We have it good now. M-series Apple chips, amazing AM5-based Ryzen CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs that can power a program that you can talk with that can pass the turing test. We have it good.
But back when we had hardware limitations that were seriously fucked, we didn’t have the resources to build huge machines, nor did we have the ability to exhaust them.
Nowadays, you see minimum system requirements featuring:
- 16GB of RAM
- at least 4GB or god forbid, 8GB of VRAM
- Quad-Core processor
- at least 512GB of storage space
and so on, and so forth.
I’m frankly shocked, disappointed, and I have no one to blame but the people who not only utilize AI for major parts of their codebase, but also use space and RAM-consuming frameworks, the likes of which need to live on the Web.
What do you mean?
Well, I recently received an old MacBook Air from 2010 with Snow Leopard on it. Yes, the version before Lion, when it still had a dedicated “Hide all the bars and shit” button on the top right.
I was tasked with provisioning the latest possible software on it and make it into a Thin Client for a VM that’s gonna live in a server somewhere. It’s not mine, hence the “Receiving” rather than Getting or Buying.
That little shitter had 2GBs of RAM and a disk that’s, well, EENSY compared to modern standards. But since it only had Snow Leopard on it and considering that it was just made for light tasks, it wasn’t that much
When I charged it and turned it on, it ran Snow Leopard. It booted up in, and you won’t believe this, less than 10 seconds. From the power on press, then to the blue screen, then to the desktop because it had autologin enabled, it literally booted into the desktop in less than 10 fucking seconds.
Nowadays, shit takes MINUTES to boot. ACTUAL. MINUTES. And I’m not even kidding.
Back in the day, that Core 2 Duo felt like the M1 compared to the Intel processors relative to the PPCs that lived in iBooks.
A fresh install of high sierra needs a 5 seconds grace period before it realizes it woke up and actually lets me type in the password. Oh, and it doesn’t start in 10 seconds. It starts in a minute and a half. Which is BAD. It has NOTHING installed.
I hate how complicated shit is nowadays. Not just including security mitigations, but the amount of preloaded JUNK that we have in our systems. Back in the day, the preloaded junk was a few hundred kilobytes in size, and was pretty fun. For fucks sake, we had a Dashboard, which went away sadly. I could play games on it. I used to play games on it.
Who do we blame?
It all started with Atom, then Atom shell which became Electron. But I can’t exactly blame them either exclusively. I can blame Facebook, now Meta, for making React and React Native, which consequently ruined the performance of Windows.
No… It’s not that. There has to be something else, right? Something I can truly blame! Here’s something: Lazy devs! Devs who don’t do optimization work, who just see “it works” without looking at performance stats like it was before.
Maybe it’s the amount of Hardware features that we have, and the fact that everyone has a different PC and we can’t expect everyone to have our results, so we try our best to polyfill everything into one universally-accepted binary! Not that?
Wait, I have an Idea! It could be high deadlines with low attention spans! I’m not exactly a psychology expert, but honestly seeing as how people get insanely bored, they want new, more, fast, right now!
Maybe it’s the DRM folk, who are developing strong memory obfuscation like Denuvo does, or vmprotect as well! Licensed software that pays the food, rent and bills of the hard-working developers in Bumfuque, Belgium!
It’s not that either? Then what in the everlasting FUCK is it? Because I’m TIRED of seeing bullshit software hit my computer like planes during 9/11. I HATE seeing my 5 year old laptop hitting the fucking TOILET when running software whose older versions could run on Pentiums with no problems.
I hate seeing it need fucking 3 minutes to fully boot. I hate that we have come all this way to just go full circle, regress in performance, and blame nothing but ourselves for craving MORE MORE MORE MORE and MORE.
FUCK.
The nostalgia I’m getting is kind of getting worse
I tried installing Lion on my Mac, but the InstallESD.dmg wouldn’t flash, and when it did even after the checksum error, it still fucked up because Of Course it did.
It couldn’t boot. I can’t simulate the experience I had of the Mac from my own birth year, which I’ve used for so many years. It had so many memories on it, which I’ve deleted because I’ve transferred them out already, but back when shit could run on that Mac I’ve utilized it until the coronavirus hit.
I used to play Zandronum on it, I used to play emulated games, I used to attempt to play Minecraft but couldn’t get a good framerate and I was Happy. Not because it sucked, but because even though it did I made sure it didn’t suck to me.
When developer tools started not working and when the battery wasn’t being reliable, my dad decided to get me a 2010 MacBook with a Backlight issue. This shit is still used to this day for some.. specific circumstances, but that’s beside the point. The Mac I grew up with felt faster than the Mac that IS faster which I use today. And I HATE it. I HATE that it’s come to this.
Not even Linux can solve this issue. Nothing can. Office on early Pentiums launched with a click, now on Linux you have to worry if the program launched or if you should click again. That has happened to me.
FUCK. ME. This is exhasting. Shit was simpler. Shit ran on PHP, had Serif fonts, Bootstrap 2, Buy me a Coffee links and a much simpler tone. Now everything’s fucking shadcn UI, AI slop gradients, just a mess.
No one’s asking themselves what the fuck is wrong because they all think that a passing score means perfect, when in reality shit looks way uglier, distasteful and just overall gross in my opinion.
Look at macOS Tahoe. It looks impressive, until you get to use it, and just realize how much of a useless fucking gimmick the entire Liquid Glass design is, regret hyping it up, and realize how much of a detriment it is when you have shit lagging because it really wants to render out displacement. Also, not being able to see visual elements is also concerning, which Apple’s trying to combat by being bipolar with their frosting options. How cool is that? Not cool at all, homie.
Windows 11 is not a better choice. Shit broke video games at one point, and as I’ve heard now you can’t even launch the fucking Notepad out of all programs. What fucking build system do they run on, Razzle?
Oh wait, they’re using GitHub Actions, probably, which also has a horrible sleep that isn’t even accurate, wastes CPU cycles, and is just designed to piss you the fuck off because they’re trying to drain your money if you’re actually paying for Actions. Which I hope you’re not.
No one’s gonna take action because no one CAN take action. Linux devs tried. But trust me when I say, the year of the Linux Desktop is never, because no sane company wants to support an ecosystem they can’t lock down because of 2 reasons:
- Piracy (which is highly prevalent and even encouraged), and;
- Cheats
Beg for a native build of Premiere, FL Studio even or Fortnite, and see how it feels.
“Just get a Mac” was my advice until Tahoe got released. I cannot, for the EVERLOVING SHIT of me, recommend a computer to anyone. I’ve lost. I can’t. I don’t trust computers anymore. The numbers are all fake. It’s all fucking fake. It’s never been this fake in my entire life. Computers cost more than minimum wave in this economy for something okay-ish. What the fuck? What kind of bullshit is this?
Why has AI made our ram SCARCE? Why has an entire company dropped out? Why. Why. Why. Why. WHY??????
If it were up to me I’d just freeze the fucking status quo and make the billionaires watch as I brought ancient computers, put them to the test and let them know with their very own eyes that software from back in the day took way LESS to launch and begin working on than their modern counterparts.
That’s all from me.