...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago.

Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway.

For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!

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AnotherGoodName 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

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ttoinou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some

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gruez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).

	▲	adrian_b 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is correct, DDR5 today is in real US$ slightly cheaper than DRAM was in 2011, 15 years ago. For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today. During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today. Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.

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Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10.

Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.

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hinkley 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.

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Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.

	▲	hinkley an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No but it's the biggest one that's easy to forget. Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.

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kasabali 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.

Today 8GB is bare minimum.