It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.

▲

sseagull 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I remember having a computer and reading about how the CPU (486) could address up to 4 GB of memory. I thought that was maybe a mistake, since even my hard drive was maybe 100 MB, and I had 16 MB of memory IIRC.

I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).

▲

avadodin 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"640kBs should be enough for anyone"? I have 64kB and half of it is ROM and VRAM.

I agree that It is silly that an OS that is still basically NT 3.1 needs 8GB to run.

In early XP days, it was 32MB for the OS and 2GB for Firefox.

I suppose the answer to the riddle is that now every program included in Windows is an Electron abomination with its own "Firefox".

Soon, every "Firefox" will include its own slightly different LLM.

NOTEPAD.EXE will run at 2FPS on your 256GB AI box.

▲

pathartl 2 days ago | parent [-]

"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead.

8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.

	▲	avadodin a day ago \| parent [-]
		What seems like an over–exaggeration to you? I agree that the time periods you mention saw different growth patterns and I would blame the stagnant software for the situation —it has slowly grown into the hardware with no real feature improvement. Even the current path to exponential RAM increases is a naked king —1T models are only slightly better than 1B models at following instructions.

▲

2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

tester756 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

8 GB was getting common like 16 years ago...

▲

hulitu a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The baseline in the past was that your program ran on bare metal or in the windowing system being written in assembly or C/Pascal. Nowadays your program runs in the browser which runs in the Windowing system, your program being written in 20 levels deep JS abstractions.

They call this progress.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What to expect when the culture is to deliver Electron crap as "native" apps?

The other day I heard on a podcast a guy complaining how hard it was to do backend software in terms of performance, his tooling? Node.js.

Naturally when even Microsoft gets these folks as coders that is what we get, Webview2 all over the place on basic OS, C or C++ code that barely works.

▲

VBprogrammer 2 days ago | parent [-]

One of the upsides of AI is that now all we need to do is prompt our way to native versions of these apps...

	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		One would imagine, instead the Claude company ships TUI React Native apps.