https://media.tenor.com/dYLvyNRhV8sAAAAC/woody-harrelson-crying.gif

If you consider only the RAM on the developers' PCs maybe. If you count in thousands of customer PCs then optimizing the code outperforms hardware upgrades pretty fast. If because of a new Windows feature millions have to buy new hardware that's pretty desastrous from a sustainability point of view.

That's how my professors instructed me to mix. To make it sound as good on shitty speakers as possible and also sound good on expensive systems.

Reminds me of the ass audio mixing in movies where it is only enjoyable in a 7.1 cinema or your rich friends home theater but not on your own setup

I had the same exact approach back in the late 90's. My friends had several band projects and when they were mixing their demos, I insisted that if the mixes sound good in a standard car stereo, they'll sound good anywhere.

Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper

That's true to an extent. But I've been on the back side of this kind of development, and the frameworks can quickly become their own arcane esoteric beasts. One guy implements the "quick and easy" framework (with 16 gb of bloat) and then fucks off to do other things without letting anyone else know how to best use it. Then half-dozen coders that come in behind have no idea how to do anything and end up making these bizarre hacks and spaghetti code patches to do what the framework was already doing, but slower and worse.

The end result is a program that needs top of the line hardware to execute an oversized pile of javascripts.

That's the most professional comment section I've ever fucking seen.

Your dad sounds like the childhood hero of mine who got me into computers.

Severe ADHD prevented me from ever learning to code, but I became damn good at repairs and things and just general understanding of computers because he was available to ask questions at almost any time.

He went to school auctions every year and got me a pile of hardware to learn from. He never asked for anything in exchange. All around great guy.

I heard him on the phone a few times dealing with the people who he worked with though. Good god he was mean. I couldn’t imagine him being that way with me ever, but he was brutal when it came to work and money.

A dude called him one time while I was sitting there, he listened for a few minutes and he said, “I’ve got a 14 year old kid here, he’s been doing this stuff for about 2 years. I’m gonna let him walk you through this for the 10th fucking time because you’re a goddamn idiot and feeling like a fool when you hang up the phone with a grown man isn’t teaching you any lessons. Maybe get a pen for this one because if I have to remind that a child walked you through it last time, I’m not going to be so fucking friendly.” I was so nervous, apologized multiple times, when I was finished walking him through it he took the phone and said, “now don’t you feel stupid? 25 years and this kid just schooled you.”

He told me, “you gotta be real with idiots or they’ll bother you with stupid problems every single day of your life.”

I wish that lesson had stuck haha, it just wasn’t in me to be mean. As a result, a hobby that I was passionate about all of my life is something I avoid like the plague now. People ruined it for me by bothering me constantly.

Still happens.

Animal Well was coded by one guy, and it was ~35mb on release (I think it's above 100 at this point after a few updates, but still). The game is massive and pretty complex. And it's the size of an SNES ROM.

Dwarf Fortress has to be one of the most complex simulations ever created, developed by two brothers and given out for free for several decades. The game, prior to adding actual graphics, DF was ~100mb and the Steam version is still remarkably compact.

I am consistently amazed by people's ingenuity with this stuff.

Jokes on you, my corporate job has crippled the Mac they gave us so much that EVERYONE has trash hardware!

I think it's given us a big wave of "Return to pixelated tradition" style games. When you see 16-bit sprites in the teaser, you can feel reasonably confident your computer will run it.

Probably an innovative revelation of the concept of "bloat".

Image description.

The image is a screenshot of a tumblr post by user elbiotipo.

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy’s laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn’t work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

It's the marketing. Always the marketing. Especially the SEO guys.

One SEO guy we worked with told us not to cache our websites because he was convinced that it helped. He badgered us about it for weeks, showed us some bullshit graphs and whatever. One day we got fed up and told him we'd disabled the cache and he should keep an eye out for any improvements in traffic. Obviously we didn't actually do anything of the sort because we are not fucking idiots. Couple days later the SEO wizard sent us another bunch of figures and said "see, I told you it would help I know my stuff". He did not, in fact, know his stuff.

The thing is

Of course, we developers like to optimize and patch source code all the time. If I am suddenly woken up at three in the morning, I will immediately open the lid of my laptop and start optimizing the code. That's our little developer secret.