RE: https://labyrinth.social/@nash/116178591588359360

you ever write code so inefficient you have to secure 80% of the world’s DRAM production

@colinstu Electron app authors be like
@colinstu In the era of the first Pentium processors we had 8 MiB (yes, Mibi) of RAM quite often, and 16 MiB the lucky ones.
Had a colleague who wrote a memory leaking application, because he wrote convoluted C++ code, instantiating too many out of control classes - the style that I would later witness with Java.
When he got a new job position he was triumphant: "Ha! Now I have a PC with 256 megs!".
He didn't realize that any space can be filled.
@luc0x61 I had installed Linux on a machine with 16MB in 1995, started X, a web server and a Netware server. I had an bunch of terminal windows open. It wasn’t until I started another terminal window that I ran out of memory and found out that this Slackware version didn’t enable the swap correctly, so I had done all that without swap.
@ahltorp The first version of Linux I actually installed was from Lasermoon, an UK distributor, Linux-FT 1.x, and it did run on a 486 with 4 MiB RAM. We used it, along with early Slackware, on many 486 on static IPs to the net, for some time.
A colleague some 10thousand km from the office, one day that no one was noticing him online, logged on a machine to play the "when henry met sally" notable scene, on the speaker. That generated quite some hilarity in the silent office.
@luc0x61 @colinstu @harald not can every space be filled, but every space WILL be filled.
@colinstu So I really didn't need that university algorithms course after all?
Microsoft of the 1990s says hi
@colinstu doesn't count if your program was correct.
@colinstu you'd think with scarcity of RAM developers would refocus on writing more efficient code that can handle tasks with less RAM use.
but instead we get more vibe coding.
@colinstu of course we've long abandoned any pretenses that code needs to actually be useful and work for its intended use case. just more code for the code god.

@elexia @colinstu

while this period sucks, i'm rather positive cause it seems that there is a growing interest at low code, optimization etc... I might be in a echo chamber as it is one of my interests, but as i'm spammed by vibe-code bros and like-it-or-not wannabee, i think it's legit.

@omar @colinstu one can only hope. not much of a computer toucher myself, especially these days, but I do have some interest and hope for a permacomputing movement that would align well with this, even if it's not looking like it will be a mainstream thing in the near future.
@colinstu
C programming on 64KB w/Z80 cpu.
@colinstu Wot happens if you tell an AI "see this code base? - make it do the same thing but a few orders of magnitude faster and cheaper".
@TimWardCam @colinstu
I think you will find a lot of assumptions are unfounded
@colinstu As someone who remembers packing bits and worrying about approaching address &A6F0, the reach for petabytes worries me that someone is doing it wrong.