The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time

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thomasgeelens 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out there on 69kb.

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bluedino 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?

	▲	zirkonit 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In consumer space, 69 KB of RAM (138 x 4 kbit chips) would cost around $1700 70s dollars for the entire package, ~$10k in modern dollars. Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.

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nshelia 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.

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denysvitali 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy

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ozim 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Space is mostly empty there is not much interesting stuff to collect and who’s going to buy that data

LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.

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mattmanser 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about memory usage, a lot is fonts and images.

EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...

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cosmicgadget 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How much? You typically don't want more than a few different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?

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conductr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> How do we get to gigs?

Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves?

While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.

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stackghost an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>How do we get to gigs?

Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.

What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.

So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.

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jasonfarnon 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

"What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies"

I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?

	▲	alain94040 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.

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troupo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, and then you have Claude Code which at one point needed 68GB of RAM to run https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

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littlestymaar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Aka poor resources management.

If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).

	▲	ben-schaaf an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet). Caching gryphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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thephyber 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m guessing you mean “does” in the sense of a user-facing feature.

I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.

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charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less memory.

	▲	anonymars a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I'm curious what your mental model of controlling a space probe looks like, and how that compares to a glorified resume + text chat