2024:
- What are you doing with that 8gb of ram and fourth gen i5?
- Using sway on Alpine (>500mb usage) :3
Also, games went from writing the most cleverly optimized code you’ve ever seen to squeeze every last drop of compute power out of a 6502 CPU all while fitting on a ROM cartridge to not giving a single shit about any sort of efficiency, blowing up the install size with unused and duplicated assets, and literally making fun of anyone without the latest highest end computer for being poor.
I know it’s a one-of-a-kind game, but it still amazes me that Roller Coaster Tycoon released in 1999, a game where you could have hundreds of NPCs on screen at a time, unique events and sound effects for each of those NPCs, physics simulations of roller coasters and rides, terrain manipulation, and it was all runnable on pretty basic hardware at that time. Today’s AAA games could never. I’m glad some indie games are still carrying the torch for small, efficient games that people can play on any hardware though.
Ah, back when game development was managed by game developers who were gamers themselves and prioritized quality over min-maxing shareholder profits…
Or another way to look at it, is that it was the market takeover phase of capitalism where capitalists are willing to operate at a loss to corner the market and create their own monopolies (see Nintendo, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc). But once market grow stalls out they switch to the milking phase or enshitification phase of capitalism where they prioritize profits over everything else
Completely unconnected to OP, but oh fuck do I hate that Microsoft Excel couldn’t open two documents side by side before like 2017. They all opened in one instance of the app unless you launch another as an admin, and it even screamed at you that it can’t open files with the same name. W?T?F?
With 16gb of RAM and 102% CPU, the computer shows you a UI on any underlying hardware, any monitor/tv/whatever, handles a moise, keyboard, sound, handles any hardware interruption, probably fetches and sends stuff to the internet, scans your disk to index files so you can search almost instantly through gigabytes of storage whether it’s USB sticks, ssds, harddrive, nvme drive. And probably a lot of other stuff I’m forgetting. Meanwhile the other thingy with 4kb ram did college math problems. Impressive for the time yes, but that’s it.
Yes, nowadays there is a lot of inefficiency, but that comparison does not, and never did, make sense.
You are being practical. I would say the fair amount of RAM in usage achieving all those tasks is 512MB. Just checked my Gentoo box with XFCE and Bluetooth & PulseAudio crap running, no tuning, merely 700MB of RAM in use.
Sure, then you can start libreoffice calc and go up to around 1g of ram and close to 0% CPU anyway.
My point wasn’t on exact numbers because obviously the ones in the image are made up, unless that excel file is a monster of macros, VBA scripts and connections to numerous data lakes.
2024: What are you doing with 16GB RAM and 300% CPU at 5.4GHz?
- Running some random process introduced with Windows 11 that adds literally nothing to the users experience other than heat and fan noise
I mean, the taskbar, start menu and file explorer header is written in react native
That flashing colon between hour and minute is rendered server-side! What a masterpiece!
Wait seriously? I’d have assumed it would at least be written in .NET or something and not fucking JavaScript.
