPU -- in cache -- the happier we are.
colinsane 4y ago
> For now developers can just slap a web app into some chromium based wrapper […] making 10% of users unreachable in order to more easily reach the other 90%. yeah, it’s a fine business strategy. though i do wish devs would be more amenable to the 10% of users who end up doing “weird” things with their app as a result. a stupid number of chat companies will release some Electron app that’s literally unusable on old hardware, and then freak out when people write 3rd party clients for it because it’s the only real option you left them.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

Tell that to the person on a fixed income who has to invest in an expensive new machine because their 2015 laptop (which still has a whopping 4 GB of memory and a CPU that would have been top-of-the-line twenty years ago) has become unusably slow. Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.

arbitrage 4y ago
Expecting your 8+ year old laptop to run as well as it did when it was new is completely unreasonable. That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Why? Are the types of things I want that laptop to do different today than they were 8 years ago? Sure, apps and websites are heavier, but I'd posit the things most people do on their computers haven't changed in a decade at least. > That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing. Yes, but again, why? As I see it, everyone has been conditioned to this lie that computers naturally slow down over time, because that's the way it has always been relative to the speed of current software. Originally, that was for a good reason—I'm glad programs now use full-color GUIs. But now? What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow, and we were no longer able to make computers faster than they are today? I suspect that a (slim) majority of computer users would actually benefit. Not hardcore gamers, not scientists, and certainly not software developers--some people really do need as much performance as they can get. But for the people who just need to message friends, write documents, check email, etc., the experience would be unchanged—except that their current computers would never slow down!
  - josephg 4y ago
    I absolutely agree. It seems like most software developers only start optimizing code once our software starts feeling slow on our top-of-the-line development machines. As a result, every time we get faster computers we write slower code. When the M1 macs and the new generation of AMD (and now intel) chips came out 18 months or so ago, I spent big. I figured I had about 2 years of everything feeling fast before everyone else upgraded, and all the software I use slowed down again. Years ago while I was at a startup, I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday. I wanted to write some code over the weekend. Well, I had a raspberry pi kicking around, so I fired up nodejs on that and took our project for a spin. But the program took ages to start up. I hadn't noticed the ~200ms startup time on my "real" computer, but on a r.pi that translated to over 1 second of startup time! So annoying! I ended up spending a whole morning profiling and debugging to figure out why it was so slow. Turns out we were pulling in some huge libraries and only using a fraction of the code inside. Trimming that down made the startup time ~5x faster. When I got into the office on monday, I pulled in my changes and felt the speed immediately. But I never would have fixed that if I hadn't spent that weekend developing on the raspberry pi. Since then I've been wondering there's a way to do this systematically. Have "slow CPU tuesdays" or something, where everyone in the office turns off most of our CPU cores out of solidarity with our users. But I'm not holding my breath.
- ndriscoll 4y ago
  I've never expected my computer to run worse over time. There's no real mechanism for that to even happen; it works fine until it fails completely. Recently it's become less possible to run the same software for 10+ years because so many things are subscription only and have unnecessary networking, which makes it necessary to patch security flaws, and then you have to accept whatever downgrade the vendor forces on you. Older applications that you used to be able to just install run just as well as they did the day they came out on the hardware available at the time. The idea that computers "get worse" is entirely a phenomenon of the industry being full of incompetence. Even (or perhaps especially) programmers at FAANG companies are just not very good at their jobs. Check out the argument Casey Muratori got into with the Microsoft terminal maintainers about how slow the thing was. He got the standard claims about how "oh it's so complex and Unicode is difficult and he's underestimating how hard it is", so he wrote a renderer in a few hours that was orders of magnitude faster, used way less memory, and had better Unicode support.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    There is (or at least was) some truth in computers getting worse over time. File system fragmentation was a very significant problem when most people still used HDDs as their primary mass storage media. SSDs are far less affected by fragmentation because of much faster random access times, but HDDs and thus performance suffered. The Windows Registry is an arcane secret not even Microsoft fully comprehends at this point, and it can get very messy if a user installs and uninstalls lots of programs frequently. This is, of course, a problem with uninstallers not uninstalling cleanly and not a problem with Windows or the users. With so much crap moving to Chrome online-software-as-a-service outfits, users aren't (un)installing as many programs as frequently anymore, but an unkempt Windows installation can definitely slow down over time. Software in general also just gets more and more bloated as the moons pass. More bloated software means less efficient use of hardware, meaning less performance and more user grief over time.
DrewRWx 4y ago
It is depressing that I had this same argument in college a decade ago and people are still so cavalier about not optimizing their code.
- josefx 4y ago
  To be fair, if you forced programmers to write efficient code you would just make everything more expensive and flood the market for unskilled labor with university graduates that can't find their own ass.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    If it really did come down to that, I would still rather people had to pay more for software and less for hardware, because software has a comparatively minuscule environmental impact.
  - MrYellowP 4y ago
    Actually no. If programmers actually learned how to properly program the machines, we'd not be in the mess we are in right now. Abstraction is the cancer that got us to where we are. Nobody has any actual clue what they're doing, everyone keeps writing code for the compiler hoping for the best and the rest of the world has to buy new machines because the programmers of the last decades sucked. That, btw, includes most of you people reading this. You're fucking welcome.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Because the person on a 2015 budget laptop isn’t the one paying their wage to optimise apps. Companies will invest in what pays the bills. And hyper optimising for customers with no money isn’t it.
nine_k 4y ago
No need to invest into an expensive new machine; a device from 5 years ago, with some more added RAM, would already be pretty adequate. Typing this from a Thinkpad T470 which was introduced in 2017, which is my main workhorse machine. A top-of-the-line laptop CPU from 20 years ago likely just doesn't support addressing more than 4GB or RAM. Forcing it to work on modern resource-heavy Web pages and media is like forcing a GPU from 20 years a go to run Skyrim. It's just not adequate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  20 years ago is pushing it a bit. But 12 years ago, in 2008, I used a computer with 4GB of RAM in order to: • Read the news • Post on social media • Make video calls • Use instant messaging • Create and edit word documents/presentations/spreadsheets Today I use my computer for all of those same things... and yet they all require drastically more memory (and CPU, GPU, etc). What happened, and how does this benefit consumers? Yeah, modern web pages are resource-heavy—but to what end†? In some cases, the requirements really did change. For example, I can now watch videos in 4K; my 2008 computer could handle 1080p, but I imagine it wouldn't have handled 4K as well. However, I suspect many users of old machines would be perfectly happy to drop down to a lower resolution. --- † Something I find amusing in all this... people often say they're glad Flash applets died because they were slow. Nowadays, instead of Flash, we use browser apps written in Javascript. I wonder how "slow" those apps would run if you threw them on a computer from the Flash era. (This isn't to discount other problems with Flash, although I do think it has a worse reputation than it deserves.)
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    You can use computer with 4 GB of ram today for all things you've mentioned. It might swap here and there and not be as snappy, but generally it'll work. I think that Apple just recently stopped to sell 4 GB computers. And their phones from the last year sells with 4 GB RAM while being perfectly able to do all the things you've mentioned as well.
NovaPenguin 4y ago
This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. Microsoft and Apple are either too closely nit or drectly provide hardware to be prolonging the liftime of hardware they sell. In optimizing open OS's it can prolong the life time of hardware by a significant margin and it means that lower in come folks are not left in the dark. I don't just mean in well off countries, but if you are in the lower classes of the global south - there is no other option. These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. " http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox... This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
- RulerOf 4y ago
  >This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. But isn't the primary application for these machines going to be the web browser, which is pulling in so much JS insanity that the web sites won't render well anyway?
  - NovaPenguin 4y ago
    Yeah, that is unfortunately a big part of it. Via NoScript I generally run the web very lean but there is only so much one can do.
wizofaus 4y ago
While I do agree with this, it seems worse than that - I've observed with a number of systems that used to run well 5 or so years ago that they simply don't any more, even with exactly the same OS and essentially the same software. I don't know to what degree that is because of actual hardware deterioration (or least, file system fragmentation), vs additional gumpf getting automatically installed and slowing it down (but every time I've tried to remove such gumpf, it hasn't really helped), or even because of user perception (but I don't buy that this explains cases of apps that now take over 30 seconds to start up, when they used to take 5 at most). I have one 8+ year old Windows 7 machine in particular that I use for music streaming, and basically can't be used for 30 seconds at least after logging in - but then seems mostly fine after that.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  "Windows Rot" is definitely a thing but it can be cleared out by doing a clean reinstall of the OS. While this can be time consuming, you'd likely be doing it anyway if you got a new machine.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    No idea where I'd even find an installer for Windows 7! It does make me wonder whether upgrading it would actually help. But for now it works well enough I'd rather not risk it (the other thing I use it for is some old software that requires a FAT partition for its licensing to work!).
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      I have a retail copy of Windows 7 on a DVD! But yeah, if you didn't buy it back in the day I'm not sure where you'd get it now. Windows 10 (and I assume 11) has an option to "refresh" Windows in Settings.

