We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website).
> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).
But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.
The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB, mattmanser then explained that images and fonts easily exceed that, and then you called that poor resource management. Sounds like we're on the same page here, but you seemed to have missed the context of the comment you initially replied to.
It didn't, here's the comment in question:
> A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
It makes no mention that an app should be under 70kB. It just note that 100MB is still *enormous* compared to 70kB.
And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.
It can't be explained by images and fonts alone, I agree, but images and fonts alone are still enormous compared to 70kB. On my screen an "e" on this site is 10*11 pixels. Subpixel positioning means we need at least 6 copies of each letter, subpixel antialiasing means we need three channel alpha (3 bytes per pixel), we have variations of bold, italic and bold-italic, 95 printable letters in ascii, that's a low-ball of 750kB for one size of one font. This comment page alone has 4 different sizes, I'd expect a chat app to have a few more.
[1]: Realistically, you're never gonna have all 95 characters in all weights for all font size, so the actual number is going to much significantly lower than the theoretical envelope. In practice, there'll be a main (font,size), that will have all glyphs (and it's going to be more than 95 because of the ligatures) in normal weight and no italic, with a subset of the glyphs in the three other modes, most likely not evenly distributed between modes. Then you'll have additional fonts (for UI labels, titles, etc) that are going to have much less represented glyphs and almost no variations of weight or italic if at all. Obviously the font(s) used for titles in going to have a bigger budget relatively to the glyph sample size, because each one is bigger than your baseline "e"
Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves?
While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.
Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.
What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.
So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?
FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.
I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.
:)
LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.
Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.