421–430 of 682 posts
Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite
LLMs are quite good at optimization. Here is a simple prompt - rewrite this crap from electron to rust + whatever time tested ui framework. And now we have 80% less ram usage.
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It would make memory-poor phones more viable. Like why can't we have a 512MB, or even 256MB RAM phone. Although I doubt that the software effort would be cheaper than just buying the extra RAM. It's definitely much more uncertain.
Those exist, they're just feature phones. Smartphones have to run general purpose apps and that takes RAM.
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I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet. Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating…
I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.
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You'll forgive me if perhaps I want something as important as eye surgery to be well regulated. Have a look at health outcomes for literally any industry where regulation is lax, like Brazilian plastic surgery. It's not great.
Sure, I totally get you. Then higher costs, lower availability and crappier services (all due to less competition and more bureaucratic hoops) is a price you should be happily willing to pay.
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The Taiwan war that the world is sleepwalking into is going to wipe out so much chip capacity that the current inflation will look like a blip.
Are you expecting that China invades Taiwan and destroys chip production? Or cuts the world off and keeps the supply for itself?
What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
It’s hilarious that they’ll spend a trillion renting GPUs instead of just making their own. Even if you were nowhere near state of the art, being able to produce millions of your own cards every year at cost would save you a lot of money.
"The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible."
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Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…
You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Capitalism is about producing stuff. To create a large variety of (useful) products for society. You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get mo…
Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence.
> Capitalism is about producing stuff.
Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.
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This also put a lot into perspective: > these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.
I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet. Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating…
It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM. What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development ph…
Unless you can use apps created 10 years ago the is no sense to produce phones with old specs. Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway
My personal laptop is a ULV 6th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM. Gets the job done, slowly but usably. That's about 9 years old. It runs Ubuntu. A dozen or so Firefox tabs, Kicad, VS Code, Slack. Computer things.
I'm of the opinion that application developers should be given middle-tier consumer systems as work machines. The whole notion of "dogfooding" is "dog-something else" if your devs experience the product using different hardware from the customer.