4 ms·

I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. You would also need to ask how many people here actually use Ras

by vkaku 3y ago

I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. You would also need to ask how many people here actually use Raspberry Pis as their daily driver to claim the power benefits that they should be realizing today. I think that viewing this as a pure power consumption exercise is very reductive at best. Then, in that spirit, you should also be going behind the people running the H100s today and asking why they aren't running their model training on a RPi 4 yet.

prmoustache 3y ago
> there is a lot of old software that is still updated and not bloated. The only things that really need more resources are video capabilities and web technos. For example there are window managers that were considered bloat 20-25y ago and that are considered lightweight. Icewm takes something like 16MB on a 64bit distro nowadays. It would have been considered bloat back in the days but is very far than what you are using with a default kde plasma or gnome desktop running idle without apps. There are still cli or gui lightweight music players, image viewers, word processors, spreadsheets tools, file managers, etc. Until you start a web browser and as long as you are using a lightweight DE you can run many modern linux distros with only 256MB of ram.
myk9001 3y ago
> I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. While software bloat is undeniably a problem, in my experience it's not that clear-cut. E.g., a messanger app built on Elector is a pure bloat. At least, from technical perspective -- maybe Electron brings in business value that outweighs the technical downsides. But an IDE from around 2005 is nothing more than a dumb notepad in comparison to a modern JetBrains IDE. Even though I often find their IDEs extremely frustrating in terms of consumed computational resources, I'd rather upgrade my hardware than go back to something less "smart". After all, hardware is just a means to an end of solving whatever task at hand.
- vkaku 3y ago
  An IDE from even 2001 isn't as dumb as you would think at all. In fact, I was one of those early adopters of Websphere Application Studio (Eclipse) and I thought it was bloated. 20 years later, it's the same argument, same stack (Java). Cut to 20 years from now, you may remember JetBrains as the best thing you had worked on - and that some other JavaScript IDE in 2043, which requires a bare minimum 128GB of RAM to run - will be the means to that end for those developers. See you in 20 years. :-)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Eclipse from 2005 was already great, and better than most languages support out there. As was Netbeans in 2005, or Delphi, VB, Visual Studio,.... JetBrains gets too much praise.
  - sn_master 3y ago
    Visual Studio 6 (1998) is an unappreciated piece of art for what it was back in the day and even by today's standards.
    - myk9001 3y ago
      I'd respectfully disagree on VS 6. It was OK for its time, but hardly a piece of art, in my experience. Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment. VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now. Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all. Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective. And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly. But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.

by vkaku 3y ago

prmoustache 3y ago

> there is a lot of old software that is still updated and not bloated. The only things that really need more resources are video capabilities and web technos. For example there are window managers that were considered bloat 20-25y ago and that are considered lightweight. Icewm takes something like 16MB on a 64bit distro nowadays. It would have been considered bloat back in the days but is very far than what you are using with a default kde plasma or gnome desktop running idle without apps. There are still cli or gui lightweight music players, image viewers, word processors, spreadsheets tools, file managers, etc. Until you start a web browser and as long as you are using a lightweight DE you can run many modern linux distros with only 256MB of ram.

myk9001 3y ago

> I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. While software bloat is undeniably a problem, in my experience it's not that clear-cut. E.g., a messanger app built on Elector is a pure bloat. At least, from technical perspective -- maybe Electron brings in business value that outweighs the technical downsides. But an IDE from around 2005 is nothing more than a dumb notepad in comparison to a modern JetBrains IDE. Even though I often find their IDEs extremely frustrating in terms of consumed computational resources, I'd rather upgrade my hardware than go back to something less "smart". After all, hardware is just a means to an end of solving whatever task at hand.

vkaku 3y ago
An IDE from even 2001 isn't as dumb as you would think at all. In fact, I was one of those early adopters of Websphere Application Studio (Eclipse) and I thought it was bloated. 20 years later, it's the same argument, same stack (Java). Cut to 20 years from now, you may remember JetBrains as the best thing you had worked on - and that some other JavaScript IDE in 2043, which requires a bare minimum 128GB of RAM to run - will be the means to that end for those developers. See you in 20 years. :-)
pjmlp 3y ago
Eclipse from 2005 was already great, and better than most languages support out there. As was Netbeans in 2005, or Delphi, VB, Visual Studio,.... JetBrains gets too much praise.
- sn_master 3y ago
  Visual Studio 6 (1998) is an unappreciated piece of art for what it was back in the day and even by today's standards.
  - myk9001 3y ago
    I'd respectfully disagree on VS 6. It was OK for its time, but hardly a piece of art, in my experience. Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment. VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now. Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all. Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective. And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly. But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.