LucidLynxHold on to Your Hardware
I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.
Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while.
This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it.
I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.
If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.
I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.
Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an application does use it people whine about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow" it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but is there an actual problem? Crickets.
I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many Electron apps are extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify sometimes finds a way to lag, when it's just a freaking list of text.
Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd figure your box is slow. But that's not even what happens. Maybe they would've been sluggish even using native frameworks. Teams seems to do 1M network round-trips on each action, so even if it was perfectly optimized assembly for my specific CPU it would probably make no difference.
Nearly all apps are sluggish for a very clear reason - the average dev is ass. It's possible to make fast apps using electron, just like it's possible to make fast apps using anything else. People complain about react too, react is fast as fuck. I can make react apps snappy as hell. It's just crappy devs.
The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resources available to it. This mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days" just leads to worse and worse software design instead of programmers actually learning how to do things well. That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making software that minimizes its system footprint has become a niche instead of the mainstream.
tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle. They're looking for their RAM to be available.
I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap.
In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.
I have no issues with browsers specifically having to use a bunch of resources. They are complicated as fuck software, basically it's own operating system. Same for video games or programs that do heavy data processing.
The issue is with applications that have no business being entitled to large amount of resources. A chat app is a program that runs in the background most of the time and is used to sporadic communication. Same for music players etc. We had these sorts of things since the 90's, where high end consumer PCs hat 16mb RAM.