I'm writing this from a crappy laptop with 2GB of RAM and a dull screen.

Planned obsolescence is one of the major engines that keep our current system of oligarchic hypercapitalism alive. Won't anybody think of the poor oligarchs?!?

Resources are just way cheaper than developers.

It's a lot cheaper to have double the ram than it is to pay for someone to optimize your code.

And if you're working with code that requires that serious of resource optimization you'll invariably end up with low level code libraries that are hard to maintain.

... But fuck the Always on internet connection and DRM for sure.

Reminds me of a funny story I heard Tom Petty once tell. Apparently, he had a buddy with a POS car with a crappy stereo, and Tom insisted that all his records had to be mixed and mastered not so that they sound great on the studio's million dollar equipment but in his friend's car.

Most of the abstractions, frameworks, "bloats", etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper, but to run such software you need a more and more expensive hardware. In a way it is just pushing some of the development costs onto a consumer.

Reminds me of the UK's Government Digital Services, who want to digitise government processes but also have a responsibility to keep that service as accessible and streamlined as possible, so that even a homeless person using a £10 phone on a 2G data service still has an acceptable experience.

An example. Here they painstakingly remove JQuery (most modern frameworks are way too big) from the site and shave 32Kb off the site size.

When my dad died suddenly in 2015 and I cleared out his office at his job, I spun down his Win95 machine that he'd been using for essential coding and testing. My father was that programmer—the one who directly spoke to a limited number of clients and stakeholders because he had a tendency to ask people if they were stupid.

When you see what ONE coder was able to do in the 80s, with 64K of RAM, on a 4MHz CPU, and in assembly, it's quite incredible. I miss my Amstrad CPC6128 and all its good games.

Doesn't really matter what your developers run on, you need your QA to be running on trash hardware.

We can even cut out the middleman and optimize unity and unreal to run on crap

I can think of a few games franchises that wouldn't have trashed their reputation if they'd have had an internal rule like "if it doesn't play on 50% of the machines on Steam's hardware survey, it's not going out"

I knew someone that refused to upgrade the programmer's workstation precisely because it would have been a big leap in performance compared to what their costumers used the software on. Needless to say the program was very fast even on weaker hardware.

We need more shorter games, made by happier devs paid more to work fewer hours, with worse graphics.

The ideal is “plays fine at lowest graphics settings on old hardware” while having “high graphics settings” that look fantastic but requires too-of-the-line hardware to play reasonably.

Generally this is almost impossible to achieve.

I think that every operating system needs to a have a "do what the fuck I told you to" mode, especially as it comes to networking. I've come close to going full luddite just trying to get smart home devices to connect to a non-internet connected network, (which of course you can only do through a dogshit app) and having my phone constantly try to drop that network since it has no Internet.

I get the desire to have everything be as hand-holdy as possible, but it's really frustrating when the hand holding way doesn't work and there is absolutely zero recourse, and even less ability to tell what went wrong.

Then there's my day job, where I get do deal with crappy industrial software, flakey Internet connections and really annoying things like hyper-v occupying network ports when it's not even open.

But .. where is the innovation (and also Alt text?)

The thing is that developers tend to keep things as simple as possible and overly optimize stuff, when you find bloatware is usually some manager that decided to have it.

If I can't type the program into my TRS-80 from a computer magazine I don't trust it.

I'm training to work in hardware currently. Its my hope that there at least, people still care about min-maxing power vs performance.

This is the way. Most of the games today run as shit because people doesn't know or care about computer resources management.

Better to run a whole generation , so like 30 years so people would start planning the upgrades ahead for when everyone is ready

I think I already posted this at some point, but Software Disenchantment is always worth mentioning in this context.

Stop using JS/Node for even brewing your coffee and see this problem resolves itself.

But how would you implement that new Microsoft Screenshot surveillance bullshit feature? Just imagine what a giant waste of resources that is. You have something on your screen which is information and mostly likely already in a good form to process like text. But it makes a screenshot every few seconds and uses some "AI" to make the already existing information searchable again from a fucking screenshot??? Maybe I missed something but that is how I understood the feature.

Antix made my old Chromebook’s usable. Old tech is fun.

I 100% agree. But, where Linux?

In 1000 years this meme/tweet/post will be what my entire generation's existence will be known for. Noone will remember the politics, the disasters, the geopolitical events good or bad, they will remember our entire world and existence ad the only time that technology advancement was driven by the big tech mafia trying to see how far it can get it's dick in your digital footprint.

It's the new cops v robbers or bootleggers v prohibition race. Our tech is getting faster to out run the corporate fuckin maleare but the faster we go the more they stuff in so to the avg user they're ended with paying $6k for a GPU/cpu combo that runs at the same efficiency as my school library's c9mputer did running ms-dos running Oregon Trail in 1995. You are so confined by only having access to functions with massive fuckiing app buttons that even logging in as a guest user req you to memorize every CLI ever made.

It's become my defining "I don't want to live in this world anymore"

How goes the saying? 32 MB of RAM and always swapping?

You have my vote.

I make sure my own web game can run smoothly on crappy hardware. It runs well on my gaming laptop downclocked to 400MHz with a 4x slowdown set by Chrome. It also loads in a couple seconds with a typical crappy Internet connection of 200kbps and >10% packet loss. However, it doesn't run smoothly on my Snapdragon 425 phone or my old Core 2 Duo laptop. Is this my game or just browser overhead?

that's why I've been doing most of my gamedev stuff on an old craptop from 2016.
performance issues become apparent immediately

Can you even run Windows with just 2gb?

I like how KDE has been getting faster and faster as time went on. Like Lisa Simpson's perpetuum mobile.

Hell yeah, I'd be getting paid for shouting at people

can we get this law passed pls

Yeah, screw CEF, Electron, and webdevs who can't live without those.

I wrote an email service called Port87, and I did it on a really low end laptop (an Ideapad 3 from 2021) to make sure that it works well, even on a potato.

Hey I know that guy he's me

I would love to be this person. I'll even fix some of the bugs I find.

This is like the definition of a "conservative". Progress shouldn't happen because their not ready for it. They are comfortable with what they use and are upset that other people are moving ahead with new things. New things shouldn't be allowed.

Most games have the ability to downscale so that people like this can still play. We don't stop all progress just because some people aren't comfortable with it. You learn to adjust or catch up.

By the way, I only threw that picture because I liked the background color. I didn't read the text itself.

i played Skyrim on i3 4005u with integrated graphics and 4gb ram when i was high schooler, they did epic in 7th console generation as limitations was 512mb shared memory and 250gflops gpu

Kinda has a point...

Yes, this would work with most applications.

lol.

Yeah, well, I have 1.8Gb so 😏

You sound like some guy screaming everyone should own a horse after the car became popular.