CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@djlavoie.bsky.social Oh jeez. Can you imagine what's found its way to this guy's 'all mail' or 'SPAM' folder over the years?

@masek @quarterswede @Robbes0211 I was very happy to see that the AMD Strix Halo and the recent Intel iGPUs are approaching the horsepower of the AMD RX 7600 that seems to be the sweet spot Steam is aiming for. I honestly don't see why any game would need much more than that after seeing what my son's experience is; he upscales 1080p to 4K and has a great experience with all sorts of games, and it seems like developers could do some really good stuff in the constraints of that level of hardware rather than making hardware that consumea more power than a toaster oven.

@quarterswede @Robbes0211 @masek It's not quite related, but I used to work Endpoint, and I had a customer who was FURIOUS that their new laptop was the same speed as their old one at the thing they did most with it, which was managing an entire library of books in one spreadsheet. Turns out that the new laptop had basically the same per-core speed as their old one, and the spreadsheet was only using
200MB RAM, and the sort operation they were waiting on was single threaded.

All that extra horsepower in a system that had 4x the specs of the previous were wasted. Just not even being tapped.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, just booting Windows 11 with the basic corporate EDR and management stuff seems to use 10GB these days. I get that the software is probably better threaded, sitting on managed libraries, etc., but it's still pretty bonkers to see something like the Start Menu consuming hundreds of mega of memory and slamming multiple cores to do... whatever it is that it does these days.

Without knowing more about it, maybe that CRM software should do less in the browser and more on the back-end, where the resources between many connecting clients can be coalesced and cached, with the browser just showing what needs to be shown.

@quarterswede @Robbes0211 @masek I know a lot of apps are inefficient, but what I'm saying is that the app you mention should be reworked so it doesn't just gobble what is now a precious resource. Office endpoints shouldn't need 32GB RAM the same way a good looking video game shouldn't need a $400 GPU. Windows shouldn't eat 10GB just to get to the desktop.

I'm normally in favor of the march of progress and an understanding that newer things are bigger, but several things have changed in the last five years that should have us re-examining our traditional patterns. I don't think the things operating system and app developers are delivering by targeting larger systems are... actually in anyone's best interest.

@Robbes0211 @masek unpopular opinion:

PC processors and GPUs have been good enough for years and the development slowdown/longer cycles aren't a bad thing. Games are not bound by the limitations of a mid-range CPU or GPU now, the choices the developer makes are much more impactful.

I use 4-8 year old hardware and barely notice the difference between it and the latest. My son has a fantastic gaming experience on a PC with similar specs to a Steam Machine Mk2.

Yes, the AI effects on the market suck, but the gamer culture of always wanting to build beefier rigs was getting toxically absurd and pointless. We don't need to double specs at the edge every two years anymore; we shouldn't even want to.

I feel the same way about the processing power in PCs. We just don't need office computers to have 32GB RAM and terabytes of fast storage. That stuff is fun, but what we need is for developers to target operating systems and software at reasonable levels and stop expecting the installed edge to ride Moore's Law forever.

@GossiTheDog I keep saying that the real defense is in the fundamentals, and it's often cheap. Problem is that it means facing and addressing your own faults. It's introspective, boring, and sometimes painful.

Buying AI tools is much more exciting for the execs.

I sometimes feel like a teenager who really wants to tidy up, then a parent busts into my room shouting "You don't need to clean this place, let's get some fast food and go toy shopping!"

@cR0w The same thing is happening in the non-code space, with documents at work. People are generating reams of text and throwing it at colleagues, and a lot of it is wrong, but it takes more time to mark it wrong than it did to conjure up.

...and a lot of people are having trouble seeing why it's a problem.

It's allowing some people to pour champagne on themselves while externalizing the hard work to others.