I hate that our expectations have been lowered.
2016: "oh, that app crashed?? Pick a different one!"
2026: "oh, that app crashed again? They all crash, just start it again and cross your toes."
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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The program expands so as to fill the resources available for its execution
-- C.N. Parkinson (if he were alive today)
I paid for the whole amount of RAM, I'm gonna use the whole amount of RAM.
/s
Joke aside, the computer I used a little more than a decade ago used to take 1 minute just to display a single raw photo. I'm a liiiittle better off now.
used to take 1 minute just to display a single raw photo
See, that’s a great example!
RAW processing (at least in that context) hasn’t really changed in 10 years. It’s probably the same code doing all the heavy lifting.
But most software doesn’t have that benefit.
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For my home PC, sure. Running some windows apps on my Linux machine in wine is a little weird and sluggish. Discord is very oddly sluggish for known reasons. Proton is fine tho.
But for my work? Nah. My M3 MacBook Pro is a beast compared to even the last Intel MacBook. Battery is way better unless you’re like me and constantly running a front end UI for a single local service. But without that, it can last hours. My old one could only last 2 meetings before it started dying.
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Windows 11 is the slowest Windows I've ever used, by far. Why do I have to wait 15-45 seconds to see my folders when I open explorer? If you have a slow or intermittent Internet connection it's literally unusable.
Even Windows 10 is literally unusable for me. When pressing the windows key it literally takes about 4 seconds until the search pops up, just for it to be literally garbage.
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I'm pretty sure the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" thing has caused its share of damage from shit developers who took it to mean use memory with reckless abandon.
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Websites are probably a better example; as the complexity and bloat has increased faster than the tech.
oh, yes, somebody made this a long time ago, in response to the performance of new webpages https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
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When you become one with the penguin, though ... then you can begin to feel how much faster modern hardware is.
Hell, I've got a 2016 budget-model chromebook that still feels quick and snappy that way.
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I still remember playing StarCraft 2 shortly after release on a 300$ laptop and it running perfectly well on medium settings.
Looked amazing. Felt incredibly responsive. Polished. Optimized.
Nowadays it’s RTX this, framegen that, need SSD or loading times are abysmal, oh and don’t forget that you need 40gb of storage and 32gb of ram for a 3 hour long walking simulator, how about you optimize your goddamn game instead? Don’t even get me started on price tags for these things.
Software and game development is definitely a spectrum though, but holy shit is the ratio of sloppy releases so disproportionate that it’s hard to see it at times.
StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.
A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you'd expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don't just have 'colour textures', they're likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that's another three times. The voice acting isn't likely to be in a single language any more either, so there'll be several copies of all the sound files.
A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. 'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!
I do agree with you. I can't think of a single useful feature that's been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it's worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.
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Had to install (an old mind you, 2019) visual studio on windows...
...
...
First it's like 30GB, what the hell?? It's an advanced text editor with a compiler and some ..
Crashed a little less than what I remember 🥴😁
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"Let them eat ram"
They often are worse, because everything needed to be an electron app, so they could hire the cheaper web developers for it, and also can boast about "instant cross platform support" even if they don't release Linux versions.
Qt and GTK could do cross platform support, but not data collection, for big data purposes.
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The whole industry needs rebuilt from the foundations. GRTT with a grading ring that tightly controls resources (including, but not limited to RAM) as the fundamental calculus, instead of whatever JS happens to stick to the Chome codebase and machine codes spewed by your favorite C compiler.
It took me a long time to figure out that "GRTT" is "Graded Modal Type Theory". Letting others know, if they want to look into it further.
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