[ryandrake]

This is what I was thinking, too. For so long, the default mode of operating a software company has been:

"Developer time is so expensive, we need to throw everything under the bus to make developers fast."

The kinds of things often thrown under the bus: Optimizations, runtime speed, memory footprint, disk image size, security, bug fixing, code cleanliness / lint, and so on. The result is crappy software written fast. Now, imagine some hypothetical AI (that we don't have yet) that makes developer time spent on the project trivial.

Optimistically: There might be time for some of these important software activities.

Pessimistically: Companies will continue to throw these things under the bus and just shit out crappy software even faster.

[IgorPartola]

My favorite part of this phenomenon is every company that interviews developers on data structures and algorithms, then puts out a calculator app that takes half a gigabyte of storage and nearly as much RAM to run.

I have not had to use Windows in ages but every time I touch it I am amazed at the fact that it takes like 10-15GB for a bare installation of the latest version, while it does about the same amount of work as XP was able to do in under 1GB. Yes I am aware assets are a thing but has usability increased as a result of larger assets?

[typpilol]

To be fair, windows has so much backwards compatibility, I'm sure there's a ton of stuff there that's not used by 99.9% of people.

That's a good or a bad thing depending on your perspective

[IgorPartola]

I am fairly certain that if you install every Debian package available it will still be less than 16GB. Windows 10 is a bare OS at that size.

[thenthenthen]

The latest iOS update (!) is more than 16gb… a mobile OS…

[naasking]

It ships with just as many features as Windows 10 which is also in that range, so it's not too surprising.