Planned obsolescence is one of the major engines that keep our current system of oligarchic hypercapitalism alive. Won’t anybody think of the poor oligarchs?!?
Reminds me of a funny story I heard Tom Petty once tell. Apparently, he had a buddy with a POS car with a crappy stereo, and Tom insisted that all his records had to be mixed and mastered not so that they sound great on the studio’s million dollar equipment but in his friend’s car.
That’s how my professors instructed me to mix. To make it sound as good on shitty speakers as possible and also sound good on expensive systems.
Reminds me of the ass audio mixing in movies where it is only enjoyable in a 7.1 cinema or your rich friends home theater but not on your own setup
It seems we’ve lost sight of reality there.
As we don’t intend to attend much cinema any more, I hope they bring back essentially a Dolby Noise Switch for movies. I don’t want to sacrifice too much, but booming noise followed by what comes out as whispered dialogue really cheapens the experience.
I hope they can find a process that gives us back a sound track for the sub-17:7 sound system.
They could add more audio tracks for different systems. Blurays support multiple audio tracks and they are almost never full.
Mr. Petty is a wise man.
Resources are just way cheaper than developers.
It’s a lot cheaper to have double the ram than it is to pay for someone to optimize your code.
And if you’re working with code that requires that serious of resource optimization you’ll invariably end up with low level code libraries that are hard to maintain.
… But fuck the Always on internet connection and DRM for sure.
If you consider only the RAM on the developers’ PCs maybe. If you count in thousands of customer PCs then optimizing the code outperforms hardware upgrades pretty fast. If because of a new Windows feature millions have to buy new hardware that’s pretty desastrous from a sustainability point of view.
But that’s just more business!
Last time I checked - your personal computer wasn’t a company cost.
Until it is nothing changes - and to be totally frank the last thing I want is to be on a corporate machine at home.
Or maybe you could actually read the comment you are replying to instead of being so confrontational? They are literally making the same point you are making, except somehow you sound dismissive, like we just need to take it.
In case you missed it they were literally saying that the fact that the real cost of running software (like the AI recall bullshit) is externalized to consumers makes companies don’t give a shit about fixing this. Like literally the same you are saying. And this means that we all, as a society, are just wasting a fuck ton of resources. But capitalism is so eficient hahaha.
But come on man, you really think that the only option is for us to run corporate machines in our homes? I don’t know if I should feel sorry about your lack of imagination, or if you are trying to strawman us here. I’m going to assume lack of imagination, don’t assume malice and all that.
For example, that’s what simple legislation could do. For example, lets say I buy an cellphone/computer, then buy an app/program for that device, and the device has the required specifications to run the software. The company that sold me that software should be obligated by law to give me a version of the software that runs in my machine forever. This is not a lot to ask for, this is literally how software worked before the internet.
But now, behind the cover of security and convenience, this is all out of the window. Each new windows/macos/ios/android/adobe/fucking anything update asks for more and more hardware and little to no meaningful new functionality. So we need to keep upgrading and upgrading, and spending and spending.
But this is not a given, we can do better with very little sacrifices.
You can also build a chair out of shitty plywood that falls apart when someone who weighs a bit more sits on it, instead of quality cut wood. I mean, fine if you want to make a bad product but then you’re making a bad product.
Resource optimization has nothing to do with product quality. Really good experiences can be done with shitty resource consumption. Really bad experiences can be blisteringly fast in optimization.
The reason programmers work in increasingly abstract languages is to do more with less effort at the cost of less efficient resource utilization.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was ASM. Slay the Spire was Java. They’re both excellent games.
Yeah, I don’t really have a problem with games except for the stuff added on purpose just to make the user experience worse like DRM. I was more thinking about trends like using Electron for desktop development.
Reminds me of the UK’s Government Digital Services, who want to digitise government processes but also have a responsibility to keep that service as accessible and streamlined as possible, so that even a homeless person using a £10 phone on a 2G data service still has an acceptable experience.
An example. Here they painstakingly remove JQuery (most modern frameworks are way too big) from the site and shave 32Kb off the site size.
That’s the most professional comment section I’ve ever fucking seen.
Hasn’t been linked to reddit yet probably.
Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.
a) don’t let in anyone who acts like petulant children b) give adults an outlet for occasional outbursts that would make them sound like petulant children
At a certain point it makes more sense to subsidize better low-end hardware than to make every web site usable on a 20 year old flip phone. I’d argue that if saving 32 kB is considered a big win, you’re well past that point. Get that homeless guy a £50 phone and quit wasting the time of a bunch of engineers who make more than that in an hour.
Get that homeless guy a home.
Also, if you are in a basement/mountains/middle of Siberia, waiting for 32 kB takes quite some time.
I’m all for ending homelessness, but that’s really a different problem than we were discussing. I’m pretty confident jQuery isn’t stopping anyone from being housed.
Anyway, there’s no way you’re gonna convince me 32 kB is a lot of data. It’s just not. Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second. Just the text of this thread is probably more than 32 kB. If you can’t download that much data, you only technically have Internet service at all.
The issue with UK services is that they all are fucking random and plenty of sections don’t work. There are billions of logins, bugs and sometimes you just get redirected to some bloody nightmare portal from 1990-s. And EU citizens couldn’t log in into HMRC portal for years after Brexit, what a fucking joke! And all they do is spend time removing jQuery, good fucking job!
Contentious in the comments!
Wow, nice. Sexcellent.
You mean eggcellent?
This is TF2 meme.
This is T9 meme.
Kinda has a point…
Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper, but to run such software you need a more and more expensive hardware. In a way it is just pushing some of the development costs onto a consumer.
Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper
That’s true to an extent. But I’ve been on the back side of this kind of development, and the frameworks can quickly become their own arcane esoteric beasts. One guy implements the “quick and easy” framework (with 16 gb of bloat) and then fucks off to do other things without letting anyone else know how to best use it. Then half-dozen coders that come in behind have no idea how to do anything and end up making these bizarre hacks and spaghetti code patches to do what the framework was already doing, but slower and worse.
The end result is a program that needs top of the line hardware to execute an oversized pile of javascripts.
This is the way. Most of the games today run as shit because people doesn’t know or care about computer resources management.
I’m training to work in hardware currently. Its my hope that there at least, people still care about min-maxing power vs performance.
You sound like some guy screaming everyone should own a horse after the car became popular.
I think that analogy oversimplifies according to the assumption that one is inherently better than the other. OP’s point here is that it isn’t all better at all.
I think a more accurate analogy would be that the OP is screaming that horse trails, ranches, and farms are being shut down because they don’t accommodate cars.
We need more shorter games, made by happier devs paid more to work fewer hours, with worse graphics.
Steam is full of shorter games with worse graphics made by indy devs. Guess what? No one gives a shit! Because no one needs crappy games from 1980-s.
Doesn’t really matter what your developers run on, you need your QA to be running on trash hardware.
We can even cut out the middleman and optimize unity and unreal to run on crap
Jokes on you, my corporate job has crippled the Mac they gave us so much that EVERYONE has trash hardware!
Yeah, screw CEF, Electron, and webdevs who can’t live without those.
