alt Hacker NewsAny hardware gains and more are used up by stuffing in additional telemetry, ad/engagement scripts, and animations. Devs have grown up on "unused RAM is wasted RAM," work on the latest high-spec Macs, and get incentivized by higher-ups demanding things be ever "modernized" and not to waste time on optimization, which they see as annoying nerd stuff. But even that doesn't explain everything I guess, because I still see a lot of these things in open source projects.
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The explanation for bloated OSS is that the software development field has opened up to be accessible to non-programmers. There are at least 10x as many developers publishing software now as there were in the 90s, and the class of people who know how a CPU works are a tiny, tiny minority of the field now, where 30 years ago it was the norm. The vast majority of developers operate on 15 layers of abstractions and are literally offended by the idea that they should understand even a single layer below the one they're currently on. They will invoke a retort like "might as well learn assembly while you're at it", which I have heard literally dozens of times by now, as though it is actually unreasonable to have an understanding of assembly even if you don't write it every day.
Game development suffers greatly from this, too. So many games run like dogshit and some take literally 100+ GB more disk space than they need to (with the counterfactual proven when a dev eventually "optimizes" their game 3 years later by doing some really trivial thing, like what hapened with Helldivers 2 and some other game I can't recall). There is a whole generation of "Unity devs" and "Unreal devs" who work no-code or as close to it as possible, only being able to develop games through a GUI and light scripting, with even the latter usually involving copy-pasting existing scripts written by other people and tweaking the numbers.
In some ways this is a good thing, of course. There are a lot of useful software and fun games in the world that would not have been created if software development were not accessible. But with the cost to performance and security breaches becoming the absolute norm, I do really wish there was a culture for developers to continue improving, to continue learning, instead of a culture of learning the very top of the stack, declaring it good enough, and becoming a "React dev" for the rest of their career instead of becoming "a programmer" who can use more than one abstraction.
Google is pushing ads on Android that are literally 3D games, as in the ad is a game and the game is controllable via the ad itself.
You have to play it for a minute before it lets you dismiss the ad and continue doing whatever you were doing.