alt Hacker NewsEh? As I see it, we've got options.
Option A: We do a better job at optimizing software so that good performance requires less RAM than might otherwise be required
Option B: We wish that things were different, such that additional RAM were a viable option like it has been at many times in the past.
Option C: We use our time-benders to hop to a different timeline where this is all sorted more favorably (hopefully one where the Ballchinians are friendly)
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To evaluate these in no particular order:
Option B doesn't sound very fruitful. I mean: It can be fun to wish, but magical thinking doesn't usually get very far.
Option C sounds fun, but my time-bender got roached after the last jump and the version of Costco we have here doesn't sell them. (Maybe someone else has a working one, but they seem to be pretty rare here.)
That leaves option A: Optimize the software once, and duplicate that optimized software to whomever it is useful using that "Internet" thing that the cool kids were talking about back in the 1980s.
There is plenty of well optimised software out there already, hopefully a ram shortage can encourage people to seek it out. Would be nice if there were some well curated lists of apps. Sort of like suckless but perhaps a little less extreme. A long standing problem in the software industry is developers havein insanely overspecced machines and fat interne popes leading to performance issues going unnoticed by the people that should be fixing them. The claim that they the need that power to run their their code editor and compiler is really only a need for a code editors and compilers that suck less. I've always ran a 10 year old machine (I'm cheap) and had the expectation that my debug builds run acceptably fast!