4 ms·

In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that s

In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Our docker file for running some ML code at work is 6GiB. That does not include the model files. What the fuck, Nvidia? Am I downloading thousands of permutations of generated code for things I’ll never use?
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  *Docker image, not Dockerfile
  - sgarland 3y ago
    Spoiler, they’re inlining weights with a heredoc.
- stackskipton 3y ago
  If you look at the build, yea, it includes everything and kitchen sink. No one cares to parse it down because in most cases, the big GPU servers running this have plenty of hard disk space and since it's a long running container image in most cases, the pull time isn't considered big enough problem for most people to fix. Prime example of "Hardware is cheap and inefficiencies be damned"
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    If only it was viable to analyze which files get used. Then cut down the image to just what’s needed.
    - dpkirchner 3y ago
      I can show you some of the big, unnecessary files: all the .a files in /usr/local/cuda* (unless you're building software inside your container). That's, IIRC, at least a gig.
    - nurple 3y ago
      Look at the stargazing snapshotter if you have access to deploy it. I pulls small blobs of the image as they're used by the host, and it tries to use heuristics to put startup data in the initial blob. https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter
- DrFalkyn 3y ago
  If using C++, clang and boost are going to take up a substantial portion of that 6 GB
- PeterisP 3y ago
  As far as I understand, one of things that it includes actually literally is the permutations of code adapted for every different model of supported nVidia hardware; that is a major (and desirable!) part of the driver+CUDA deployment.
rumad 3y ago
I completely agree. I believe it is still not too late to set a destination for the future. But, because of the hardware breakthroughs which are good, no one thinks about software efficiency anymore. They will add another GB/TB to the specs to avoid any bottlenecks.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dale_glass 3y ago
> Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? Functionality and graphics. For instance 'dict.words' alone on Linux is 4.8MB. Arial Unicode is a 20MB-ish font. The icon for an application I work on is 400K. The Google Crashpad handler for handling crashes is somewhere around several MB. A 4K true color display is 138 times larger than 640x480x16 colors.
- MonkeyClub 3y ago
  >> Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? > Functionality and graphics. And massive amounts of telemetry. But now functionality is moving to the cloud, we'll just be stuck with gigabytes for graphics and telemetry.
- berkes 3y ago
  Let's ask the question differently: what problems were solved? With your examples, it could be: - introduce global spell checker. - have emoji? - fix blurry icons? - being able to search through crash logs? - not having to switch between windows. Do we need GBs instead of MBs for that? Why? Was that problem not fixed already? Could we not fix it in a way that didn't demand magnitudes more resources? I'm asking, because I highly doubt that there's a technical reason that requires an improved piece of software or a solved problem,to require magnitudes more resources. Sure, slack is far superior in UX to IRC. But could we really not get that UX without bloatware hogging my CPU, taking hundreds of MBs installation size and often biting off significant chunks of my memory? Is that truly, technically impossible?
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    > Let's ask the question differently: what problems were solved? A few more: * Seamless internationalization. If you're a native English speaker you probably never experienced the "fun" of dealing with French and Russian in the same text document. Pre-Unicode supported English + one other language, if that other language wasn't too weird. * Lots of tiny life quality improvements. Eg, not seeing windows repaint costs a LOT of memory. Every window is present in RAM even if not being looked at so that when you switch to it you never see it paint. * Stability. Windows 9x tried to be frugal by keeping a copy of everything in system32. That was called "DLL hell". So the current standard is that the app just packages every framework, so you may have a half dozen copies of Qt easily. > Do we need GBs instead of MBs for that? Why? Well, let me look at my AppImage: 3.8 GB total. 2.3 GB of dependencies. 2.1 GB is libnode, 128 MB is Qt Webengine. 1.4 GB application. 126 MB of JavaScript and UI images. The rest is mostly code.
arprocter 3y ago
A while ago someone dropped off an old PowerBook Duo for disposal - I had to fire up Word 5.1 just for nostalgia reasons I saw it described once that software is like a gas - it expanded to take up the space we now have You see it with live distros too. They used to be 700MB to fit on a CD-R, but now it's getting rare to find one that'll fit on a 2GB USB; although yay for 'minimal' gaining ground
ale42 3y ago
A few years ago, as a 1st April joke, I set up a DOS/Windows 3.11 disk image on our PXE network boot server. It included a functional Word 6 for Windows, and the gzipped image was fitting in 12 MB... PCs back then could still boot without UEFI (and run Windows 3.11 if it was properly configured). It booted almost instantly. Same for opening Word. Having used that version of Word when it was the latest one, I can say the current ones have quite some added functionality (lots of very tiny things, and a few bigger ones), but I'm totally sure the same could be done with 10x less memory usage if MS would care about it. But there's no incentive to do it. Computers are faster and have lots of memory, and we don't depend on floppy disks any more. It would just cost them more money. Not saying that this is a good thing (I think the opposite, especially that I start thinking that software bloat might have a non-neglectable environmental impact), but as long as nobody complains strong enough (or as long as the EU doesn't come out with an anti-softare-bloat law... seems just a dream but who knows), that wont change. And I can clearly remember I had the same bloat-software feeling when I tried Office 2000 or XP, compared to Office 97, so there's nothing so new here. As a final note, I've recently seen the source code of MS Word for Windows 1.0 on a GitHub repo (MS released it, see original release on Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...). It was pure C, with even very large parts of code written in assembly! But the code is really ugly... totally incomparable to current C or C++ coding standards, patterns and language capabilities.
jesse__ 3y ago
> We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more. Hah! Good one. It's unfortunate, but true.
mihaaly 3y ago
Basically what we had in Word 6 is what I use today in the newest Words. It only takes longer to use while finding what I want among the bloated set of other things added.
masfuerte 3y ago
The exe for Word 2 was about 1MB. I remember it because it was by far the largest exe I had ever seen. It didn't have the red underlines for spell-checking but it did have all the other word-processing features I use now.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

