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?!?
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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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.
If you consider only the RAM on the developers' PCs maybe. If you count in thousands of customer PCs then optimizing the code outperforms hardware upgrades pretty fast. If because of a new Windows feature millions have to buy new hardware that's pretty desastrous from a sustainability point of view.
But that's just more business!
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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.
Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper
That's true to an extent. But I've been on the back side of this kind of development, and the frameworks can quickly become their own arcane esoteric beasts. One guy implements the "quick and easy" framework (with 16 gb of bloat) and then fucks off to do other things without letting anyone else know how to best use it. Then half-dozen coders that come in behind have no idea how to do anything and end up making these bizarre hacks and spaghetti code patches to do what the framework was already doing, but slower and worse.
The end result is a program that needs top of the line hardware to execute an oversized pile of javascripts.
But this does not neccesarily mean the consumer pays more. Buying a current mavhine and having access to affordable software seems like a good deal.
Capitalism makes it work only in one direction. Something became cheaper? Profits go up. Sometging became more expensive? Prices go up.
If the software is much more expensive to develop, most is it just won't exist at all. You can get the same effect by just not using software you feel is bloated.
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.
That's the most professional comment section I've ever fucking seen.
Website is amazingly responsive as well, seems to be working.
Hasn't been linked to reddit yet probably.
Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.
a) don't let in anyone who acts like petulant children b) give adults an outlet for occasional outbursts that would make them sound like petulant children
Contentious in the comments!
The issue with UK services is that they all are fucking random and plenty of sections don't work. There are billions of logins, bugs and sometimes you just get redirected to some bloody nightmare portal from 1990-s. And EU citizens couldn't log in into HMRC portal for years after Brexit, what a fucking joke! And all they do is spend time removing jQuery, good fucking job!
At a certain point it makes more sense to subsidize better low-end hardware than to make every web site usable on a 20 year old flip phone. I'd argue that if saving 32 kB is considered a big win, you're well past that point. Get that homeless guy a £50 phone and quit wasting the time of a bunch of engineers who make more than that in an hour.
Get that homeless guy a home.
Also, if you are in a basement/mountains/middle of Siberia, waiting for 32 kB takes quite some time.
I'm all for ending homelessness, but that's really a different problem than we were discussing. I'm pretty confident jQuery isn't stopping anyone from being housed.
Anyway, there's no way you're gonna convince me 32 kB is a lot of data. It's just not. Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second. Just the text of this thread is probably more than 32 kB. If you can't download that much data, you only technically have Internet service at all.
Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second.
Even 3G is not always avaliable, even 3G sometimes slower than 2G.
32 KB here, 32 KB there and boom - you have bitbucket.
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Also, engieneers already had tech debt of updating to new jQuery version, which can result in a lot of wierd bugs, so it was achiveing two goals at once.
And probably 50£ phone IS their target device.
🙄
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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.
Your dad sounds like the childhood hero of mine who got me into computers.
Severe ADHD prevented me from ever learning to code, but I became damn good at repairs and things and just general understanding of computers because he was available to ask questions at almost any time.
He went to school auctions every year and got me a pile of hardware to learn from. He never asked for anything in exchange. All around great guy.
I heard him on the phone a few times dealing with the people who he worked with though. Good god he was mean. I couldn’t imagine him being that way with me ever, but he was brutal when it came to work and money.
A dude called him one time while I was sitting there, he listened for a few minutes and he said, “I’ve got a 14 year old kid here, he’s been doing this stuff for about 2 years. I’m gonna let him walk you through this for the 10th fucking time because you’re a goddamn idiot and feeling like a fool when you hang up the phone with a grown man isn’t teaching you any lessons. Maybe get a pen for this one because if I have to remind that a child walked you through it last time, I’m not going to be so fucking friendly.” I was so nervous, apologized multiple times, when I was finished walking him through it he took the phone and said, “now don’t you feel stupid? 25 years and this kid just schooled you.”
He told me, “you gotta be real with idiots or they’ll bother you with stupid problems every single day of your life.”
I wish that lesson had stuck haha, it just wasn’t in me to be mean. As a result, a hobby that I was passionate about all of my life is something I avoid like the plague now. People ruined it for me by bothering me constantly.
I think it's nice of you not to be mean. The industry turned me a bit mean as a defence against people constantly shoveling more work onto me. Try to protect it if you can! I miss my lack of mean dearly.
I seriously have a boiling hatred for computers now because I couldn’t even be a little bit mean. I’ve snapped a few times when people blamed me for problems years after I worked on their stuff, but mostly I just got trampled on and robbed at every turn because I didn’t want to upset anyone.
By the time I was mean enough to demand payment and things like that, I already hated it.
My daughter is passionate about computers, so nowadays if I so much as want to tweak something a little bit I let her do it unless she don’t want to. I don’t want to burn her out too.
That sucks my dude, it sounds like some really shitty people ruined something you liked. So far I've found that the only way to protect yourself against that stuff is to set healthy boundaries. It doesn't have to be rude, but unfortunately some people see it that way. It's a rough time.
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.
Still happens.
Animal Well was coded by one guy, and it was ~35mb on release (I think it's above 100 at this point after a few updates, but still). The game is massive and pretty complex. And it's the size of an SNES ROM.
Dwarf Fortress has to be one of the most complex simulations ever created, developed by two brothers and given out for free for several decades. The game, prior to adding actual graphics, DF was ~100mb and the Steam version is still remarkably compact.
I am consistently amazed by people's ingenuity with this stuff.
SNES ROMs were actually around 4MB. People always spoke about them being 32 Meg or whatever, but they meant megabits.
I did like Animal Well, but gave up after looking at one of the bunny solutions and deciding I didn't have the patience for that.
I think most of the size of games is just graphics and audio. I think the code for most games is pretty small, but for some godforsaken reason it's really important that they include incredibly detailed doorknobs and 50 hours of high quality speech for a dozen languages in raw format.
I think most of the size of games is just graphics and audio. I think the code for most games is pretty small, but for some godforsaken reason it's really important that they include incredibly detailed doorknobs and 50 hours of high quality speech for a dozen languages in raw format.
True. Even Xonotic - opensource game - has very small game engine, but game logic and assets(maps, textures, lightmaps) are 1 gig. And same with AltCraft - small engine, but minecraft assets are huge.
When you see what they did in the 60s and 70s, where they ran an entire country's social security system in a mainframe with a whooping 16Kb of memory (I'm not sure if it was 4 or 16, but it doesn't make that much difference).
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
Jokes on you, my corporate job has crippled the Mac they gave us so much that EVERYONE has trash hardware!
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 think it's given us a big wave of "Return to pixelated tradition" style games. When you see 16-bit sprites in the teaser, you can feel reasonably confident your computer will run it.
Unless they use Unreal Engine and don't know what they are doing. It can be pixely and run like ass.
Octopath Traveler was the last UE based game that really ran well that I can remember.
I don't mind if indie devs try something experimental that melts your computer. Like beamNG needs a decent computer but the target audience kinda knows about that sort of stuff.
The problem is with games like cities skylines 2. Most people buying that game probably don't even know how much RAM they have, it shouldn't be unplayable on a mid range PC.
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