No, not the ones with the highest crime but the poor/black/brown neighborhoods, at least in my city. I know, I live in a majority brown neighborhood and I've mapped the flock cameras in my city. There are more cameras in my neighborhood by about 3:1. To me this really shows the bias in my local PD because while there are pockets of high crime in my neighborhood, it is a huge neighborhood and the crime rate outside of those pockets is about the same as the rest of the city nevertheless, the cameras are not concentrated in the high-crime pockets but throughout the entire neighborhood.
It seems to be the opposite near me. There's a few well off neighborhoods that I've noticed have cameras all over, but the area near my work where there's new piles of broken glass every morning has nothing (not that I want more surveillance, but it makes the intent clear).
The neighborhoods that are less well off I spend less time in, so maybe I just haven't seen them, but usually surveillance there seems to be in the form of parking lot camera trailers.
This attitude is dumb, people don't just have one thing open on their machine at a time.
If you're designing software like a music player (that is, something people are likely to want to keep running in the background while doing other things), you're just giving people a reason to switch to something else by taking up a bunch of memory carelessly, as it'll be one of the first things to go when the user needs the memory.
Definitely it has become a selection criteria when picking tools. Electron? I don't care what a developer uses, nor how fun it was to use. I care about end results.
But to be fair. An Open Source project done in someone's free time for the love of it and shared freely in the wild as a humble contribution to humanity for the price tag of a Like in a forum, really should use whatever the author feels like using, as long as they don't treat it as a product and attempt to market it like it was done with care for anything but the developer's ergonomy. For what is worth, it could be made of Minecraft Redstone if the author feels like it, and nobody can judge them for it.
I just went to amazon and typed in "windows laptop". The first two listed had 4gig ram
In order it was 4,4,16,8,16,4,8,16,4,16,32,8,16,4,32
9 of them were under $300
My dad had some really crap HP Celeron desktop. I don't remember it if had 4gig or more but I do remember it took 3 to 4 minutes of swapping continuously just to boot up and run all the crapware that HP had launch on startup in Windows.
That said, I'm not anti-electron. Here's some native app sizes
The overwhelming number of personal computing devices in active use are <4GiB of ram, and with operating systems following your reasoning too: less and less is available for applications.
Stop being greedy, even if it existed as you say, externalising your development cost by having higher runtime requirements is a mild form of resource exploitation for profit.
This might sound contradictory, but I agree with you. 300 MB is nothing!
Problem is, when the music player takes 500 (let's be honest those 300 were probably just a cold-start and before actually doing anything with it), the collaboration chat app takes another <let me check...> 650 MB (Slack right now for me), the profile loader I need for work is <checking again...> another 400. The text editor is 510 MB (VSCode, and still that is a well engineered and optimized Electron marble). The Pomodoro timer, 300 MB.
And on top of that I'm supposed to do my actual work! All that junk is stealing memory that should be available to Visual Studio and compiling my huge code base.
Hopefully we don't end up with Electron calculators, calendars, email clients, file browsers, and image editors, because those things also tend to be open long term in my desktop (which right now I can do without any second thought about being able to, because they are all properly done as decently optimized GUIs)
Missing the point. When developers dont have to give a shit about resource usage it can become a problem. When every app is using way more ram/memory than necessary it starts to add up.
This is why modern programs and games can barely run on modern hardware in many circumstances. There is no incentive for devs to be efficient.
It's not one program using a lot of memory. It's 45 of them all using way more than they need to. It adds up.
Except 8 GB of ram is really more like 3 because Windows uses 5 to do nothing. And then Chrome uses a couple more gigs. And then Lord have mercy if you have outlook.
So that's, like, two programs open and were already running out of memory.
It's more than all the RAM I had in my Windows 98 computer that ran Windows and Winamp, which was fully capable of playing music and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun at the same time.
Idealistically it should not be using so much memory and burning up the world’s silicon. Efficient computing is a backbone of why we trust computers. (I am horrified with the windows explorer in windows 11 nowadays for its slowness.)
