this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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This is the same coping mechanism as "just build another 4 lane highway. That should solve the traffic issues". You are just shifting the problem.
I'm not shifting the problem if I have actually paid the money to build the 4 lane highway.
The point is that you're not fixing the problem, you're just masking it (and one could even argue enabling it).
The same way adding another 4 lane highway doesn't fix traffic long term (increasing highway throughput leads to more people leads to more cars leads to congestion all over again) simply adding more RAM is only a temporary solution.
Developers use the excuse of people having access to more RAM as justification to produce more and more bloated software. In 5 years you'll likely struggle even with 32GiB, because everything uses more.
That's not sustainable, and it's not necessary.
How is adding more RAM a temporary solution? It would lead more workload to the CPU... which is good?
This also applies to CPU and GPU.
You're giving the devs too much credit. They didn't give a fuck even when we have not enough RAM. Otherwise this post won't be such a common experience.
The point is that building the 4 lane highway is a poor solution
I don't know much about car traffics but I don't see how adding more RAM to solve the problem of not having enough RAM is a poor solution
The idea is that increasing road capacity will increase demand and basically make traffic as bas again and similarly "just add more ram"-ing will just lead to developers using less memory efficient practices leading the same situation down the line.
Which is a flaw logic as it implies
Of course the average amount of ram in computers isn't some secret. What are you on about? It's only thanks to the fact that we have gigabytes of ram these days that inefficient practices are possible. If developers didn't know that, they would have no idea that was possible. How on earth do you think developers would ever optimise software and determine their performance requirements if specs were unknown? I'm not saying they're snooping on YOU individually (although there's a ton of telemetry these days everywhere and ram is probably a common statistic collected by software - Steam's hardware survey is public and shows millions of computer's specs. Any software you use knows your ram capacity - it's not secret. The ram capacity of newly sold systems is public is obviously shown on spec sheets)...
... and electron app developers are optimizing according to Steam’s hardware survey? How does that make any sense?