Hot take

[Ripred]

If developers optimized their software, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

[Levent]

Not hot take, you are clueless.

[BiotechBen]

4 minutes ago, Levent said:

Not hot take, you are clueless.

"Everything is a conspiracy when you have no fucking idea how things work"

 

One of my favorite unattributed quotes

[StDragon]

Code optimization wouldn't have stopped the RAM shortage or lowered the prices by any meaningful amount.

...however, the code-bloat from shared code / libraries is not only wasteful of system resources, but the bloat is a major security vector that's ripe for exploitation. For example, Living Off the Land (LOTL) attacks become easier to pull off.

[jordanbuilds1]

1 hour ago, Ripred said:

If developers optimized their software, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

lemme guess, you watch threat Interactive...

[Kermit_Frog]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

Code optimization wouldn't have stopped the RAM shortage or lowered the prices by any meaningful amount.

...however, the code-bloat from shared code / libraries is not only wasteful of system resources, but the bloat is a major security vector that's ripe for exploitation. For example, Living Off the Land (LOTL) attacks become easier to pull off.

NPM... Axios... Cries  

[whispous]

We're about to find out how developers will respond to an average RAM capacity lower than expected.

 

PC is a wonderfully open, largely backwards compatible ecosystem.

 

There are tens of thousands of solid games to play from the last 30+ years, and on top of that, there's an endless set of upcoming low requirement indie games.

 

 

Some devs will plough on behaving as if their customer base is all buying 32 and 64+gb of RAM.
Some will do better optimisation to work with less

Some don't need to worry, because their games don't have a giant memory footprint anyway.

[TudorFinalBosz]

It depends on the software but a lot of software is optimised to not use hardware resources too heavily, if possible.

Or at least check the hardware profile of a machine and adapt resource usage to its capabilities.

So for example if Chrome sees that you have 64GB of RAM it will behave differently than if you had 16. There are heuristics inside the program that make it use memory according to what is locally possible for a usable experience.

[Mark Kaine]

5 hours ago, Ripred said:

If developers optimized their software, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

ai would still buy it all up...  but if they did we wouldn't need 16+ GB for "textures"... You can do a lot with like 8kb (full games) yet here we are with gigabytes wasted on "music" and textures, tons of unoptimized "vibe code" while not even mirrors work in-game (too complicated!) which was already standard 20 years ago with much smaller games... 

[Doobeedoo]

Haha. My current PC has 32GB of RAM my prior one had it as well. Before I even launch the game half of RAM is used already so. Nothing to do with gaming. 

Even some games can eat most that capacity at max.

[starsmine]

Its less a hot take and more of a half baked take

Yes, software is terribly bloated, That has alot to do with dependencies
The other source of large ram ammounts is sand boxing, this is important security wise

But none of that addresses the ram shortage in the slightest, it would just make it hurt less for consumers. Every single bit of research and improvements in AI is how to use memory better, its one area where things are not bloated.

like I have a chrome tab that burns over GB on its own just from dependencies, its stupid. its unnecessary. But at least its better then fandom. 

But I have others burning less then 90MB, and a solid 60MB of that is just the sandboxing. 
 

12 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

but if they did we wouldn't need 16+ GB for "textures"... You can do a lot with like 8kb (full games) yet here we are with gigabytes wasted on "music" and textures,

This on the other hand is a bad take. Yes you can do alot with very little, but none of this shit is wasted here. Lossy compression is lossy and noticable. Vibe coding isnt even a problem here, you can even use AI to try to scrub through and minimize dependencies by going, hey, half the shit compiled and sitting in ram is dead code. 

 

  

15 hours ago, jordanbuilds1 said:

lemme guess, you watch threat Interactive...

They dont even address this topic in any real form? so its not that. but also this is a bad take as well even if it was valid. They focus more on dumb ways to use compute. and they are right, it is dumb and the industry used to be better, they were one of the last parts of SWE environment to fall into the whole clean code and dependency trap with the last two generations not requiring as much effort to get the bare minimum product out. Heck they use a 12GB GPU for all their targets. they dont care if you blow the 8GB budget. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

This on the other hand is a bad take. Yes you can do alot with very little, but none of this shit is wasted here. Lossy compression is lossy and noticable. Vibe coding isnt even a problem here, you can even use AI to try to scrub through and minimize dependencies by going, hey, half the shit compiled and sitting in ram is dead code. 

