If one of us ever wins the lotto we better get on funding that

First it’s like 30GB, what the hell??

Just be grateful it's SSD and not RAM.

Visual Studio is the IDE. VS Code is the text editor.

And that us poors still on limited bandwidth plans get charged for going over our monthly quotas because everything has to be streamed or loaded from the cloud instead of installed (or at least cached) locally.

I'm dreading when poorly optimized vibe coding works it's way into mainstream software and create a glut of technical debt. Performance gonna plummet the next 5 years just wait.

If only bad people weren't the ones who said it, maybe we would have listened 😔

Bloated electron apps are what makes Linux on desktop viable today at all, but you guys aren't ready for that conversation.

I’m starting to develop a conspiracy theory that MS is trying to make the desktop experience so terrible that everyone switches to mobile devices, such that they can be more easily spied on.

2011 means it's probably DDR3, which is still fairly affordable

I work in support for a SaaS product and every single click on the platform takes a noticeable amount of time. I don't understand why anyone is paying any amount of money for this product. I have the FOSS equivalent of our software in a test VM and its far more responsive.

Except for KDE. At least compared to cinnamon, I find KDE much more responsive.

AI generated code will make things worse. They are good at providing solutions that generally give the correct output but the code they generate tends to be shit in a final product style.

Though perhaps performance will improve since at least the AI isn't limited by only knowing JavaScript.

I want to avoid building react native apps.

Even Windows 10 is literally unusable for me. When pressing the windows key it literally takes about 4 seconds until the search pops up, just for it to be literally garbage.

The Windows bloat each new generation is way out of control.

It takes forever to boot I know that and that's from fast food which is extra pathetic.

Probably that's the folder explorer or whatever itself crashing.

What really matters isn't meetings, it's profits.

There's no difference whatsoever between qt or gtk and electron for data collection. You can add networking to your application in any of those frameworks.

I don't know why electron has to use so much memory up though. It seems to use however much RAM is currently available when it boots, the more RAM system has the more electron seems to think it needs.

Vista honestly wasn't as bad as we all said/remember, but it was the start of Windows optimization downturn. It worked great on top of the line systems with tons of power, and was the best looking Windows Microslop ever developed.

It just happened to also coincide with the start of netbooks and low power computers going mainstream, and marketing thought that the F1 requiring OS should also be sold on a 3 door hatchback with 60 horsepower.

oh, yes, somebody made this a long time ago, in response to the performance of new webpages https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Well yeah, why would I learn html when I can learn React?!?

(/s but I actually did learn React before I had a grasp of semantic Html because my company needed React devs and only paid for React-specific education)

Jevon's Paradox is that when there's more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.

More specifically, it's when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.

So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.

I always felt American car companies were a really good example of that back in the 60s-70s when enormously long vehicles with giant engines were the order of the day. Why not bigger? Why not stronger? It also acted as a symbol of American strength, which was being measured by raw power just like today lol.

This also reminds me of the way video game programmers in the late 70s/early 80s had such tight limitations to work within that you had to get creative if you wanted to make something stand out. Some very interesting stories from that era.

I also love to think about the tricks the programmer of Prince of Persia had employed to get the "shadow prince" to work...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54

Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use

They are being written to be more efficient in inference, but the gains are being offset by trying to wring more capabilities out of the models by ballooning token use.

Which is indeed a form of Jevon's paradox

With 32 and 64 GB systems I've never run out of RAM, so the RAM isn't the issue at all.

Optimization just sucks.

Would be nice if I could force programs to use more ram though. I actually have 100GB of DDR4 my desktop. I bought it over a year ago when DDR4 was unloved and cheap. But I have tried to force programs to not be offloading as much. Like Firefox, I hate that I have the ram but it's still unloading webpages in the background and won't use more than 6GB ever.

In most cases, you either optimize the memory, or you optimize the speed of execution.

Having more memory means we can optimize the speed of execution.

