OskarAxolotl

joined 1 year ago
[–] OskarAxolotl 3 points 11 months ago

Ruby was designed to evoke joy and they absolutely succeeded. Usually, programming is mostly a means to an end to me. But using Ruby just feels so amazing, it's almost impossible to even describe to somebody who has never used it before.

[–] OskarAxolotl 1 points 11 months ago

Depends on the area. For most of the corporate world, nothing changed.

Well, we are talking about consumer technology here.

For the same reason you didn't need 8gb of RAM just to open fucking Chrome back in 2010. Changing tabs was as instant back then on a shit computer as changing apps is nowadays on any phone, with significantly less resources needed for that.

There isn't quite another platform that has changed as dramatically as the web over the last few years. Just look at all those new APIs. Especially with the introduction of WebAssembly, we have reached a point where running actual software in the browser has become a viable option. Back in 2010, most websites consisted mainly of static content and maybe a bit of Flash and JavaScript here and there.

Loads of apps are little more than glorified "single page browsers", they just load a special version of the site with a couple extra bells and whistles. You can very easily run Spotify, Youtube, TikTok, Discord, Gmail, Xitter and more on a single browser and change tabs instantly with a single click.

Do so and check your memory usage.

And most games aim at the lowest common denominator (both regarding phone specs and "type of game") because they want to reach the widest audience possible. A lot of people use Unity to make simple 2D games, yet that thing is bloated as all hell. Does it facilitate development? Absolutely. That doesn't excuse it for being a mess.

Having a look at the list of most popular mobile games, you will see that recent ones usually aren't simple 2D games.

As a side note, did you know that the PS2 had 32MB of RAM and its main CPU was a custom RISC running at 300MHz? You know, the console that let people play God of War 1 and 2, GTA San Andreas. "Oh, but its sole purpose was for gaming and it had a specific graphics core" - true, but once your application is front and center in a phone, it can hog 90% of the CPU and eat any free RAM, which, if your phone has 2GB total, and ~1.5GB is used by other apps and the system, you still have some 400MB to play with. The OS can get in the way and does add overhead, which ends up mostly being extra CPU time.

That's really not comparable at all. Games back then were specifically optimized for a single console with a single hardware configuration. Android apps today target millions of different devices and mostly aren't even native. That's just how it works and it isn't really an issue since RAM has become dirt cheap. There isn't really any downside to just having a lot of RAM when it only increases the price by a few dollars.

A Galaxy S2, back on release, was really fast compared to its peers. Once its specs became mid-low end, it started to feel significantly slower, that's true. Could've been the bloat catching up.

Compared to it's peers? Maybe. But it definitely couldn't keep dozens of apps running in the background and allow immediate switching between them without reloads. Even with the lower requirements of apps back then.

[–] OskarAxolotl 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Not every increase in complexity means an increase in bloat. Software today is much more capable than it was 12 years ago. People don't use their phones only to write SMS, do some calls and maybe basic web browsing (mobile sites used to be very limited to reduce resource requirements, by the way). They want to be able to have dozens of apps open at the same time, switch between them without any kind of lag, scroll through infinite feeds with pictures and videos auto playing, watch YouTube and Netflix videos at high resolutions and let me also remind you of the fact that the mobile gaming market is the largest of them all by far.

I'm not saying that there isn't any bloat but most people have replaced their PC with a phone because they can now do everything that once required a computer on their mobile device. So why shouldn't the phone have similar memory requirements to a PC?

And honestly, I don't remember Android phones from over a decade ago ever actually feeling fast. They might have been all right for a while but, in my experience, old phones would usually turn into a slog quickly.

[–] OskarAxolotl 5 points 1 year ago

Well, the website and mobile app are overwhelmingly hated (just look at the reviews on the PlayStore). I think there are two major things helping Reddit: It's easy to grasp (Lemmy has instances, dozens of different apps, etc.) and the fact that Reddit already has a community for basically everything.

[–] OskarAxolotl 3 points 1 year ago

The wasps you see are usually the ones only out for your food.

[–] OskarAxolotl 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, it's very common (mostly) in men at that age.

[–] OskarAxolotl 4 points 1 year ago

What do you mean? I don't think any other operating system even comes close to Windows in regards to backwards compatibility. Most software designed for Windows 98 will still run fine on Windows 11.

There are thousands lines of code in the NT kernel with patches for specific programs. There is even a line patching an incompatibility with Lego Island, lol.

[–] OskarAxolotl 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't. I chose to purchase the pro version for a few bucks.

[–] OskarAxolotl 54 points 1 year ago (38 children)

I don't know any open source client that is even remotely as nice to use as Boost. Also, it's not like the developer is actively spying on you, that's just the default AdMob popup Google is now forced to show (They simply didn't ask for any kind of consent in the past).

Anyway, I simply paid a few bucks for ad-free Boost.

[–] OskarAxolotl 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, I think Gmail's web client is pretty great. It actually has tons of power user features I found very handy in the past (like support for scripting).

[–] OskarAxolotl 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

cat

This is one of my favorite pictures on the internet.

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