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The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridicu
by torben-friis 7mo ago
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
- zozbot234 7mo ago> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
- mettamage 7mo agoThis is the way
- tormeh 7mo agoFor real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.
- skydhash 7mo agoThat’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.
- lpcvoid 7mo agoI rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
- skydhash 7mo agoWhy would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.
- lpcvoid 7mo agoThe only subscription I have is Spotify, since there's no easy way that I know of to get the discoverability of music in a way that Spotify allows it. For the rest: I agree with you.
- h4ch1 7mo agolastfm is still a great way to discover music, countless times I've gotten great recs from a music neighbor.
- sys_64738 7mo agoPlex or Jellyfin client access.
- opan 7mo agompv + sshfs is the way.
- bluGill 7mo agoI use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)
- lpcvoid 7mo agoTry Quickweather (with OpenMeteo) if you're on Android. I love it. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ominous.quickweather/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ominous.quickweather/
- foobarian 7mo agoI keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?
- ryandrake 7mo agoWe could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.
- balamatom 7mo agoReal talk. Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s. That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?
- kps 7mo agoThere's no market for it.
- balamatom 7mo agoNot real talk. To have a market for something you need people to find it valuable. What drove the shift in values?
- ekaryotic 7mo agocould have been a pressure to decrease wages, decreasing quality in exchange for increased quantity of code.
- balamatom 7mo agoAlright, if we were to replace "quantity of code" with something like "feature velocity", I might agree that something like that could be the case. Of course, then the next question is: how was this accomplished? I mean, we're talking people's values here - i.e. the preferences of economic actors - IIUC the phenomenon underlying the entire market model? Are those so flimsy so as to be completely overwritten in a generation's time? Is this something that happens every generation?
- lo_zamoyski 7mo agoSeems like the perfect target for ESG.
- Esophagus4 7mo agoIt seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more bloated to compensate. Or maybe it’s vice versa. I wonder if there’s a computer science law about this. This could be my chance!
- mjmas 7mo agoIs your name Wirth?
- Esophagus4 7mo agoDangit! Always the bridesmaid, never the bride
- daveguy 7mo agoSorry to burst your bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law Not exactly the same (it's about power rather than price). But close enough that when you said it, I thought, "oh! there is something like that." There's also more fundamental economics laws at play for supply and demand of a resource / efficiencies at scale / etc. Given our ever increasing demand of compute compared increasing supply (cheaper more powerful compute), I expect the supply will bottleneck before the demand does.
- Esophagus4 7mo agoAh, so you think there’s a point where actually bloat slows because we eventually can’t keep up with demand for compute? I guess this might be happening with LLMs already
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- teeray 7mo agoCompanies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.
- vladvasiliu 7mo agoIf only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.
- sfn42 7mo agoYeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an application does use it people whine about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow" it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but is there an actual problem? Crickets.
- gryfft 7mo ago"chrome uses 2gb of ram" these days individual _tabs_ are using multiple gb of ram.
- fhdkweig 7mo agoDon't know about chrome, but Firefox has an about:memory special page that will let you know which tabs are using the most ram. Of all the sites I use, youtube is the only culprit. When I am done watching a video, I use the about:memory to kill the associated process (doesn't destroy the tab (in case I want to come back to it)). I assume it is all the javascript cruft.
- bccdee 7mo agoThat's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term, modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
- swiftcoder 7mo agoThe big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times under control at work. The constant increases in website and electron app weight don't feel great either.
- WillAdams 7mo ago3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)
- adregan 7mo agoIs that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? I don’t have experience with CAD, so I’m not sure if it’s due to entrenched solutions or something else.
- WillAdams 7mo agoMy understanding is that the problems being worked on do not yield to breaking down into parallelizable parts in an efficient/easily-calculated/unambiguous fashion.
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago> Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? A lot of commercial CAD software exists for a very long time, and it is important for industrial customers that the backward compatibility is very well kept. So, the vendors don't want to do deep changes in the CAD kernels. Additionally, such developments are expensive (because novel algorithms have to be invented). I guess CAD applications are not that incredibly profitable that as a vendor you want to invest a huge amount of money into the development of such a feature.
- Tossrock 7mo agoThat sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or PrusaSlicer.
- WillAdams 7mo agoIt's a very complex joint (which is why it's never been done before that I could find --- hopefully will be patentable), and the tool definition probably wasn't optimal, nor the CAM tool being used appropriate to the task, hence my working on developing the toolpaths more directly.
- duskdozer 7mo ago>My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage That's "non powerful" to you?
- torben-friis 7mo agoThe opposite. I meant that if this is what consumer grade looks like nowadays, even with a fraction of current flagships we seem well covered - this was less than 800 bucks.
- mbfg 7mo agoI've never have a personal computer that came even close to powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15 minutes, is really annoying for instance.
- diablevv 7mo ago[dead]
- wat10000 7mo agoI’d love it if a clean build and test on the biggest project I work in would finish instantly instead of taking an hour.
- Culonavirus 7mo ago> My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. Most affordable laptops have exactly that, 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage. Think about THAT!
- Arcanum-XIII 7mo agoSimulation, analysis, rendering... All those gobbles memory, CPU, sometimes graphic card. Real time works also: huge data set in real time — sensor for production line or environmental monitoring for example. For word processing, basic image manipulation, electron app (well...) even the "cheap" Macbook Neo is good enough, and it's a last year phone CPU. But that's not enough for a lot of use case.
- SergeAx 7mo ago> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? As a software engineer: 1) I need Docker to run some dependencies for my project: databases, caches, things like that 2) My IDE is quite a resource hog 3) I prefer my build process to be as fast as possible.