5 ms·

>Why “of all things”? Pardon my French, but: Because it's a fucking website, not a nonlinear video editor or a large language model. It's supposed run on low

by nvy 3y ago

>Why “of all things”? Pardon my French, but: Because it's a fucking website, not a nonlinear video editor or a large language model. It's supposed run on low-end android devices, my aunt's 3 year old iPad, and the old thinkpad I've got in the basement, not just on my M2 machine. What on earth does a web developer need all that memory for, beside the comically bloated Chrome browser and all the stupid Electron apps people shit out these days? You end up needing 32 GB or more because without it you can't run Chrome, Slack, and VS Code on the same machine, because Electron is hot garbage.

eyelidlessness 3y ago
> Because it's a fucking website You seem to be aware that web developers need to use, pardon my French in kind, fucking tools to develop a fucking website. The tools—in many cases the very same tools used by non-web developers—don’t magically become lighter weight just because the end product ought to be. Web developers don’t need those tools any less than non-web developers. Chrome (or equivalent) and Slack (or equivalent) and basically any IDE are just as prevalent in many non-web development workflows, and account for just as much demand for resources for those developers. In what other profession would it be a “sad commentary” that the resources needed to do one’s job differ from the resources needed by the product of that job?
- nvy 3y ago
  What I'm getting at is: unlike running LLMs, 3D modeling, rendering 8K video, or similar tasks, there's nothing inherent to working with html and javascript that demands such huge amounts of memory. Editing a few hundred (even a few thousand) lines of code is not a memory-intensive task. The only reason we are in this current sorry state of affairs is because They(tm) have decided that the proper way to deploy apps is to ship it atop an entire Chrome instance, itself being a notorious resource hog. The web sucks. Desktop apps are now just web apps, and they also suck. It didn't have to be this way.

by nvy 3y ago

eyelidlessness 3y ago

> Because it's a fucking website You seem to be aware that web developers need to use, pardon my French in kind, fucking tools to develop a fucking website. The tools—in many cases the very same tools used by non-web developers—don’t magically become lighter weight just because the end product ought to be. Web developers don’t need those tools any less than non-web developers. Chrome (or equivalent) and Slack (or equivalent) and basically any IDE are just as prevalent in many non-web development workflows, and account for just as much demand for resources for those developers. In what other profession would it be a “sad commentary” that the resources needed to do one’s job differ from the resources needed by the product of that job?

nvy 3y ago
What I'm getting at is: unlike running LLMs, 3D modeling, rendering 8K video, or similar tasks, there's nothing inherent to working with html and javascript that demands such huge amounts of memory. Editing a few hundred (even a few thousand) lines of code is not a memory-intensive task. The only reason we are in this current sorry state of affairs is because They(tm) have decided that the proper way to deploy apps is to ship it atop an entire Chrome instance, itself being a notorious resource hog. The web sucks. Desktop apps are now just web apps, and they also suck. It didn't have to be this way.