retrac 4y ago

I have a netbook from around 2010. It has 2 GB of RAM and a single core Atom processor. It boots to a full Linux GUI desktop in a minute or so. It can handle CAD software, my editor, and my usual toolchain, if a bit slowly. It even handles HD video and the battery still holds a 6 hr charge. But it doesn't really have enough RAM to run a modern web browser. A few tabs and we are swapping. That's unusably slow. A processor that's 5 or 20x slower is tolerable often. Working set not fitting in RAM is thrashing with a 1000x slowdown. And so this otherwise perfectly useful computer is garbage. Not enough RAM ends a machine's useful life before anything else does these days, in my experience.

anthk 4y ago
Enable ZRAM. I run luakit with just 1GB of RAM and a compressed GB of ZRAM. Atom n270 netbook, go figure. Also, run this to get a system wide adblocker: git clone https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts cd hosts sed -n '/Start Steven/,$p' < hosts > hosts.append sudo cat hosts.append >> /etc/hosts EDIT: wrong URL
teo_zero 4y ago
Same here, except I fine-tuned the kernel to boot under 10 s. Of course it can't run all today's bloated software, but we're talking about the operating system, here, not the applications.

est31 4y ago

That's fine for those desktop users which don't care about spinning fans, but many users are on laptops, and care about battery life. An inefficiently coded app might keep the CPU in high levels even if it's absolutely not required for the app because it is just a chat app or such.

MrYellowP 4y ago

You're part of the reason why we're stuck in the mess most people, actual idiots, don't even acknowledge as a mess.

ShaneMcGowan 4y ago
True but the products I build in this inefficient way solve other messes so you win some you lose some

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Prices per GB of RAM are starting to plateau, or at least not fall as quickly: https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/ https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/ DRAM density and cost isn't improving like it used to. Also memory efficiency is about more than just total DRAM usage; bus speeds haven't kept pace with CPU speeds for a long time now. The more of the program we keep close to the CPU -- in cache -- the happier we are.

colinsane 4y ago

> For now developers can just slap a web app into some chromium based wrapper […] making 10% of users unreachable in order to more easily reach the other 90%. yeah, it’s a fine business strategy. though i do wish devs would be more amenable to the 10% of users who end up doing “weird” things with their app as a result. a stupid number of chat companies will release some Electron app that’s literally unusable on old hardware, and then freak out when people write 3rd party clients for it because it’s the only real option you left them.