Well, at least with the RAM crunch that the AI boom has caused, I hope there will be some sort of pressure to write efficient software, otherwise device manufacturers are quite fucked.

Yeah, I've been thinking this as well. I have some optimism, but not with high confidence. The exponentially increasing power of computing hardware up until this point is often cited as the reason performance optimization has been sidelined in the software industry. Now that there's a definite hiccup in that trend, I'm hoping programmers will remember that software actually can be fast and memory-efficient, and that poor design choices that lead to bad performance are exactly that, a choice.

The author of the article definitely seems to think LLMs are what enables this to happen, but I personally am much more skeptical of that. I think what it really needs is bringing engineering back into software, not just throwing LLMs at it and calling it a day.

Yah, maybe $1k/dimm on 32 dimm system is a slight price bump.

I've been hoping for this for my entire software engineering career but it never came.

It's messed up. Sometimes it feels like everything in the universe is aligned to ensure that skilled software engineers lead horrible lives full of anguish, frustration and powerlessness.

It feels like the economic system creates incentives which go against efficiency. So then it makes sense that software engineers would be most impacted.

There's a weird duality to our job; it's supposed to be about automation and efficiency but in reality, engineers who make the most money are those who create unnecessary complexity because it creates better lock-in and thus gives them more leverage in negotiations. And the tech monopolies they work for never seem to run out of money no matter how much enshittification occurs as a result.

Same perverse incentive for open source projects; engineers who lead projects that are full of bugs can charge more consulting fees and sell more enterprise licenses to work around the issues.

And engineers are often forced to use shitty tools by their employers so we're always stuck between a rock and a hard place with limited control over our output... Which we are blamed for when things go wrong but never given credit for when we pull heroic feats because those achievements are often overshadowed by missed deadlines resulting from being forced to use shitty software.

Adoption and quality are orthogonal, unfortunately.

Worst part is that nobody listens to us. Business people with money only listen to engineers who have money; who are mostly merchants of complexity. Engineers who care about efficiency have no voice in this market.