Our docker file for running some ML code at work is 6GiB. That does not include the model files. What the fuck, Nvidia? Am I downloading thousands of permutations of generated code for things I’ll never use?

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
*Docker image, not Dockerfile
- sgarland 3y ago
  Spoiler, they’re inlining weights with a heredoc.
stackskipton 3y ago
If you look at the build, yea, it includes everything and kitchen sink. No one cares to parse it down because in most cases, the big GPU servers running this have plenty of hard disk space and since it's a long running container image in most cases, the pull time isn't considered big enough problem for most people to fix. Prime example of "Hardware is cheap and inefficiencies be damned"
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  If only it was viable to analyze which files get used. Then cut down the image to just what’s needed.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    I can show you some of the big, unnecessary files: all the .a files in /usr/local/cuda* (unless you're building software inside your container). That's, IIRC, at least a gig.
  - nurple 3y ago
    Look at the stargazing snapshotter if you have access to deploy it. I pulls small blobs of the image as they're used by the host, and it tries to use heuristics to put startup data in the initial blob. https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter
DrFalkyn 3y ago
If using C++, clang and boost are going to take up a substantial portion of that 6 GB
PeterisP 3y ago
As far as I understand, one of things that it includes actually literally is the permutations of code adapted for every different model of supported nVidia hardware; that is a major (and desirable!) part of the driver+CUDA deployment.

rumad 3y ago

I completely agree. I believe it is still not too late to set a destination for the future. But, because of the hardware breakthroughs which are good, no one thinks about software efficiency anymore. They will add another GB/TB to the specs to avoid any bottlenecks.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dale_glass 3y ago

> Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? Functionality and graphics. For instance 'dict.words' alone on Linux is 4.8MB. Arial Unicode is a 20MB-ish font. The icon for an application I work on is 400K. The Google Crashpad handler for handling crashes is somewhere around several MB. A 4K true color display is 138 times larger than 640x480x16 colors.

