6 ms·
I think it will be a good thing actually. Engineers, no longer having the luxury of assuming that users have high end system specs, will be forced to actually w
by deadbabe 10mo ago
I think it will be a good thing actually. Engineers, no longer having the luxury of assuming that users have high end system specs, will be forced to actually write fast and efficient software. No more bloated programs eating up RAM for no reason.
- Insanity 10mo agoI'm not optimistic that this would be the outcome. You likely will just have poor running software instead. After all, a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices on terrible connection speeds (such as many parts of Africa).
- chii 10mo ago> a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices but you cannot consider this in isolation. The developed markets have vastly higher spending consumers, which means companies cater to those higher spending customers proportionately more (as profits demand it). Therefore, the implication is that lower spending markets gets less investment and less catered to; after all, R&D spending is still a limiting factor. If the entirety of the market is running on lower powered devices, then it would get catered for - because there'd be no (or not enough) customers with high powered devices to profit off.
- Insanity 10mo agoIn general what you are saying makes sense. But there are specific counter examples, such as Crysis in 2008 or CyberPunk 2077 some years ago. Both didn’t run great on the “average consumer hardware”. But I’ll admit this is cherry picking from my side :)
- rurp 10mo agoThe problem is that higher performing devices will still exist. Those engineers will probably keep using performant devices and their managers will certainly keep buying them. We'll probably end up in an even more bifurcated world where the well off have access to lot of great products and services that most of humanity is increasingly unable to access.
- hansvm 10mo agoCan confirm, I'm currently requesting as much RAM as can fit in the chassis and permission to install an OS not too divorced from what we run in prod. On the bright side, I'm not responsible for the UI abominations people seem to complain about WRT laptop specs.
- incompatible 10mo agoHow many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?
- TheDong 10mo agoSome open source projects use Slack to communicate, which is a real ram hog. Github, especially for viewing large PR discussions, takes a huge amount of memory. If someone with a low-memory laptop wants to get into coding, modern software-development-related services are incredible memory hogs.
- rhdunn 10mo agoImage, video, and music editing. Developing, running, and debugging large applications.
- Ekaros 10mo agoThe last three sounds to me like self-inflicted issues. If applications weren't so large, wouldn't less resources be needed?
- thatguy0900 10mo agoI think the actual outcome is they will expect you to rent servers to conduct all your computing on and your phone and pc will be a dumb terminal.
- TheDong 10mo agoAt the same time, AI has made it easier than ever to produce inefficient code, so I expect to rather see an explosion of less efficient software.
- rabf 10mo agoIt has also made it easier than ever to build native applications that use the os provided toolkits and avoid adding a complete web-tech stack to everything.
- jghn 10mo agoGood luck with that.
- laterium 10mo agoWhy are you celebrating compute becoming more expensive? Do you actually think it will be good?
- trinsic2 10mo agoI don't think it's going to happen in this day and age. Some smart people will but most barley know how to write there own code let alone write efficient code