It's 300MB of RAM when it's not doing much, it's the lowest possible value.
When so many little tools that you normally keep running in the background, it starts adding up. Not to mention that not everyone has that much RAM. Until recently, Apple still shipped Macbooks with 8GB RAM.
I've also started having issues with my Windows partition filling up with these applications. Again, no one application is a problem, it's the trend that's the problem.
Sounds totally reasonable to me. I'm running ten windowed applications and they're still leaving 87.5% of my RAM available for other things? No problem there.
No they’re all trivial things that could all be using 1% of your ram. And when you try to do demanding work on your machine you often have to close half of them to avoid stutter.
But who has 10 applications all showing animations at the same time? Or constantly animating at all? If a button animates when you click it, or a message animates when it pops up, it's not exactly slowing down my system.
The subject is the resources a Chromium based app uses. RAM is just the example that was used. I don’t think theres a path here where we keep sharing valuable insight on this topic. Clearly you don’t mind Electron apps. Others do however and dislike this trend of using more and more resources because we can.
This non-concern for resource usage and good software design is why energy costs are sky rocketing today.
This is true for autoscaling VMs which run one application and when underutilized the load is reconsolidated.
It is NOT true for desktops which run different applications all the time, the user often switches between them, and where uncommitted memory is automatically used by the kernel as disk cache space.
It's not doing nothing. It's caching frequently accessed files on my filesystem, which generally speeds everything up especially with HDDs. Why should someone instead waste that on a needlessly bloated music player?
That choice is for me, the user, to make. App developers don't get to make it for me. If apps are smaller, then I can use that memory to run more apps, cache things, etc.
I do. The instant I saw it uses Electron, I decided the app wasn't for me and closed the tab. But why would that mean I shouldn't participate in a discussion (which I didn't even start myself) on whether the excessive RAM usage is ok?
The problem is when it's based on bullshit, like the secretary of energy's recent claims that completely covering the earth in solar panels wouldn't be enough energy for our needs. Like his hypothetical Dyson sphere of solar panels, a lie on Twitter can make it around the world before the truth can catch up.
The degradation started when they began looking at the Accept HTTP header to see if you were clicking a direct link to an image so they could show you a page full of ads instead of just the image. And that happened well before that bloke sold the site.
I remember a long time ago you’d click on a direct link and it would redirect you to the image’s page. Then, it would superimpose a cat paw beckoning the user to swipe and see other images. I recall people really hating that.
Now the site can’t help but show you some tacked-on TikTok style video or animated gif underneath the image you actually wanted to view.
It's crazy how night and day the quality tank was after they essentially killed their API. The good contributors were all pushed away or became less active.
And with the official app constantly trying to push posts from random subreddits into people's feeds, you constantly get comments from people who have no idea of the concept of a subreddit, and leave stupid comments cause they don't know the context the post was made in.
It really was. Apollo was the reddit UI for me. The old reddit web page looks awful on a phone. The new page is a mess of algorithmic disaster on any device. I cannot stand their 1st-party app. When they killed the API, I no longer enjoyed using reddit on my phone, which is where I accessed it 95% of the time. They made it pretty easy for me to stop using the site at all.
OTOH, I had previously posted often enough to get in on the IPO, and that made up for a lot of the annoyances.
Couldn't agree more. Pushing people away from 3rd party apps was a business decision I understand as much as I disliked it (Boost gang gang) but the unusable nightmare of an app they pushed me toward was such an insult that I ended up just off the platform entirely. Any social media site that loses the bathroom loses the war, and Reddit was no longer my #1 for #2s.
I've pretty much ignored the various Reddit revolts. What drove me away from Reddit and Imgur was the constant spam of US politics. The recent Imgur revolt actually made the site better for me (after the middle finger spam ended) - political posts went from ~50% to less than 10%.
The ones with highest amount of crime?
But it could also be the opposite: the neighbourhoods of the well off, who are willing to pay for this kind of service.
I really don't know, since both options seem likely.