alt Hacker NewsI know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated?
Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?
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I was on LinkedIn last night, and someone posted their new SAAS. The website was basically a calendar where you could log what you did each day of the month. I checked my memory usage, and that site was using 1GB of memory. They were also charging $100 for it...
Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?
That's crazy talk. What will you ask for next? Add functionality to make apps at least as good/capable as they were in the 1990s and early 2000s? And then? Apps that interoperate? Insane.
More seriously and more ironically, at the same time, we've now reached a strange time where even non-programmers can vibe-code better software than they can buy/subscribe to - not because models are that good, or programming isn't hard, but because enshittification that has this industry rotten to the core and unable to deliver useful tools anymore.
Tell that to those who are still using Electron, TypeScript to create bloated desktop apps.
Among my favorite failed dorking around experiences is pre-Raspberry, when the Arduino was still hobby-level equipment. This was over a decade ago...
With only a few kilobytes of code, you could send a UDP packet directly to your phone, with an app you "wrote" with just a few lines of code (to receive, without auto-confirmation).