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chii 7 hours ago

> In 5-10 years

and waiting for 5-10 yrs for a lower price is a long wait for consumers.

If food prices were high, would you say to the starving person to wait for 5-10yrs for food?

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josephg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Thats a ridiculous metaphor. Ram isn't food. Nobody starved to death from insufficient RAM in their computer.

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briansm 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Economies die from lack of produce though.

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josephg 6 hours ago | parent [-]

When the internet boom happened, computers had a tiny fraction of the RAM they have today. Everything worked fine. Programmers had to make efficient programs. But we were fine with that. We just programmed in C and C++ and shipped small binaries, because what choice did we have? Nobody tried to build desktop software in javascript on top of electron. And nobody built web servers in python.

If all consumer devices only shipped with 1gb of RAM maximum, we'd get over it remarkably quickly. Just about the only times large amounts of RAM is an actual requirement is AI, some data science / simulation, and editing video in 8k. And maybe 3d modelling. Lots of programs we run today are memory hogs for no good reason - like the rust compiler, cyberpunk 2077 and google chrome. But we could make those programs much more memory efficient if we really had to. Cyberpunk wouldn't look as pretty. But nobody would really care.

The economy won't die due to expensive RAM. Programmers will just adapt, like we've always done.

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chii 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> But nobody would really care.

no, you should say that you personally wouldn't care, but that does not generalize.

People do care, just like people prefer eating better food than just bread and milk. And after having had a taste of the good stuff, people do not want to revert - loss aversion is real.

So if consumer devices regressed back to only having 1gb of ram, they will feel the loss, and they will complain if nothing else. The world of lean, efficient software that require little ram will not return. Programmers (read:companies selling products) will not adapt, but instead, the requirements for computing will become more exclusionary to those with the means.

	▲	snovv_crash 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Software that uses less RAM isn't necessarily worse, often RAM is wasted purely due to carelessness and because it didn't matter. Your assertion that a world of lean software won't return is backwards looking; that was all driven by hardware being cheaper than developer effort. If we now enter a world of AI-enhanced developer effort being cheaper than hardware, perhaps we can have lean efficient software again.