[palata]

More RAM is becoming the standard because software developed with more RAM is less efficient. And developers tend to have powerful computers "because it's their job", which encourages them to write inefficient code.

> 16GB RAM is also a practical capacity for general tasks such as web browsing, office work

16GB RAM to read and write text and see images... I think it just says it all.

[evanjrowley]

>16GB RAM to read and write text and see images... I think it just says it all.

More could be said about the bloatware, telemetry, surveillance, and adtech built into Windows.

Hard to imagine that 1GB was "a big deal" in my lifetime.

[melling]

I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013, which I still use. Why the F 32GB isn’t standard by now is ridiculous. Screw all the “sloppy code” bullshit talk. I’ve been buying computers since they had 64K. People have been having the same “sloppy code” talk for decades.

[u801e]

Yet, when I'm browsing Facebook, I frequently encouter an issue where the brower tab process starts allocating 5% or more of resident memory (on a 16 GB memory machine). On the other hand, my usenet client worked just fine on my computer with 16 MB of memory at the time without slowing the compter to a crawl due to excessive memory usage.

[palata]

Because it has been the same problem for decades: the more RAM developers have the more RAM their code uses. There is nothing special for 32GB, it was always the case.

Only when the resources are limited do we see optimization being done seriously.

[Grimblewald]

while slop probably plays a part, there is a lot going on that is now possible that wasn't previously. Many of the things we take for granted wouldn't be possible without the extra memory. Do I need 16gb to read text and view images? no. I don't even need 1gb, but I do need that extra ram if I'd like to listen to music while I write text that is actively spell checked, while searching my open document against ones i've already written to look for reusable content while leaving my spreadsheets open, browsing with multiple tabs open, while handling some beefy data file a colleague has sent through, all of which sounds like a reasonable workday for many. Multitab browsing alone isn't some massive stroke of genius that no one had thought of prior, while clever it was also not present earlier because of technical limitations.

Sure I don't need 32gb to do all that, but who knows what fun things will come from having that extra budget?

[palata]

I would like to completely agree with that, but when my laptop consistently starts venting like crazy whenever I open a particular webpage, I have to blame the webpage.

An example I have is a food orders website, which takes 4 seconds and 10MB to load, where all I want to do is go unsubscribe for the weekly order (where I need to unsubscribe every week because it's opt-out, I guess it's better for them). This page is crap because it can, not because it brings some value it couldn't without using all that compute power.

Then as a software engineer, many colleagues literally say "memory is cheap" very often, which kind of hints towards the fact that they don't care about optimizing for memory :-).

I honestly cannot really think of something I do now that is really useful for me and that I was not already able to do 10 years ago (hint: I don't use a copilot to code).

[blharr]

Obviously, large data files will need large memory, but aside from that, music and spellcheck take little memory, and web browsing takes so much

For 90% of browsing like searching and reading articles or watching video or using email, all of those worked on the almost same functionality 10 years ago with a fraction of the memory.

[bombcar]

My first computer that was directly permanently connected to the Internet didn’t even have 16GB of disk space.

[midasuni]

I remember buying a ram upgrade to take my internet connected computer to a massive 16MB

[z500]

I remember in the late 90s/early 00s PC Magazine or something had an ad in the back for a "monster" 47 GB hard drive. That's so quaint now.

[saltcured]

I saw it as a bit of a milestone when people started regularly talking about individual media files that were larger than the whole 80 MB hard drive that held my first Slackware Linux install with X Windows, emacs, and C development tools.

First it was audio, then video, and RAW camera images are almost there with the prosumer digital cameras. And those are compressed files. Software that decompresses the whole thing into arrays of regular samples will need much more RAM...

[jug]

Windows 98 ran on 16 MB as a pretty enthusiast configuration and it let you browse the web. I recall Outlook was about as capable as now too for most uses (mail, calendar etc).

They say this is happing due to abstraction and saving development costs but I'm not so sure anymore. Windows 11 infamously has large swathes of boilerplate copied around apps that many of their engineers don't even know what it does.

At this point we're far into abstracting abstractions and those abstractions bear their own complexity that may or may not be more complex than what we began with at a fraction of the resource cost...

[_mlbt]

This is exactly why I purchased a base model 8GB RAM M1 Mac Mini to develop on. If it runs well on that (with Xcode in the background no less), it’s likely to run well on users computers.

[steveBK123]

It's not the developer hardware, its that every last available CPU cycle & KB of ram gets consumed by ad/tracking bullshit on every website we visit.

[Ekaros]

I'm starting to think that no one in our industry have any actual pride in their work. Just slapping layers and layers of stuff together until it barely works and then shipping it... And somehow they should be paid lot of money for this...

And most of this stuff isn't even doing anything that special or demanding, which is the sad part.

[palata]

> And somehow they should be paid lot of money for this...

They get paid to be productive from the point of view of the company paying them. And by slapping layers of stuff together until it barely works, apparently they make profit for their company.

They are not paid to write optimized (or "good" or "useful for society") code.

Which is sad, no question asked. But it makes perfect sense given the system we live in.

[cybercatgurrl]

As someone who has seen shit code shoveled into the fire repeatedly, this is precisely the reasoning. Make money faster is the only reason a company needs to throw quality out the window. Even though accumulating tech debt like that will likely slow them down.

[palata]

> accumulating tech debt like that will likely slow them down

Which I believe is not taken into account in the performance evaluations. How could you blame an employee for consequences that will happen in 2 years, when the employee has already been promoted for their good short-term results?

[steveBK123]

Lot of CRUD apps and Glue together python imports Just Google it Ask ChatGPT

[u801e]

I remember the days when having 16 MB of memory was plenty to do that.