4 ms·

The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time

nshelia 7mo ago
We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
- denysvitali 7mo ago
  A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
  - mattmanser 7mo ago
    As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about memory usage, a lot is fonts and images. EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
    - littlestymaar 7mo ago
      Aka poor resources management. If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - ben-schaaf 7mo ago
        The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet). Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
        littlestymaar 7mo ago
        > The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website). > you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM. I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above). But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.
        ben-schaaf 7mo ago
        > I didn't set the bar to 70kB The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB, mattmanser then explained that images and fonts easily exceed that, and then you called that poor resource management. Sounds like we're on the same page here, but you seemed to have missed the context of the comment you initially replied to.
        littlestymaar 7mo ago
        > The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB It didn't, here's the comment in question: > A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy It makes no mention that an app should be under 70kB. It just note that 100MB is still *enormous* compared to 70kB. And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.
        ben-schaaf 7mo ago
        > And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone. It can't be explained by images and fonts alone, I agree, but images and fonts alone are still enormous compared to 70kB. On my screen an "e" on this site is 10*11 pixels. Subpixel positioning means we need at least 6 copies of each letter, subpixel antialiasing means we need three channel alpha (3 bytes per pixel), we have variations of bold, italic and bold-italic, 95 printable letters in ascii, that's a low-ball of 750kB for one size of one font. This comment page alone has 4 different sizes, I'd expect a chat app to have a few more.
    - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
      How much? You typically don't want more than a few different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?
      - conductr 7mo ago
        > How do we get to gigs? Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves? While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.
        cosmicgadget 7mo ago
        Can you be more specific? Yes I am familiar with LinkedIn.
        conductr 7mo ago
        Their apps do a lot and usually do not run well in my experience. Meaning they can freeze and lock things up on occasion.
        heyethan 7mo ago
        [flagged]
      - stackghost 7mo ago
        >How do we get to gigs? Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise. What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple. So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
        7mo ago
    - troupo 7mo ago
      Well, and then you have Claude Code which at one point needed 68GB of RAM to run https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 :)
  - ozim 7mo ago
    Space is mostly empty there is not much interesting stuff to collect and who’s going to buy that data LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.
    - bryanrasmussen 7mo ago
      >Space is mostly empty Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
      - ozim 7mo ago
        Exactly and people on LinkedIn think they are smarter than everyone and definitely smarter than dolphins, because what dolphins do? They muck in the water all day having good time whereas humans built important profiles on LinkedIn having good time berating each other.
- thephyber 7mo ago
  I’m guessing you mean “does” in the sense of a user-facing feature. I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.
- weare138 7mo ago
  I remember when your computer had 128MB of ram and could still run an entire desktop OS, web browser and chat app at the same time.
charcircuit 7mo ago
Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less memory.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
bluedino 7mo ago
That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?
- zirkonit 7mo ago
  In consumer space, 69 KB of RAM (138 x 4 kbit chips) would cost around $1700 70s dollars for the entire package, ~$10k in modern dollars. Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.
  - saltyoldman 7mo ago
    Wouldn't they just put a lead plate around the computer? That can't cost 100k in 70s
    - mysterydip 7mo ago
      lead being heavy, I wonder if that tradeoff wasn’t worth it?
    - kulahan 7mo ago
      Lead makes things worse, not better. High-energy particles go straight through a couple mm of lead no problem, and lead itself is radioactive anyways. The problem is when a particle punches straight through a chip, leaving some energetic charge behind. You won't stop that with a paper-thin layer of lead. Also, lead is extremely dense.
      - hunterpayne 7mo ago
        "and lead itself is radioactive anyways" Um, I guess in that there are naturally occurring isotopes of lead that are unstable. But those are very rare and can be removed. By this standard, the chips themselves are radioactive since they are made of silicon. By this standard, you, everything you eat, every plant and animal is radioactive since there are trace isotopes of carbon that are radioactive (that's how carbon dating works). And sunlight is very radioactive by this standard. However, the materials we actually use in chips is highly processed and radioactive isotopes will likely be removed if a centrifuge was used in any step in concentration process. Likewise the lead used in a space shield will probably have similar processing of the material "Also, lead is extremely dense." This is the real reason lead isn't used. There are plenty of other elements that shield ionizing radiation quite well and are less dense. However, they are also more expensive than lead which is why we use lead on earth for shielding (its cheap) and use something else in space (where density is more important than price).
thomasgeelens 7mo ago
This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out there on 69kb.
wontopos 7mo ago
To be fair, Voyager 1 doesn't have to render 47 "congratulate your connection" notifications at the same time.
- OptionOfT 7mo ago
  With autosuggestions to click so you don't even have to type anymore!

