When RAM prices are increasing like a crypto currency we have a real societal problem.
Tangential but this is funny. Back in the early 90s, I did a lot of BASIC programming in the family computer, this was before we had Internet. I could spend hours.and hours in front of the computer doing stuff.
Fast forward to around 2010 I remember a distinct feeling one time the internet went off at home. Sitting in front of the computer and feeling that it was "useless" because it wasn't connected to the net.
We are getting to that point in coding apparently: 5-10 years ago, everyone programmed just by typing commands, looking at S.O. and thinking. Now, if we open our "IDE" and it doesn't have access to The Brain, we are left just standing there looking in awe at the machine.
Sign of the times...
I guess it feels less like a problem when you have that problem regularly and are forced to adapt. and I guess I'll just HAVE to switch to Pixel 10 when Pixel 11 comes out - the integrated Linux terminal right there is awesome. or maybe just get a MacBook like most around me did
E.g. back when you were coding BASIC, you probably had magazines and either ended up copying a lot of code by hand, or if you were lucky the mag came with a floppy disk. Now no such magazines exist. Manpages were all local, now it's readthedocs online. Fat local-friendly standard libraries in almost all languages have been modularised and package managers for the most part expect to install stuff by fetching it from the net.
So unless you have heavily prepared for the cyberapocalypse or sth, there really is not much you can do on your machine when the internet goes down.
On the other hand, however, when you can prepare in advance, it's great to shut off the net for a while. I do my most productive coding during flights, for example.
There might be an overdue era of computing where being a little mindful of resource consumption might go a long way, now that Moore's law has been killed by economics, but I wonder how that'll play out with vibe coding that vomits out thousands of lines of inefficient code.
I honestly wouldn't mind living in a society where growth and excess is no longer viable.
The destruction of computing is absolutely miserable to witness.
You want the technical, mathematical, reason for that? The short version is that for society as a whole, prices are information. How many fields should be filled with grain plants? How many with flowers? How many factories should make cars? Phones? Tv furniture? How much fuel goes to heating? How much to transporting old people to the hospital and back?
I hope that can explain, if "society" gets that information more than a tiny bit wrong ... very bad things will happen. VERY bad things. People will die, lots of them, and quickly, if you get it wrong.
I hope it also makes it clear that for society as a whole, money isn't a "real" limit. Rather it's a tool that makes the actual limits clear. If we make 50% more bread, how do we make that not affect how many heart surgeries can be done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Capitalism has many advantages, the strongest of which, in my opinion, is that it simply imposes a cost on lying. You can lie about production, about prices, but it'll cost you. It is resilient against the bane of so many other systems: it is extremely resilient against people trying to sabotage it, because everyone has an incentive to undo or bypass sabotage. In other systems like communism or slavery the people doing work have an extreme incentive to lie, and the only break on that is violence against workers. But the state fundamentally has no idea if you're lying or not, so that violence will be mostly random. It can't be directed against the people actually causing problems in society.