Whoever are downvoting this really don't understand that expanding a congested highway merely widens the congestion instead of alleviating it.
Software today require several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores just to render some simple fucking text because everyone has several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores.
The bloat is real, but it’s not all bloat. We ask for a lot more from our software today. Simple example: rendering text isn’t that simple when we expect full Unicode support.
It’s not altogether different from how everything seems to be much more expensive than it was in the 1950s. There are many real and concerning reasons for that, but one less concerning reason is that we have higher standards and expectations now, and that translates to higher cost.
I really would like to know what's good bloat and bad bloat like they say with Taliban.
To give a random example, Apache http server for windows is less than 12mb download. I used to download Oracle's http which I'm told is based on that, but that's like 1GB++ haven't checked in recent years.
Thanks..Among many other issues, it is also a serious crippling factor for communities and countries that are low on budget/resources & a disaster for recycling, climate change etc etc.
This is one of the biggest reasons why China or India are threat to the West.
Because their Engineers are constantly in situations were they have to work with much less resources. And they come up with stuff that constantly surprises people for being much cheaper. The western reaction is to then go and buy them out. Its not going to work forever. They have already taken over large swathes of the tech landscape.
Even with AI for example, Real Time inference is not required in majority of cases.
But the western engineer and corp exec in big tech, are used to buying new data centers everyday (not because of specific Customer Demand, but because of intent to capture market/snuff out competition/build moats or what ever bs an environment of over abundance has trained them to do) and then they have zillions of machines idling which they use to provide real-time inference raising the cost for everyone.
Sooner or later someone in China or India working on non real time inference will offer large corps much cheaper solutions.
The Western model is where you forget how to cook a meal at home, and end up relying on McDonalds for food, because they are everywhere, thanks to their prime directive of survival via opening new stores everyday.
For how much we all bitch about beancounters, I'm kind of surprised that beancounters haven't managed to convince management to buy bottom-of-the-barrel Celeron laptops for software developers.
Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people instead of some monstrosity with a 256 cores CPU and 48 TB of RAM and 24 exabytes of enterprise SSD and an RTX Cinco Grande connected via optical fiber to the Amazonflare Cloudnet. We will see lean and mean software literally overnight.
> Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people
Are you sure it’s the engineers who are being complacent? I know quite a few coders who’d love nothing more than to spend months on optimizations eking out small performance gains. Their bosses (or the market) don’t let them.
Because shipping fast almost always beats speed/memory optimization. The only reason to even do performance optimization is if it is a constraint on the problem itself (e.g. you work in gaming or HFT).
If shipping fast means you spend an extra $1000 once per developer, guess what almost every company is going to do?
I have access to a couple of Macbook Pros and a Linux machine with very good processors, but I do my hobby development all in an old Macbook Air. That allows me to see when my code runs slowly much more clearly. On an M1, everything just runs so fast you don't notice when you have a serious performance issue which is painfully obvious on the Macbook Air! I recommend doing that, though it does require patience waiting for things that are instant on the better machines.
I've always (well, since Pentium days at least) said you don't actually want your devs using top-end machines, at least for testing and debugging. You want them using the minimum target hardware. That way they'll actually care when the product slow on low end hardware, which will make it usable there and snappy on high end hardware. I've certainly caught a few accidentally-exponential style UI issues which were unnoticeable on a new workstation but very obvious on a slower machine.
It should be possible to achieve the same end by forcing management to use the "hardware of the people", getting them to do nontrivial on-call duty frequently, and making them dogfood what they make.
The real fucking assholes are the ones that enable the fucking assholes you refer to.
I use "monster" desktops for my development. I appreciate luxury of language servers, proper syntax highlighting, smart complete etc. etc. Output results however are absolutely tiny (for what they do) single executable enterprise backends, firmware for microcontrollers etc. etc. Also produce desktop same style software. Runs fine on ancient computers.
So there is a use for fat development stations. Increases my productivity which is very important as I am an independent vendor and pay for all my tools.
One area where I'll be worried about China (not sure India as it's following USA in many ways) is they needn't spend time, resources on ensuring political compliance. Maybe yes in a different sense but not in the same sense as in returning "correct" answers for questions. We saw that with Google.
That should knock God knows how many GPU cycles, time and training of models.
I'm not sure it's easier to make your products block communication about Taiwan or Tiananmen Square.
If you have to do political policing one way or the other, you'll have to invest resources to achieve it. On the other hand, maybe it's beneficial for r&d because it pressures you to do hard things that your product benefits from, e.g. controllability in ML-products.
I'm always baffled by this "forget how to cook at home" example, but I suspect this is more about having fast food within walking distance, while not having a grocery store within walking distance ??
Think it's not simple China or India issue. Even in those countries, new gen kids grow up with too much not too little, depending of course on who their dads are.
Even with latest hardware, there must be incentives to optimise on size, memory, CPU time etc. But given natural tendency, we just optimise on what's the rarest of them all - time to market. Get it shipping fast.
I was once in a training (as new consultant) for software, the instructor, an old fashioned guy said quit using the mouse learn the keyboard shortcuts - your customer is watching you. He was damn right cos years later, I realised so many customers did remark, how do you do that so fast? To this day, running some command in Excel (say) access Name manager, I use kB shortcut that hasn't changed in decades. I frankly even lost track of where to find them in the menu bar.
Software today require several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores just to render some simple fucking text because everyone has several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores.