The world turned millenia ago and will turn millenia later.
The problem statement is of applications using up expensive RAM. Incidentally, expensive RAM is just one of the problems we face in the computing space. Forced obsolescence is another, when running hardware needs to be replaced because software is built for only newer CPUs.
> The problem statement is of applications using up expensive RAM. Incidentally, expensive RAM is just one of the problems we face in the computing space.
You need to stop and think about the problem. Nowadays RAM is expensive because many people now want to max out their computers with RAM to run LLMs and AI coding assistants. Today's software is still the same software that ran perfectly well half a dozen years ago. Cloudflare happens to operate a large global computer infrastructure, and it's scale is such that 1% gains are lauded as fantastic cost savers. But that's the bean counter's perspective, pointing out that they saved a bean.
> Nowadays RAM is expensive because many people now want to max out their computers with RAM to run LLMs and AI coding assistants.
Source? I imagine the amount of people trying to run local LLMs is miniscule. RAM is expensive because a handful of companies have spent billions buying all of the compute.
> Today's software is still the same software that ran perfectly well half a dozen years ago.
This statement is quite honestly not true at all. Just take the two largest OS from 6 years ago and compare resource usage between them and you will find you are incorrect, never mind the software running on it.
You are right, but it reads (to me, could be just me) you mean newer specs which used to be true when I shipped software in the 70-90s; you mean faster machines / more memory right? Like installing a new version of software or OS and suddenly all memory is used, system is swapping and you did not ask for that but some obscure feature you didn't need needed to be shipped fast.
That statement can be used to justify anything, to the point it is utterly useless.
— Humanity has been on the decline. People are hateful towards each other, striking their fellow man and poisoning the environment. Despots eventually launched nukes which killed everyone but the cockroaches.
On the contrary. Industrial developing countries saw bigger % increases in their economic growth in the last couple of decades than the fully developed "old" western ones. Mostly due to "the rich" shipping western jobs there to cut costs and increase their margins.
For example the likes of Poland, China, India and Vietnam were and still are growing like crazy when you compare to the likes of UK or Germany.
> And its this obsession with shipping things as fast as possible quality be dammed (...)
You seem confused. Allocating more memory than optimal levels is not a measure of quality. Similarly, a web page is not suddenly lower quality if an image asset is 50kb instead of 25kb. And how much complexity and engineering effort and bugs are you willing to tolerate to halve your memory allocations?
You are conflating quality with mindless minimization, not even knowing or caring that are the tradeoffs. The blog post you're commenting on starts by presenting the case for celebrating small improvements, even 1% improvements at a time. A similar 1% improvement in a mobile app is at like 1MB. Do you ever notice it? How many hours of engineering effort are you hoping to spend on this nonsense? And you prefer to spend it on this or in actually fixing a bug or implementing a feature?
This puerile conflation of minimization with quality suggests your personal notion of quality has no bearing on what quality actually is.
> And how much complexity and engineering effort and bugs are you willing to tolerate to halve your memory allocations?
You seem to be confused about this relationship. It's usually exactly the opposite.
The wasteful applications are generally not well reasoned about and half assed implementations. That's why they're guzzling resources
There is ofc a middle ground, because targeting eg incredibly resource constrained embedded systems will naturally increase complexity, but that's something entirely different to the scenario this discussion was about up to this point.
Exactly, that`s why i refuse to call 99.9% of "software engineers" engineers. Imagine you optimize a aircraft turbine 1%....man you get to drink a pool of champagne with the highest ceo's and aircraft carriers try to buy that turbine as fast as possible.
But with software and a install base of some millions 1% optimization is seen as wasteful, its like software slop is acceptable since forever because hardware gets faster, and electricity is "green" anyway.
Resource constraints have historically been a bastion of quality engineering, though. The relationship is not directly causal, but any time an engineer must not only solve a problem but _fit it within some kind of a budget_ vs having an unlimited budget, it forces them to slow down and think more carefully about what they are producing and how well it actually functions.
Ultimately it is an expression of anti-fragility: some minimal challenge must be met and conquered on many different axes of a production in order to help the full production itself mature to the best possible quality.
It is the same reason we exercise, the same reason that cars and toilets and so many products greatly increase in quality after emissions and usage and waste-related regulations get applied from above, etc.
The appreciation of the refining force of outside limitations is not about min-maxing, but it is at least partly about curbing the min-maxing of other concerns such as "ship the fastest garbage possible to move on to the next opportunity to repeat that process".