nshelia 7mo ago

We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.

denysvitali 7mo ago
A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
- mattmanser 7mo ago
  As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about memory usage, a lot is fonts and images. EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
  - littlestymaar 7mo ago
    Aka poor resources management. If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ben-schaaf 7mo ago
      The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet). Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
      - littlestymaar 7mo ago
        > The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website). > you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM. I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above). But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.
        ben-schaaf 7mo ago
        > I didn't set the bar to 70kB The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB, mattmanser then explained that images and fonts easily exceed that, and then you called that poor resource management. Sounds like we're on the same page here, but you seemed to have missed the context of the comment you initially replied to.
        littlestymaar 7mo ago
        > The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB It didn't, here's the comment in question: > A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy It makes no mention that an app should be under 70kB. It just note that 100MB is still *enormous* compared to 70kB. And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.
        ben-schaaf 7mo ago
        > And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone. It can't be explained by images and fonts alone, I agree, but images and fonts alone are still enormous compared to 70kB. On my screen an "e" on this site is 10*11 pixels. Subpixel positioning means we need at least 6 copies of each letter, subpixel antialiasing means we need three channel alpha (3 bytes per pixel), we have variations of bold, italic and bold-italic, 95 printable letters in ascii, that's a low-ball of 750kB for one size of one font. This comment page alone has 4 different sizes, I'd expect a chat app to have a few more.
  - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
    How much? You typically don't want more than a few different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?
    - conductr 7mo ago
      > How do we get to gigs? Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves? While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.
      - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
        Can you be more specific? Yes I am familiar with LinkedIn.
        conductr 7mo ago
        Their apps do a lot and usually do not run well in my experience. Meaning they can freeze and lock things up on occasion.
      - heyethan 7mo ago
        [flagged]
    - stackghost 7mo ago
      >How do we get to gigs? Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise. What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple. So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
      - 7mo ago
  - troupo 7mo ago
    Well, and then you have Claude Code which at one point needed 68GB of RAM to run https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 :)
- ozim 7mo ago
  Space is mostly empty there is not much interesting stuff to collect and who’s going to buy that data LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.
  - bryanrasmussen 7mo ago
    >Space is mostly empty Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
    - ozim 7mo ago
      Exactly and people on LinkedIn think they are smarter than everyone and definitely smarter than dolphins, because what dolphins do? They muck in the water all day having good time whereas humans built important profiles on LinkedIn having good time berating each other.
thephyber 7mo ago
I’m guessing you mean “does” in the sense of a user-facing feature. I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.
weare138 7mo ago
I remember when your computer had 128MB of ram and could still run an entire desktop OS, web browser and chat app at the same time.

charcircuit 7mo ago

Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less memory.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

bluedino 7mo ago

That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?

zirkonit 7mo ago
In consumer space, 69 KB of RAM (138 x 4 kbit chips) would cost around $1700 70s dollars for the entire package, ~$10k in modern dollars. Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.
- saltyoldman 7mo ago
  Wouldn't they just put a lead plate around the computer? That can't cost 100k in 70s
  - mysterydip 7mo ago
    lead being heavy, I wonder if that tradeoff wasn’t worth it?
  - kulahan 7mo ago
    Lead makes things worse, not better. High-energy particles go straight through a couple mm of lead no problem, and lead itself is radioactive anyways. The problem is when a particle punches straight through a chip, leaving some energetic charge behind. You won't stop that with a paper-thin layer of lead. Also, lead is extremely dense.
    - hunterpayne 7mo ago
      "and lead itself is radioactive anyways" Um, I guess in that there are naturally occurring isotopes of lead that are unstable. But those are very rare and can be removed. By this standard, the chips themselves are radioactive since they are made of silicon. By this standard, you, everything you eat, every plant and animal is radioactive since there are trace isotopes of carbon that are radioactive (that's how carbon dating works). And sunlight is very radioactive by this standard. However, the materials we actually use in chips is highly processed and radioactive isotopes will likely be removed if a centrifuge was used in any step in concentration process. Likewise the lead used in a space shield will probably have similar processing of the material "Also, lead is extremely dense." This is the real reason lead isn't used. There are plenty of other elements that shield ionizing radiation quite well and are less dense. However, they are also more expensive than lead which is why we use lead on earth for shielding (its cheap) and use something else in space (where density is more important than price).

thomasgeelens 7mo ago

This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out there on 69kb.

wontopos 7mo ago

To be fair, Voyager 1 doesn't have to render 47 "congratulate your connection" notifications at the same time.

OptionOfT 7mo ago
With autosuggestions to click so you don't even have to type anymore!