alt Hacker News> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
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Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.
It seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more bloated to compensate. Or maybe it’s vice versa.
I wonder if there’s a computer science law about this. This could be my chance!
That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term, modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
This is the way
For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.