Programmer Humor

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.

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!"

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!”

Everything bad people said about web apps 20+ years ago has proved true.

It's like, great, now we have consistent cross-platform software. But it's all bloated, slow, and only "consistent" with itself (if even). The world raced to the bottom, and here we are. Everything is bound to lowest-common-denominator tech. Everything has all the disadvantages of client-server architecture even when it all runs (or should run) locally.

It is completely fucking insane how long I have to wait for lists to populate with data that could already be in memory.

But at least we're not stuck with Windows-only admin consoles anymore, so that's nice.

All the advances in hardware performance have been used to make it faster (more to the point, "cheaper") to develop software, not faster to run it.

Thought leaders spent the last couple of decades propaganding that features-per-week is the only metric to optimize, and that if your software has any bit of efficiency or quality in it that's a clear indicator for a lost opportunity to sacrifice it on the alter of code churning.

The result is not "amazing". I'd be more amazed had it turned out differently.

PCs aren't faster, they have more cores, so they can do more at a time, but it takes effort to optimize for parallel work. Also the form factor keeps getting smaller, more people use laptops now and you can't cheat thermal efficiency.

On Linux it really is noticeable

The same? Try worse. Most devices have seen input latency going up. Most applications have a higher latency post input as well.

Switching from an old system with old UI to a new system sometimes feels like molasses.

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.

When you become one with the penguin, though ... then you can begin to feel how much faster modern hardware is.

Hell, I've got a 2016 budget-model chromebook that still feels quick and snappy that way.

I still remember playing StarCraft 2 shortly after release on a 300$ laptop and it running perfectly well on medium settings.

Looked amazing. Felt incredibly responsive. Polished. Optimized.

Nowadays it’s RTX this, framegen that, need SSD or loading times are abysmal, oh and don’t forget that you need 40gb of storage and 32gb of ram for a 3 hour long walking simulator, how about you optimize your goddamn game instead? Don’t even get me started on price tags for these things.

Software and game development is definitely a spectrum though, but holy shit is the ratio of sloppy releases so disproportionate that it’s hard to see it at times.

Websites are probably a better example; as the complexity and bloat has increased faster than the tech.

Windows 11 is the slowest Windows I've ever used, by far. Why do I have to wait 15-45 seconds to see my folders when I open explorer? If you have a slow or intermittent Internet connection it's literally unusable.

Actually I can, because I use Linux.

I hate that our expectations have been lowered.

2016: "oh, that app crashed?? Pick a different one!"

2026: "oh, that app crashed again? They all crash, just start it again and cross your toes."

You do really feel this when you're using old hardware.

I have an iPad that's maybe a decade old at this point. I'm using it for the exact same things I was a decade ago, except that I can barely use the web browser. I don't know if it's the browser or the pages or both, but most web sites are unbearably slow, and some simply don't work, javascript hangs and some elements simply never load. The device is too old to get OS updates, which means I can't update some of the apps. But, that's a good thing because those old apps are still very responsive. The apps I can update are getting slower and slower all the time.

Unreal Engine is one of biggest offenders in gaming.

why do anime girls have to be right all the time?

The program expands so as to fill the resources available for its execution

-- C.N. Parkinson (if he were alive today)

I paid for the whole amount of RAM, I'm gonna use the whole amount of RAM.

/s

Joke aside, the computer I used a little more than a decade ago used to take 1 minute just to display a single raw photo. I'm a liiiittle better off now.

"Let them eat ram"

They often are worse, because everything needed to be an electron app, so they could hire the cheaper web developers for it, and also can boast about "instant cross platform support" even if they don't release Linux versions.

Qt and GTK could do cross platform support, but not data collection, for big data purposes.