Oh we're at that point again, do I believe the old and tired hot takes from you or dave "task manager" plummer...?

 

 

 

... the real problem is I see no way out of this, people who know how to actually program without shitting on the user are becoming exceedingly rare... but that doesn't mean we should just close our eyes and "let ai look over it" that's not a solution, not even a bandaid. 

[starsmine]

18 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Oh we're at that point again, do I believe the old and tired hot takes from you or dave "task manager" plummer...?

 

 

Bro literally said the same thing in that video I said. 

inappropriate use of dependencies.

so your either or is not a thing that applies here. we share the same take here.

he does not even talk about compression. In fact the better your compression, the more compute you need. So why you bolded that part of what I said is beyond me. 

18 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

... the real problem is I see no way out of this, people who know how to actually program without shitting on the user are becoming exceedingly rare... but that doesn't mean we should just close our eyes and "let ai look over it" that's not a solution, not even a bandaid. 

Look. That isnt what I said either. But yes, AI with things like Sonnet 4.5 and especially Mythos that can zoom out pretty far to most or all of a systems code base can find many things in systems that are to big for one person alone to tease out. It very much is part of the solution. 

 

[Issac Zachary]

19 hours ago, Ripred said:

If developers [Microsoft] optimized their software, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

I added the definitions within the brackets.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

people who know how to actually program without shitting on the user are becoming exceedingly rare...

Supply of competent developers isn't the (full) problem. I mean, there may be more or fewer in relative terms, probably fewer as a percentage due to the vast increase in the number. The key are the incentives given to them, and therefore, the problem the companies they work for are trying to solve. A good programmer can make a very good contribution to an open project on his spare time, but that won't change that his day job is dealing with unrealistic deadlines, inherited technical debt, and efficiency as a low order priority. A mediocre driver told to stick to the paved road would give you a smoother ride than an ace pilot told to cut through the wilderness.

[Mark Kaine]

4 minutes ago, Issac Zachary said:

I added the definitions within the brackets.

 

19 hours ago, Ripred said:

If [Microsoft] dropped openAI, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

FTFY!!!

 

[Mark Kaine]

38 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Bro literally said the same thing in that video I said. 

inappropriate use of dependencies.

And I didn't say you're wrong about that? But that's just a symptom rather than the root ...

 

 

39 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Look. That isnt what I said either. But yes, AI with things like Sonnet 4.5 and especially Mythos that can zoom out pretty far to most or all of a systems code base can find many things in systems that are to big for one person alone to tease out. It very much is part of the solution. 

Ok, technically that "could" be a part of a solution, but the main issue is the mindset that brought us here (disrespect of the user and the machine) ... And that's why I said I don't have a solution for that either, but having more "to the metal" code (or whatever you wanna call it) would likely be able to get so much more out of today's powerful machines... that's not really debatable I think, and I also don't think variables in hardware are a good excuse, nowadays computers are kind of all very similar, yes of course differences in performance etc must be addressed, but again it's how that's done, and not that it has to be done (kind of reminds me of MT framework again, that was one of the last engines that actually respected the hardware, nowadays there's really a big shift to upload everything on the hardware, UE5 being designed exactly for that, need of RTX features etc, basically pretty much the opposite of MT framework)

 

 

[Issac Zachary]

57 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

 

FTFY!!!

 

Thanks! Now I learned a new acronym! 

 

And I agree about Microsoft's AI. I was using more than 8GB right after startup. Then I got rid of all the Copilot junk that I could, as well as the Phone Link stuff, and now I'm running under 8GB usage most of the time.

[cmndr]

20 hours ago, Ripred said:

If developers optimized their software, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

Hot take... 

Software and hardware are optimized enough that 1 day's work for most people in the US buys "enough" RAM. If you're doing pretty well, it's about 1 hour. 
30 years ago it was about a week to get "enough RAM" and enough was 8MB. 

We're up a factor of 2000-8000 in terms of how much RAM we're looking at. 

[Issac Zachary]

1 hour ago, cmndr said:

Hot take... 

Software and hardware are optimized enough that 1 day's work for most people in the US buys "enough" RAM. If you're doing pretty well, it's about 1 hour. 
30 years ago it was about a week to get "enough RAM" and enough was 8MB. 

We're up a factor of 2000-8000 in terms of how much RAM we're looking at. 

