Software engineers. I’m also a software engineer.

• Forgejo - git hosting
• actual budget - spending tracking mostly
• Vaultwarden
• home assistant - still configuring

My phone is pretty recent and has 8GB RAM, and it’s still fairly common to find phones with 4GB RAM. You really can’t rely on a consistent amount of RAM, so being careful with memory is still important.

Try the slate truck.

It doesn’t exist yet. I’ll believe the price when I can buy it.

But then you can’t receive texts and calls, which is the entire point of a mobile phone. This just sounds like a landline w/ extra steps…

I can’t wait for Linux phones to be a thing. Until then, GrapheneOS and CalyxOS FTW!

Exactly. At work, my team kinda sucks at communication but great w/ facts (we’re engineers, go figure), so they use gen AI to turn facts into nicer-to-read documentation and communication (i.e. personal reviews, emails, documentation, etc). The process is relatively smooth:

1. generate all the facts in a rough form
2. ask AI to reword it for whatever purpose
3. edit it a bit to correct any issues
4. if needed, ask a coworker to quickly review it

For that task, it works pretty well.

I’m a manager of sorts and one of the people who report to me used gen AI in their mid-year reviews. Basically, they said, “make this sound better” and the AI spit out something that reads better while still having the some content. In the past, this person had continually been snarky and self-deprecating, and the AI helped make it sound more constructive.

I hope that’s what’s happening here. A human curates the content, runs it through the AI to make it read better, then edits from there. That last part is essential though.

Or for workstations. It’s a lot cheaper to add a stick of RAM to a workstation than optimize workflow a bit.

There are many cases where RAM is not cheap:

• mobile apps
• end user machines - most people won’t add that stick of RAM
• macOS apps - pretty much all Apple products use soldered RAM now

If you control the machine, RAM is cheap, until it isn’t. If you don’t control the machine, you should always keep an eye on RAM, because once the complaints start coming in, you’ve already started losing customers.

Automatic updates are absolutely a thing on some distros, but you can change the schedule to be outside your gaming time.

Fake: there’s no way Anon goes to bed before midnight

Gay: Anon gets off to Japanese balls

Memory is not cheap

The thing is, these mantras are always taken out of context.

“Memory is cheap” is in comparison to other options. For example, if you have a the choice between optimizing for CPU or memory, you should optimize for CPU almost every time because it’s a lot cheaper to add more RAM than add more CPU.

But for some reason, we’ve taken this to mean, “I don’t need to optimize memory or CPU because I can just upgrade them.” That’s only true until it isn’t, and it’s generally easier to optimize things as you go than optimize once everything is broken.

Good post. I really don’t understand how apps have gotten so terrible.

The app I work on is slow, but that’s because we’re doing pretty heavy things (3D canvas stuff), but even then we do a really bad job of lazy loading stuff (e.g. images used for that 3D stuff are loaded way before you get to the 3D part, and many users don’t use the 3D feature at all in a session).

But at least we have an excuse. Why does the bank app take forever to load when it just needs to query around balances and submit tasks to their backend to process? That should be incredibly lightweight.

They didn’t say they’re okay with their behavior, they said they appreciate promoting Linux, because more people using Linux is a good thing for all Linux users.

This feels like a good metaphor for US vs EU culture.