Post #1799653
2026-04-12 01:45 UTC
Some of this is reasonable economic forces and focusing limited human bandwidth. Nobody makes consumer PowerPC chips anymore, so of course new efforts are unlikely to target it (e.g., Rust). Fair enough. Similar factors come into play with 32-bit ARM application processors.
But much of the software support *already exists*. The only thing breaking anything beyond games is the memory consumption of modern web browsers, and to a lesser extent office software. Why does opening a brand new browser instance, freshly installed, with no open tabs spike memory consumption by 2GB? I'm aware that there's more happening in today's web browsers than 20 years ago (I used to work on a JavaScript compiler). Also the switch to 64-bit adds some overhead vs the G4 (but my old *Opteron* was still blazing fast running Firefox under Solaris or Debian, with 4GB of RAM). Because Chrome is similarly bloated (or worse), everything built with Electron (VS Code, Obsidian, Zotero, countless other things) is also bloated.
6/n
Replies (1)
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@csgordon@discuss.systems 2026-04-12 01:54
Do we sometimes ask computers today to do things that are genuinely beyond what those older machines could do? Sure, even focusing on typical consumer applications. Games are a big one. But I'm not talking about asking these machines to do anything new; I'm talking about using them for things *we already know they're very capable of doing*, not just in principle but because we've already used them that way! While I'm eager for the next AI winter, I have to wonder if prolonged pressure on RAM prices might finally push folks (companies, really) building consumer software to think "hmm, we should make sure this still runs on some machines with limited specs." 7/7(?)