wanted to make a post about the perpetual arms race between hardware engineers making their devices as fast as possible and software engineers making their programs as unoptimized as possible, but i couldnt figure out a way to word it
all im gonna say is, theres functionally no reason a phone needs 16 gigs of ram and an insanely fast processor to run youtube. and "tick-tock". and occasionally texting your friends. maybe listen to music now and then. the fact that an iphone 8 is "outdated" and "slow" is stupid. why should an App with words and pictures use 6 gigs of ram. why should my device be able to handle 4k video. i cant even see the pixels anymore at 1080p on a 6 inch screen. cameras in phones are really good now? ok. only because companies stopped investing in producing small digital cameras. game graphics are super impressive on phones now? dont care. we had a tool for that. called a "handheld gaming console". you kids wouldnt understand.
fifty million fucking tonnes of e-waste every year because software vendors insist on writing everything in ffffffucking javascript. fuck you.
About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
— Niklaus Wirth (1995), A plea for lean software
so in the past we’d blame this on x86 instruction set bloat (long story.. SSE, 3dnow, etc) yet even since FINALLY making the long needed pivot to ARM (it’s more efficient) we’re now incredibly bogged down in the extremely whack JIT java legacy shit from google. not to mention most apps are just Websites With Spyware
however, there is a name for this phenomena, as promised by the title:
