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Comment by razoorka | Hacker News Reader

And not only this, Jetbrains, which consumes tons of RAM, Chrome, and so on. When did we decide that resources are free?

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Did JetBrains and Chrome apps leak too? Or were they just RAM-hungry and didn't leak?

No, I don’t think that it’s leaking, it is just “normal” behavior. But why it is became a normal? When optimization stopped be mandatory?

Perhaps computer resources are cheaper than developer time spent on optimizations.

Computer resources aren't cheaper, they're externalized (to users, environment, etc.)

This is definitely not true for the client-side software under discussion. Millions of devices requiring more resources and energy. The problem is that’s an externality to the developer.

> energy

My MacBook Pro M1 16" seems to be averaging about 13 watts of power, about the same as previous i7. My house idles at around 200 watts (lots of smart devices, etc). Hardly worth obsessing over it.

They are not, if you consider all the instances of the bloatware running.

How many users does Spotify have? Multiply that by the 79GB mentioned above. Is it still cheaper?

Irrelevant because Spotify doesn't pay for, nor do they have to care about user's resources.

If a user doesn't have enough ram to use Spotify, Spotify doesn't care. That user canceling their service is lost in the normal user churn. Spotify most likely has no idea and doesn't care if resource wastage affects their customers. It isn't an immediate first-order impact on their bottom line so it doesn't matter

But let’s agree, that you will not be able to scale just with resources forever. Basically AI already struggles because of lack of resources

I don’t agree. AI is a special case that has nothing to do with what you’re talking about. AI uses a lot of resources because we don’t currently know any other way to implement it, not because it’s been developed to optimize for other factors.

This is antithetical to capitalism's founding principles. Resources (profit potential) will always increase unbounded forever. That's the only way the scam works

> But why it is became a normal? When optimization stopped be mandatory?

A lot of it is simply economic. CPU, RAM, and disk are all much cheaper than engineers’ time. A single headcount with a multi-$100K salary can pay for a lot of hardware resources.

IDEs I think are a bit of a special case. Under the hood, it's constantly re-compiling and re-analyzing everything. That truly does take up a lot of memory and CPU. Probably not as much as if it were super aggressively optimized, sure, but still very heavy.

Full featured IDEs like this have always been heavy, as far as I know. It's only the pure-text editors without advanced full code analysis that can get away with low resources.

Ok, fair enough with IDE, but for instance I was using web storm ide for years and sometimes struggled with memory issues. But when I switched for cursor, I forgot about this at all

My work machine is so full of bloatware that its 64gb of RAM is always full.

Exactly. I’m using Mac m3 with 32gb ram and constantly receiving notifications from clean my Mac that ram is full

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