Actshually it's bandwidth censorship if you make something too heavy to be used then it won't get used. It is one of the things China is doing to separate their internet from the rest of the worlds, by having an internet so blazingly fast it is unbearable to goto the world wide web.

So yesh, the epstien class are making the news too slow for typical users to access. /maybe some sarcasm maybe not I'm not sure yet

EDIT: I have decided I was not being sarcastic. https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/reports/shining-a-light-on-the-slowdown-ioda-to-track-internet-bandwidth-throttling/

Episodes of network throttling have been reported in countries like Russia, Iran, Egypt, and Zimbabwe, and many more, especially during politically sensitive periods such as elections and protests. In some cases, entire regions such as Iran’s Khuzestan province have experienced indiscriminate throttling, regardless of the protocol or specific services in use. Throttling is particularly effective and appealing to authoritarian governments for several reasons: Throttling is simple to implement, difficult to detect or attribute and hard to circumvent.```

Costs have been dropping by a factor of 3 per year, but token use increased 40x over the same period. So while the efficiency is contributing a bit to the use, the use is exploding even faster.

Also Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin to make extracting cotton less of a tedious and backbreaking process, which lead to a massive expansion in slavery plantations in the American South due to the increased output and profitability of the crop.

This happens not only with efficiency gains. There is risk overcompensation, which feels kinda the same. Cars that are more secure cause reckless driving, which in turn is the reason accidents happen more often, which eat into the safety gains.

I actually have 100GB of DDR4

They've got RAM! Get'em!

Will disabling the swap file fix that?

Programs that care about memory optimization will typically adapt to your setup, up to a point. More ram isnt going to make a program run any better if it has no use for it

Set swappiness to 5 or something similar, or disable swap altogether unless you're regularly getting close to max usage

unoptimized code that does complex stuff.

You can still have complex code that is optimized for performance. You can spend more resources to do more complex computations and still be optimized so long as you're not wasting processing power on pointless stuff.

For example, in some of my code I have to get a physics model within 0.001°. I don't use that step size every loop, because that'd be stupid and wasteful. I start iterating with 1° until it overshoots the target, back off, reduce the step to 1/10, and loop through that logic until I get my result with the desired accuracy.

'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!

Not at all. For example, Rimworld saves all the map and world data in one big XML (which is bad btw, don't do that): about 2 million lines @75 MB, for a 30-pawns mid-game colony.

So you see, Data is not what uses space. But what uses space instead is, if you don't properly re-use objects/textures (so called "assets"), or even copy and repack the same assets per level/map, because that saves dev time.

Ark Survival Evolved, with "only" about 100 GB requirement, was known as a unoptimized mess back then.

Witcher 3 mod "HD Reworked Next-Gen" has barely 20 GB with 4k textures and high-res meshes. And you can't say that Witcher 3 is not a vibrant and big open world game.

Why are you comparing the most common screen resolution in 2007 to a 4k monitor today? 4k isn't the most common today. This isn't a fair comparison.

Excel is sooo much than it used to be in Office 97. And it's way better than any other spreadsheet software I've tried.

Speaking of, anyone know of any alternative that handles named tables the same as Excel? Built-in filtering/sorting and formulas that can address the table itself instead of a cell range?? Please?

Tbf, there's saves there that efficiency increase means a lot

No, never! Tech corps (both devs and app stores) brainwashed people into thinking "no updates = bad".

Recently, I have seen people complain about lack of updates for: OS for a handheld emulation device (not the emulator, the OS, which does not have any glaring issues), and Gemini protocol browser (gemini protocol is simple and has not changed since 2019 or so).

Maybe these people don't use the calculator app because arithmetic was not updated in a few thousand years.

"More AI features"? Of course we can implement more AI features for you.

Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something's written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don't know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can't know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it's only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn't matter either way, but if it's used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

Also, it's common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn't expect to be slow (otherwise they'd have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.

It’s kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize “premature optimization”, when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary.

I will forever be salty about that one time I blamed of premature optimization for pushing to optimize a code that was allocating memory faster than the GC could free it, which was causing one of the production servers to keep getting OOM crashes.

If urgent emails from one of the big clients who put the entire company into emergency mode during a holiday is still considered "premature", then no optimization is ever going to be mature.

Optomisation often has a cost, weather it's code complexity, maintenance or even just salary. So it has to be worth it, and there are many areas where it isn't enough unfortunately.

I sure hope the tags are wholesom... OH NO.

Yeah, discotd is eating 1.5gb of ram. Actually crazy

I recently had occasion to run a headless Linux distrk and got my socks knowcked off when I ran top and saw idle RAM use at fucking 400 MB