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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

#491

Post by chrisjj »

remarkEon wrote: post #387

I still run Windows 10 on my PC, and one night I spend about 3 hours with ChatGPT turning off all of the bullshit telemetry and other nonsense that Windows runs in the background. Total was about 2.5 GB of RAM, roughly. Why is Windows like this? One would think the at the company whose value proposition is, allegedly, "optimize your productivity" would not do things like this with their operating system. When this PC…

> One would think the at the company whose value proposition is, allegedly, "optimize your productivity" would not do things like this

The company's "optimise our productivity" trumps.

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

#492

Post by 72deluxe »

gruturo wrote: post #280

In the era of coding with frontier LLMs, it should take Microsoft 20 junior engineers, a couple seniors, a token budget and a month or two to fix most of this shit by building lean, native apps. Given that they can obviously spare this kind of resourcing, I truly wonder why they won't. Not that I give a crap - removed the last windows machine from my home ages ago at this point.

Yes it's odd that given the obsession with LLMs and how much native code they've been trained on, why on earth they can't actually ever seem to write a good native app using their own frameworks is baffling.

Having said that, the code for Windows Calculator is truly astonishingly over-engineered. I don't understand who "designs" stuff like that in C++. It's insanely engineered, so perhaps they have truly lost their ability to do anything well?

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

#493

Post by ethbr1 »

lesostep wrote: post #452
WarmWash wrote: post #331

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?

AI currently writes median-good code which is by definition better than the worst developers' code.

In order to push beyond that (e.g. architecture, size, performance), the human has to bring the constraints. There's only so much AI can/should default assume from "write code for me" (which I expect a lot of bad / non-HN developers are doing).

It is exciting that there's an opportunity for global improvement though! After the general model improvement pace slows, expect there will be a lot of room for code gen AI optimization, and if "write code for me" can be made to generate more efficient code... suddenly all AI-generated code (read: most code) will improve.

Shit code is out in the wild because the company decided to optimize for programmer labor cost instead of code efficiency. If instead apples:apples because AI code gen is being used both ways, everyone wins.

Feels like what I imagine were the early days of optimizing compilers, when I'm sure there were a large number of really bad assembly programmers out there.

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

#494

Post by player1234 »

jijji wrote: post #472
harshreality wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because programmers in 2006 didn't understand programming. They didn't understand how to make their software better . Real programming means writing your own javascript glue, pulling in hundreds of supply-chain-compromised js libraries that you never inspect or profile, and running the whole thing in a browser engine, while making sure to store all state in the cloud. The modern breed of programmers who don't…

rust programs are a lot of times faster and orders of magnitude safer than C and C++ counterparts... where is your data to support your assertion that rust programs use more resources than C and C++ programs?

[dead]

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

#496

Post by moffkalast »

fl0id wrote: post #483
WarmWash wrote: post #331

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

Forty functions with the same purpose are still better than importing react.

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

#497

Post by trinix912 »

ttoinou wrote: post #466
trinix912 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It physically will not fit a modern motherboard.

You can get an old mobo with an old CPU

Which will only support up to around 16-32GB anyways and most likely won’t be supported by Windows 11. You’re not really better off that way and I’m saying this as someone with a DDR3 setup in my closet and a ton of DDR/DDR2/DDR3 RAM sticks laying around.

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

#498

Post by mort96 »

latexr wrote: post #457
mort96 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pictures and frame buffers. If you're running fullscreen at 4k, you're probably gonna take two roughly 3840x2160x3 byte frame buffers for the window. Your designers want a background image which moves as you scroll in some parallax style; that's over 3840x2160x3 bytes more for the pixel buffer backing the image layer. And let's say roughly 50% of your screen is text with subpixel (aka full color) anti aliasing; that…

Let’s maybe ease up on the designers, there. It’s not like they are the sole cause of bad decisions and developers always do everything right if not for their pesky demands. There are order of magnitudes more shitty apps caused by bad programming than by a designer wanting a larger image. Plus, if you’re doing everything designers ask without questioning or collaboratively discussing the tradeoffs, there’s a non-zero…

It wasn't actually meant to be a slight against designers, the choice to have a big background image is sometimes perfectly fine. You're a bad developer if you argue against it because it'll use some small amount of extra memory that your users aren't gonna notice.

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

#499

Post by vor_ »

fragmede wrote: post #90
david-gpu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money are these companies going to make by reducing their weather app to 1MB, or 10MB? How much is it going to cost them to get there? The world doesn't run on personal aesthetics, when nobody is willing to pay for them.

The MacBook Neo has only 8GiB of RAM. This is widely decried as not enough. The RAMpocalypse means that 8 GiB is going to have to be enough or else it'll eat into Apple's margins. The Neos are wildly popular though because people have used it and 8 GiB is fine. So while the singular weather app being smaller itself isn't material, in aggregate, macOS being more efficient is something that lets Apple sell a lower spec…

Apple has been using the "macOS is more efficient" excuse since the early 2000s to justify skimping on RAM.

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

#500

Post by khalic »

tonypapousek wrote: post #261
hadrien01 wrote: post #254

What's worse is that the previous version of the same Weather app was fully native on Windows 10. Why would you take a perfectly working app and downgrade it like this?

Well, this is Microsoft and Windows; it would be weird if it got better.

Yeah, people are acting like it's not been decades of microsoft pumping out spaghetti code at industrial scale.
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