Open source developers are just like you and me. They'll get fed up with the bullshit and start developing things they need with the resources they have, just like they've always done.

That'll be 800€ and all change you own.

Even Electron apps aren't necessarily ram hoarders: Stretchly, which is a break reminder and thus needs to always run in the background, takes something like 20 or 40 MB of memory.

3/5 of the way through 100% Final Fantasy II. Figure by the time I catch up to modern final fantasy either hardware will be better again or people will optimize again. Either way I got time

That's been the thinking for the last couple of decades at least. But it can't continue if people can't afford new hardware.

Yep. My 64 gigs of RAM died in my old setup a few weeks ago, and instead of paying out the ass for replacement DDR4 RAM, I decided to pay out the ass for DDR5 RAM and upgrade while I was at it. Only did 32 gigs, because I really wasn't using most of my 64 gigs (I thought). A few days ago, I ended up having to set up a swap file because a Rust project I was working on kept crashing VSCode while it was running the analyzer. What are we doing here.

I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on "virtual memory" on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven't really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

But TL; DR; I'd be more inclined to blame "bloat" on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.

VSCode history is so messed up. Microsoft buys github and stops production of github team's IDE, then uses the framework developed for that IDE to make VSCode.

Fucking 1600s colonizer behavior.

No thanks. Any software that has AI integration as one of its main selling points is shitware imo.

In Tauri, the rust backend is the glue between web/js and OS functions. Yet you don't need to do any rust code, it's delivered ready.

So what was the original saying? As I see it, this phrase is wrong no matter how you look at it. Because all ram is used at all times, for example if you have 32GB of free ram, the kernel will use all of it as a page cache to speed up the file system. The more free ram you have the more files can be cached, avoiding access to the disk when you read them.

"unused ram is wasted ram"

yeah yeah yeah, great. but all you motherfuckers did that and i'm fucking out of ram.

They used Cloud Computation and AI ("Actually Interns") way before it was cool.

And it always used Chromium under the hood.

The article mentions Chrome/Chromium: 9 times
The article mentions Google: 0 times

Google made Chrome. Chrome had that multi-process architecture at its core which allowed to consume as much memory as needed even on 32-bit OS. Chromium was always inside it and open source. Then they created CEF, which allowed webdevs to build "real" apps, and that opened the floodgates. Electron was first built on it but they wanted to include Node and couldn't because it required too much experience in actual coding. So they switched to Chromium. It didn't change much in the structure, just basically invited more webdevs to build more "real" apps (at 1.0 release Electron advertised hundreds of apps built with it on its website).

Google could do something about how the web engine works in frameworks (that don't need that much actual web functionality), but didn't. They invited webdevs to do anything they want. Webdevs didn't care about security because mighty Google would just publish new Chromium update eventually. They never realized they don't need more security in their local "real" apps gui that connect to their websites because there is not much room for security danger in such scenarios. They just always updated the underlying engine because why not. Chromium dll is now at 300 mb or something? All of that code is much needed by everyone, is it not?

So, for me the sequence was always seen as this:

Google (caring about webdevs, not OS) ->

Webdevs (not caring about native code and wanting to sell their startup websites by building apps) ->

Reckless web development becoming a norm for desktop apps ->

Corporations not seeing problems with the above (e.g. Microsoft embedding more stuff with WebView2 aka Chromium)

So yes, Google has everything to do with it because it provided all the bad instruments to all the wrong people.

Personally, I don't care much about hating Microsoft anymore because its products are dead to me and I can only see my future PCs using Linux.