For anyone unsure: Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use (see DeepSeek), but instead AI companies just buy up all the GPUs and shove more compute in.
For the expansive bloat - same goes for phones. Our phones are orders of magnitude better than what they were 10 years ago, and now it’s loaded with bloat because the manufacturer thinks “Well, there’s more computer and memory. Let’s shove more bloat in there!”
I always felt American car companies were a really good example of that back in the 60s-70s when enormously long vehicles with giant engines were the order of the day. Why not bigger? Why not stronger? It also acted as a symbol of American strength, which was being measured by raw power just like today lol.
This also reminds me of the way video game programmers in the late 70s/early 80s had such tight limitations to work within that you had to get creative if you wanted to make something stand out. Some very interesting stories from that era.
I also love to think about the tricks the programmer of Prince of Persia had employed to get the “shadow prince” to work…
Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
More specifically, it’s when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.
So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.
Also Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin to make extracting cotton less of a tedious and backbreaking process, which lead to a massive expansion in slavery plantations in the American South due to the increased output and profitability of the crop.
The modern web is an insult to the idea of efficiency at practically every level.
You cannot convince me that isolation and sandboxing requires a fat 4Gb slice of RAM for a measly 4 tabs.
My PC is 15 times faster than the one I had 10 years ago. It’s the same old PC but I got rid of Windows.
The tech debt problem will keep getting worse as product teams keep promising more in less time. Keep making developers move faster. I’m sure nothing bad will come of it.
Capitalism truly ruins everything good and pure. I used to love writing clean code and now it’s just “prompt this AI to spit out sloppy code that mostly works so you can focus on what really matters… meetings!”
so you can focus on what really matters…
meetings!collecting unemployment!What really matters isn’t meetings, it’s profits.
On Linux it really is noticeable
Two possible and opposite interpretations of your comment:
- Modern Linux feels exactly as responsive or worse on modern hardware than old Linux used to feel on old hardware.
- Linux feels much more responsive and fast on modern hardware than it does on old hardware, unlinke other OSes.
Well, until you open a browser… or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.
Right now, my laptop doesn’t have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.
I’m pretty sure the “unused RAM is wasted RAM” thing has caused its share of damage from shit developers who took it to mean use memory with reckless abandon.
Would be nice if I could force programs to use more ram though. I actually have 100GB of DDR4 my desktop. I bought it over a year ago when DDR4 was unloved and cheap. But I have tried to force programs to not be offloading as much. Like Firefox, I hate that I have the ram but it’s still unloading webpages in the background and won’t use more than 6GB ever.
I actually have 100GB of DDR4
They’ve got RAM! Get’em!
Will disabling the swap file fix that?
If not, just mount your swap file in RAM lmao