Now, the side effect is that we can also afford to be slower to gain other benefits: Ease of development (come in javascript everywhere, or python) at the cost of speed, maintainability at the cost of speed, etc...

So, even though you dont always see performance gains as the years go, that doesn't mean shit devs, it means the priority is somewhere else. We have more complex software today than 20 years ago because we can afford not to focus on ram and speed optimization, and instead focus on maintainable, unoptimized code that does complex stuff.

Optimization is not everything.

Absolutely. Every time I play a game from before 2016 or so it runs butter smooth and looks even better than modern games in many cases. I don't know what we're doing nowadays.

StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.

A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you'd expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don't just have 'colour textures', they're likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that's another three times. The voice acting isn't likely to be in a single language any more either, so there'll be several copies of all the sound files.

A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. 'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!

I do agree with you. I can't think of a single useful feature that's been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it's worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.

Then factorio dev blog comes in and spend months optimizing the tok of one broken gear in the conveyor belt to slightly improve efficiency.

Comparing a 20 year old game with FMV sequences at 1080p is certainly a take 🤣.

Well, until you open a browser... or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn't have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

Sadly, it is not how it is for me. I've never (in last 20 years) experienced freezes that bad and that frequent as with my new beefy Linux PC.

I've got a 2007 laptop that was shitty even for its time, and it does the job perfectly as a home server with Debian and a few good open source services I want to host

But... 2016 was a decade ago. If it feels quick and snappy that way that means the post is right.

Which it kinda isn't but hey.

They are all actually the start of an incredibly complex dojinshi.

To prevent fictionalist comments in replies.

PC games are software.

Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.

Proton can only do so much.

... and Metal basically can't do that that much.

Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.

They haven't really.

They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.

Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.

App launch time can be annoyingly slow on mac if you're not offline or blocking the server it phones home to

it can be the difference between one bounce or seven bounces of the icon on my end

My 12? 13? Year old Dell laptop does just fine running Ubuntu. It'll probably be fine for my needs for another 3 or 4 years at least.

Mint Xfce on my 2015 laptop compared to its previous system was the difference between usable and waiting 10 minutes for it to even boot, and things like gaming, VMs, comically large spreadsheets (surprisingly the memory hog), etc., were an eternal challenge on it. On my current laptop, I have the luxury of picking the systems by aesthetics and non-optimization functions instead. And to compare, I've run even the same updates on the two laptops, as the older one still works.

Anyone opening the app menu (from the dock or Home Screen) on an iPad will tell you that it’s not exclusive to windows pcs.

And Android

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Whenever efficiency increases consumption increases. Better steam engines mean more coal consumption. Faster cheaper RAM means more RAM consumption.

But the user wants a gui.

Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we've had smooth GUI experiences since Apple's 1980s OS. This isn't the primary load on the system.

Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn't ask for.

It's a black hole of bloatware.

There isn't anything fundamentally slower about using a GUI vs just text in a console. There's more to draw but it scales linearly. The drawing things on the screen part isn't the slow bit for slow programs. Well, it can be if it's coded inefficiently, but there are plenty of programs with GUIs that are snappy... Like games, which generally draw even more complex things than your average GUI app.

Slow apps are more likely because of an inefficient framework (like running in a web browser with heavy reliance on scripts rather than native code), inefficient algorithms that scale poorly, poor resource use, bad organization that results in doing the same operation more times than necessary, etc.

No, the bottleneck is fucking electron apps.

even with mothern ssds, things sometimes feel slower than what they were with hdds with time accurate software, windows 7 was snappy even on a hdd, windows 11 is slow and sluggish everywhere

it doesn’t account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.

We know they do more, but most of that “more” is bullshit bloat and sloppy engineering, neither of which we asked for.

When I boot up Windows 11 and start no programs, somehow there’s already over 8Gb RAM already consumed, the CPU shows 8% utilisation, there’s 244 processes running, and it still took every bit as long to get there as my Windows 7 machine from 2011. That’s what the rest of us are talking about.

It tracks that the guy I saw raging about linux more than once is defending bloat lol