MonkeyClub 3y ago
>> Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? > Functionality and graphics. And massive amounts of telemetry. But now functionality is moving to the cloud, we'll just be stuck with gigabytes for graphics and telemetry.
berkes 3y ago
Let's ask the question differently: what problems were solved? With your examples, it could be: - introduce global spell checker. - have emoji? - fix blurry icons? - being able to search through crash logs? - not having to switch between windows. Do we need GBs instead of MBs for that? Why? Was that problem not fixed already? Could we not fix it in a way that didn't demand magnitudes more resources? I'm asking, because I highly doubt that there's a technical reason that requires an improved piece of software or a solved problem,to require magnitudes more resources. Sure, slack is far superior in UX to IRC. But could we really not get that UX without bloatware hogging my CPU, taking hundreds of MBs installation size and often biting off significant chunks of my memory? Is that truly, technically impossible?
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > Let's ask the question differently: what problems were solved? A few more: * Seamless internationalization. If you're a native English speaker you probably never experienced the "fun" of dealing with French and Russian in the same text document. Pre-Unicode supported English + one other language, if that other language wasn't too weird. * Lots of tiny life quality improvements. Eg, not seeing windows repaint costs a LOT of memory. Every window is present in RAM even if not being looked at so that when you switch to it you never see it paint. * Stability. Windows 9x tried to be frugal by keeping a copy of everything in system32. That was called "DLL hell". So the current standard is that the app just packages every framework, so you may have a half dozen copies of Qt easily. > Do we need GBs instead of MBs for that? Why? Well, let me look at my AppImage: 3.8 GB total. 2.3 GB of dependencies. 2.1 GB is libnode, 128 MB is Qt Webengine. 1.4 GB application. 126 MB of JavaScript and UI images. The rest is mostly code.

arprocter 3y ago

A while ago someone dropped off an old PowerBook Duo for disposal - I had to fire up Word 5.1 just for nostalgia reasons I saw it described once that software is like a gas - it expanded to take up the space we now have You see it with live distros too. They used to be 700MB to fit on a CD-R, but now it's getting rare to find one that'll fit on a 2GB USB; although yay for 'minimal' gaining ground

ale42 3y ago

A few years ago, as a 1st April joke, I set up a DOS/Windows 3.11 disk image on our PXE network boot server. It included a functional Word 6 for Windows, and the gzipped image was fitting in 12 MB... PCs back then could still boot without UEFI (and run Windows 3.11 if it was properly configured). It booted almost instantly. Same for opening Word. Having used that version of Word when it was the latest one, I can say the current ones have quite some added functionality (lots of very tiny things, and a few bigger ones), but I'm totally sure the same could be done with 10x less memory usage if MS would care about it. But there's no incentive to do it. Computers are faster and have lots of memory, and we don't depend on floppy disks any more. It would just cost them more money. Not saying that this is a good thing (I think the opposite, especially that I start thinking that software bloat might have a non-neglectable environmental impact), but as long as nobody complains strong enough (or as long as the EU doesn't come out with an anti-softare-bloat law... seems just a dream but who knows), that wont change. And I can clearly remember I had the same bloat-software feeling when I tried Office 2000 or XP, compared to Office 97, so there's nothing so new here. As a final note, I've recently seen the source code of MS Word for Windows 1.0 on a GitHub repo (MS released it, see original release on Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...). It was pure C, with even very large parts of code written in assembly! But the code is really ugly... totally incomparable to current C or C++ coding standards, patterns and language capabilities.

jesse__ 3y ago

> We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more. Hah! Good one. It's unfortunate, but true.

mihaaly 3y ago

Basically what we had in Word 6 is what I use today in the newest Words. It only takes longer to use while finding what I want among the bloated set of other things added.

masfuerte 3y ago

The exe for Word 2 was about 1MB. I remember it because it was by far the largest exe I had ever seen. It didn't have the red underlines for spell-checking but it did have all the other word-processing features I use now.