I think the tech purchasing dynamic has completely changed since 30 years ago, which meant that whole RAM (and tech) was way more expensive back then, it also didn't seem to matter as much.

 

30 years ago and computers were optional, so tech could be expensive, but it didn't matter to your average Joe.

Nowadays, you can't own a phone that isn't a computer. Even "dumb phones" have Wi-Fi, hook up to the Internet and have app stores. And even then you're expected these days to have Internet access and app access.

 

30 years ago and computer tech was changing so quickly that it was easy to get free computers that were thousands of dollars just a couple of years ago, at least in the USA.

 

Now, some people did need a new expensive computer or just had the money lying around and figured they deserved it, but for those of us who didn't we'd just wait until a relative or neighbor upgraded and then we got their computer.

 

But today, there seems to be a bigger push to drop unsupported hardware. It was one thing to use a 286 IBM to print up a document with Word Perfect instead of with Word on Microsoft Office on a new Pentium powered W95 machine back in the day; but it's a whole other thing to try to check your bank account on a W7 machine today.

 

Because of this  there's a bigger demand to keep up with the latest and greatest, which is thankfully cheaper, but still means we're affected more by price fluctuations than ever before.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, cmndr said:

We're up a factor of 2000-8000 in terms of how much RAM we're looking at. 

Well, since we are nowhere near 2000-8000 times the utility derived from software, I'd say the efficiency has been pretty atrocious.

[Kisai]

On 4/20/2026 at 7:21 PM, Ripred said:

If developers optimized their software, their wouldn't be a ram shortage 

This only holds true for the HTML/webview type of software:

Epic's launcher sits there in the background, chewing up 5GB of RAM doing nothing.

Steam, wow 34 times smaller. Also dishonest, because steam actually lives over here and is only 6 times smaller:

Both are bloated embedded chromium framework apps. Just Steam is actually fast and snappy, where as Epic, can take 2 minutes just to refresh the store page and is completely unresponsive while it does.

 

Yep, been staring at that for 2 minutes.

 

Let's look at another CEF, Spotify:

 

 

Spotify uses almost as much as steam does.

 

And we have something easy to directly compare spotify to:

 

Winamp can, literately do everything spotify does. Play music, play video, do visualizations, connect to podcast streams, etc.

 

Even if we don't use that, we can also compare two other media players:

MPC-HC, playing a 4K H.265 video.

Or VLC playing the same 4K H.265 video.

 

Point being, there is "software is bloated, due to crappy development priorities, like using HTML to ... display images, which requires spinning up an entire web browser webview" and then there is "whatever happened to the stuff we had before that worked?"

 

Winamp could ran on a 486 in 1997. Given you couldn't actually play an MP3 on a 486, it was too weak. But then again, MP3's didn't really take off until after 2001. It was all proprietary rubbish until "xvid/divx" which was an early "Mpeg-4" standard based on h.263.

 

Like if you think about it, a lot of newer software performs worse, is very bloated, and tries to do a lot of crap while connected to the internet that these older things never tried to do during the era they were developed. So we go from winamp at 16MB, to VLC at 265MB, to MPC-HC at 967MB to Spotify that takes up just as much memory and performs much poorly (screenshot is from spotify not even playing the music, it was just showing a playlist.)

 

While I don't really use Winamp anymore except to provide a visual for whatever music is being streamed so people don't ask what is being played over and over, since SPOTIFY does not allow twitch integration of any sort, and I'm not operating a radio station. Winamp is such a tiny overhead that it's actually viable to use, where as having something like iTunes up, will literately make the PC lurch to a halt for no damn reason.

 

[Uttamattamakin]

PS5 pro has 16 GB.  Double that because PC OS's are heavier.  Then add in a GPU

On 4/22/2026 at 9:48 AM, Kisai said:

Winamp could ran on a 486 in 1997. Given you couldn't actually play an MP3 on a 486, it was too weak. But then again, MP3's didn't really take off until after 2001. It was all proprietary rubbish until "xvid/divx" which was an early "Mpeg-4" standard based on h.263.

 

Part of it could be due to the 32 to 64 bit transition.  BUt really apps use more ram now because they can.  How many people would go back to the function, look, and feel of the old apps to save on RAM. 

Perhaps the RAM shortage narrative is overblown.  If one has a system with specs just a bit better than a PS5 Pro one should be able to play any game from the past and up to the next few years in the future.  16 GB in that thing so ... what ... 32 should be plenty if all one wants to do is game.