[antisthenes]

> it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up.

I'm sorry, "used to be" ? 90% of the last decade of hardware advancement was eaten up by shoddy bloated software, where we now have UI lag on the order of seconds, 8GB+ of memory used all the time by god knows what and a few browser tabs and 1 core always peaking in util (again, doing god knows what).

[michaelt]

I don't dispute that software is currently bloated - I'm just saying the rate of increase of bloat is now much reduced.

Taking Steam's hardware survey as an example, from 2004 [1] to 2014 [2] RAM increased from 512 MB to 8 GB.

From 2014 to 2024 [3] RAM increased from 8 GB to 16 GB.

Software has bloated by 2x in a decade. But in the preceding decade, it bloated by 16x so keeping it down to a mere 2x is quite restrained in comparison.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040630214045/http://steampower... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.stea... [3] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

[antisthenes]

> I'm just saying the rate of increase of bloat is now much reduced.

The rate of increase of bloat is now reduced, because hardware advancements rate of increase is also now reduced.

The bloat takes up all the hardware advancements, so of course they'll just be in line with each other.