we need to stop making computers more powerful they're as powerful as they need to fucking be.
graphics don't need to get better at this point and GPUs shouldn't be used for ai or farming.
we need to focus on making the tech we currently have consume less power.
like seriously all making computers even more powerful has done—with some exceptions for non-consumer uses—is more harm. more consumption, and has allowed software companies to get away with making their software actively worse and more bloated because they don't need to care about optimising things
i miss when every web application wasn't stupidly slow, i miss when every web browser didn't need 160GB of RAM, and I miss when my slightly higher than mid-range PC didn't keep my room warm just by being courtesy of being switched on and i miss when every application wasn't based on fUCKING ELECTRON
I agree with this when it comes to gaming. Greater accessibility/affordability should be prioritized over leveling up power. Capitalism actively stymies fun.
That's nostalgia talk. Web apps in the past or rather web pages refreshed everything with any request and sometimes it took multiple seconds to wait for the results. Native applications were fast as long as you didnt work on any mid-big amount of data or didn't do any media work.
Compilers were either closed source or you had to go through so many hops to run open source dev stack on non-linux machine. Compiling took a long time and debugging was very difficult, the tooling in the past was much less user friendly.
Capitalist bloodsuckers were still there, finding their way to siphon as much money as possible. Software was very expensive, hardware too. There was much less choices despite more variety in what you could get. There was so much extremely bad solutions, but almost nobody remembers them now.
and yet the problems i have with current software remain.
I'm not saying the past didn't have its problems, I'm saying that the present could be so much better, but it isn't.
It could be, but the present is not bad because of better hardware or developers. It's like complaining about furniture quality blaming modern factory machines and workers.
Stuff is made too fast and not as good because of the capitalist need for constant growth, not because tech is more advanced.
so much this. as an embedded developer i have had to work around limitations and with that comes creativity. you quickly realize that you can't just throw more RAM at the problem. the solutions are different on a PC where clock cycles are so abundant they are basically free.
We traded accessibility, privacy, speed of access, performance, number of requests data and amount of data for ease of development.
And we never looked back once.
Omg the amount of companies that just gave up on optimizing 😤 youd to be a game update was 500 mb. Now the update is still 500mb. But thwir too lazy to optimize it so you pretty much have to redownload the entire 60 gb game for a tiny update 😭
Devs should only be allowed to work on computers with specs 20 years behind the current specs, for a probationary period of like their first 10 years in the field.
I'm a graphics dev and I 100% wish I could go back to the hardware we had like 10-20 years ago. I had a bunch of cool ideas I never got to try out! I feel so much less skilled now because it's all a dark mysterious box of brute force and magic and I can't really control it any more.
the issue we're talking about is the shift in culture and tech and changes to industry standards. you can make things on old hardware, but you can't exactly use that to do graphic design work in current day.
Agreed. In terms of gaming, I'd be quite happy to return to PS2 graphics. And in terms of other computing stuff, just enough power to run whatever art hobby programs we need are good.
As an electrical engineer, I agree wholeheartedly
I can run Elden Ring on medium-high on a Steam Deck, a handheld device, without my hands melting off from the heat
That's impressive, that's like, pinnacle stuff for miniaturizing components for gaming rigs
5 more years and Steam Deck two can cram triple that power, and it takes so little power to use.
If Valve can do this, we can all make our gaming rigs the size of softballs and stop trying to gigamax our TV resolutions
I like the push towards RISC/ARM architectures you see in some spaces (steam deck, apple m-series for all of that company's faults) in that regard
Because those are massively more efficient than x86-64 architectures.