I think (based completely on anecdotal evidence) both the Windows desktop and lock screen pull their backgrounds from a different source than the Bing home page. I would often see a very different collection of image on my Windows machine (when I still had one) vs what I would get from the Bing Wallpaper GNOME extension I use on my Linux machines.
Sounds like they were getting overly upset by things that don't effect them and also...checks notes a website following the law of the country they're based in.
Really weird things to be getting upset over if you ask me.
Regardless of the stupidity of the law (which don't get me wrong, the Online "Safety" Act in the UK is incredibly dumb) you still have to follow it until its struck down or replaced.
I mean if you're gonna stop people from owning their device and doing what they want with it just because of the possibility of crime occurring then their are quite a few more things that probably should also no longer exist because of their potential use in crime.
That's a pretty ridiculous argument if you ask me.
You can say that about a lot of things in life. Legalized gambling, for example. Tons of people ruin their lives with it and this creates big externalities for society. But we tolerate it so that everyone has the freedom to gamble.
Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves. I think a lot of people have short memories for all the hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago. I think we also need to remember that Apple is not the government so people have alternatives to buying their devices.
Personally, I think people should have the right to buy a locked down device. It’s not on Apple to provide open competitors to their product. And why should developers have a right to develop for the platform? Heck, I wanted the iPhone back when it didn’t even have 3rd party apps at all.
> Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves
The idea that, for many people purchasing an iPhone, the inability to install apps from alternative stores or the web is a selling point seems rather questionable.
On top of that this could easily be provided by an optional switch that enables you to enforce this on your own device if you so desire.
It is a poor reason to request that all app distribution for everyone else also has to go through Apple and its terms, basically for your convenience.
I’ve already given one reason why the switch is a bad idea. Another reason is that powerful third parties such as Meta and Google could force users to disable their own protections and give those apps full access to all data as a condition of installation.
Ultimately, an option becomes a requirement and then the protection for users is totally gone.
>>hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago
And that still plagues every computing platform now. Including Apple platforms. So the lockdown clearly didn’t completely solve that problem like a lot of people seem to claim
That is exactly what Apple has decided to do. You have named the tradeoff. Stop the possibility by disabling everyone. It has always been this way. People have had nearly 20 years to leave Apple
is like much of the discourse around the changes, overly sensationalized and borderline false.
The only change made that's relevant to sideloading-a-downloaded-APK as far I understand, is a 24hour delay in enabling the ability to do so, which is a wildly overblown non-issue.
It’s a one time delay that occurs when you first enable the ability to install downloaded apks and you never see it again for any device attached to your Google account. That’s why I called it a wildly overblown non-issue
I also had one of this 11th Gen Intel FW13s, and the RTC battery on mine worked for a short time because they for some reason used some garbage rechargeable one with a 2 yr lifespan instead of the more common not-rechargeable battery that every other PC vendor uses with seemingly 10x the lifespan
>> Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago
I put in the exact same amount of effort to install a Linux distro on my laptop that I would have to install Windows.
1. Download the ISO
2. Write to a USB drive
3. Reboot
4. Run the installer.
5. ???
6. Profit
And all for an experience with way less bloat, none of the bundled spyware, more consistent UI design (depending on which desktop you're using), and better perceived performance.
>>This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:
This is still a web app, it doesn't solve the problem of MS being too lazy or cheap to make real desktop apps for things. I mean this is the same company who thought taking the Start Menu of all things and re-making it with web crap was a good idea.
This is just false. For starters, your users most _definitely_ don't care about how "elegant" your code is either. They want new features to keep them engaged, or to make the product better. The quicker they get those wants fulfilled by your product, the less likely they are to churn off your product onto something else that has those features that they are missing.
The only people who care about code elegance are the people looking at the code, which is orders of magnitude fewer people than those who are _using_ the artifacts of what the code actually represents.
So I'm not so sure how you arrived at your conclusion of Zed having higher memory use than VSCODE but in testing just now that's not at all close to true.
Zed for me on my Linux machine opened to a massive C++ project (the Ladybird browser if you were curious) is (not including LSP or extension processes) using around 480MB of memory.
VSCode on the other hand with nothing open but a 20 line JSON file is (again not including any LSP or extension processes) using around 920MB of memory as reported by its own builtin task manager thing.
I suppose 480MB for a text editor might be a tad high but calling it worse than VSCode is a massive stretch.
If editors own memory usage is your main concern then you should use emacs or even better mg or vi.
The editor + its plugins + it's LSP server is what counts. I dont care if zed is written in rust and uses 400MB when it spawns a multi GB nodejs process when I work on my tiny golang project.
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