Ask HN: What If We Had Local-First Software? (Focus on CPU and RAM)

Power users (like most HN readers) have computers (and even phones) with a very fast multi-core CPU and gigabytes of RAM. But with the trend toward building all software in the cloud, these ressources are sometimes sitting there unused.

Most of the time, we want software as light as possible, so that we can keep our CPU/RAM for actual work, but what if we also "power apps" that are designed to take advantage of all your CPU/RAM (when needed) to give you some unique features that are not currently available.

Practical example: What if the YouTube app stored the metadata on all the videos that you have watched and all the videos of all the channels that you subscribe to locally? Then, they could offer a very powerful facetted search UI for filtering these videos and finding exactly what you want.

That way, if I haven't been on YouTube for the past week and don't have time to sift through hundreds of recent videos, I can find the "videos published in the past week ordered by ViewCount DESC" and start there. Or I could be curious about "videos I watched where RatingAverage < 2 AND ViewCount > 1000000"... YouTube could offer such features without having to worry about the strain it would put on their datacenters.

Do you have other examples that you would love to see?

By the way, I know there are plenty of complains about Electron-style apps hogging your CPU/RAM. This question is about software that use these ressources to give you features that you care about.

I thought about this question after reading a [similar one yesterday that was focused on enabling offline usage][1].

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790170