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> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
by 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/
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoI'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters. -- [0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.
- ajolly 7mo agoYou know pebble is back? Also Old Pebbles still work perfectly and are supported by the latest software stack.
- Fnoord 7mo agoYr.no [1] is free, and available in English. Thanks to Norway. Apps available as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr.no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr.no
- alsetmusic 7mo agoAmazing. With an API I can poll. Thank you.
- FeepingCreature 7mo agofun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days. ("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)
- Fnoord 7mo agoYeah, I found this out the other day when my laptop was toasting. In hindsight, probably related to archive.today or some Firefox extension. You have to close Firefox every now and then for updates though. The issue you describe seems better dealt with on filesystem level with a CoW filesystem such as ZFS. That way, versioning and snapshots are a breeze, and your whole homedir could benefit.
- daoistmonk 7mo agoFWIW: the Tab Stash extension has worked well for me.
- ryandrake 7mo agoI kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps. And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoYeah it's awful. Web apps are slower, they don't integrate well with the system, they are inaccessible if the network is down. A native app has to be truly abysmal to be worse than a web app. But far too many developers simply do not care about making something good any more. There's no pride in one's work, just "web is easier for the developer". And of course the businesses producing software are all about that, because they are run by people with a business ethic of "make the product as cheaply as possible, ignore quality". It's a very sad state of affairs.
- arcanemachiner 7mo agoWe have an open, universal application platform. That alone is something to celebrate.
- newdee 7mo agoIt would be if it wasn’t also universally shit.
- Zancarius 7mo agoIt's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue modern .NET apps are almost as bad. I have an example. I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance, and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile versions lack many of the features available for desktop, but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps part of it is their push to include AI-driven features, no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think it's a growing combination of company priorities and framework choices. Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to be curmudgeonly!
- 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.