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Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

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Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly . Even opening it is instantaneous. Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't…

>> AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. To this day I never saw an AI write anything less than a 3Mb binary. Do you have specific examples in mind, and if so, can you share them?

Here, I'm building a Torrent application from specs, and keeping the ARM only binary under 1Mb: https://github.com/josusanmartin/rustorrent

It's fully vibecoded, and quite functional, although I'm still working out some bugs.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it. You say tomato we say tomahto At the end of the day bloated app is a bloated app its consequences are the same.

10 apss using 100mb each plus 600mb shared use less ram than 10 apps using 200mb each.

Tis not shared

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us still know how to write software like that. And enjoy doing it. I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is…

AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly . Even opening it is instantaneous. Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't…

AI does this when it's not warranted, and even happily writes two functions with the same purpose.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#484
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. Yeah, people get upset when you spew out total bullshit. I work as a performance specialist and "AI writes code like that" is utter nonsense. AI writes the same terrible performing code that was the mediocre developer standard on Stackexchange and other codebases it ate. You still need a lot of vigilance and time to make well performing software and…

LLM coding assistants have a bias towards writing standalone implementations instead of pulling in libraries to do a job, which does tend to sidestep probably the most common cause of bloated software: pulling in too many layers of abstraction. Most software can be pretty damn fast (at least as far as users are going to notice) without needing too much of a focus on optimization, but just by not accidentally screwing…

Just writing your own bloat is not the way to go though, especially when it makes the codebase quickly balloon...

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#485

My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.

2 years ago I stated that we should stop worrying about software consuming a lot of ram. I had just built my pc with 128gb of ddr5 ram spending less than an average android phone (I think like $300). I would like to retract that statement. Thanks.

  I stated that we should stop worrying about [X] consuming [finite resource].
Why would you ever say something like this? When was that ever true?

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#486
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every comment without an /s at the end is definitely 100% serious and unironic.

Ah... now I know that Microsoft is running full weather simulations on each user desktop... pretty neat.

You missed the Clouding@Home announcement?

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but many modern computers are using unified memory. On such systems all memory is almost equal, despite often reported differently. For example, on my 5 years old laptop with integrated AMD GPU, windows 10 calculator in default state uses 33 MB system RAM, 9.6 MB dedicated VRAM. Maximized to FullHD screen, same app uses 36 MB system RAM, 13 MB dedicated VRAM. Maybe the OS counts VRAM as active private working s…

> many modern computers are using unified memory. Not really true. Even machines with integrated graphics in Windows aren't truly using a fully shared memory pool. Usually the hardware reserves a chunk of the system memory for the iGPU.

“aren't truly using a fully shared memory pool” I think with AMD iGPUs I have here (GCN 5.1 and RDNA3 generations) it’s actually unified, at least on Windows 10. The difference between the reserved portion and the rest of the memory is cosmetic.

From Vulkan API POV, the reserved portion has device local and multi instance heap flags, the main heap doesn’t. However, the memory type is identical across all heaps, all of them have device local, host visible and host coherent property flags. And I can confirm VMA library from Vulkan SDK successfully allocates way more device visible memory than the size of that reserved portion.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#488
post #215

Why does everything turn into a browser

Mainly due to extremely lazy developers and/or a generation of developers who only learned very very high level web languages and don't understand anything deeper and so are completely detached from actual memory allocations or resource usage. Since this is coming from Microsoft (which isn't new - the Vista clock widget would interrupt all the time, very inefficient), it just highlights how far from the tree the modern apples have fallen.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#489

What if we make all these apps obsolete with 100 tools < 100mb.

I miss lightweight tools so much. Even on Linux, opening some apps feels slow and sluggish, maybe because of Snap or Flatpak containerization, I don't know.

It is a breath of fresh air to run older applications like pcmanfm or xfe or xfwrite in comparison to flatpak and snap applications. flatpak's on-the-fly decompression of a file tree to run the app doesn't help its performance.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM" What a wonderful world we have created where the fix for a 1GB RAM guzzler reduces it to a mere 130MB. Now I could start off with my old ZX80 or even my C64 (which is doing fine, thanks, and sports a USB "drive" next to its Quickshot II) but I think my first 80486 is a realistic comparison. That ran at 25MHz, had a maths co-pro in it had 4MB RAM, a 20MB IDE HDD…

What inxi commnd shows a map of pollen concentration, weather alerts, and air quality? How do you generate a graph comparing this year's temperatures to the previous yeas' average climate? Comparing inxi to Windows Weather is like comparing vi to Autodesk. You can make 3d graphics for sure, but it's not exactly comparable. When I run inxi -w, I get this: Weather: Message: Error: Your access to this resource has been…

> Your access to this resource has been blocked.

Do you have VPN enabled?

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