Honestly, FF became similar worse:
On my 16 GB machine, when surfing some hours FF has allocated around 10-11 GB and for whatever reason it does not free them, unless I exit and restart it
On linux do something like `systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryHigh=XG -p MemoryMax=X+2G firefox` to constrain it since the firefox people refuse to implement the memory limits logic that say Edge has..
But at the same time, this isn't just a Firefox issue, although they may be worse than most. Its a fundamental tenant of GC languages. You trade CPU (for the garbage collection) for RAM utilization. IIRC This was apparent by the late 70s with Dijkstra, but very clearly indicated in say Hertz where they are explicitly scaling GC overhead vs memory footprint to find that it takes ~5x the ram to approach the efficiency of an explicit allocate/deallocate model. Lower footprints are achievable but the GC overhead goes way up just to reach 2x the ram footprint such that the GC tends to dominate the CPU utilization.
And there are lots of papers like this for long running processes. GC works well if your model is basically allocate as much as you like, exit the process before actually needing to do a proper GC pass. Especially for contended systems where the memory is returned to the OS. This is why say PHP tended not to have this problem, because the memory was largely freed at the end of every request.
The New Tab Suspender plugin has my 50+ Firefox tabs at 2.2GB of ram usage right now. Having every tab ready and waiting for you is of course going to have increased memory usage.
Even Safari is gobbling up RAM these days, I think it's just all the JavaScript code on the web is pure garbage, and what was bad enough before is getting even worse with all the vibeslop coding going on now.
Garbage collected languages and seemingly unlimited virtual memory encourage developers to not even think about memory allocation any more, so memory usage for a tab that's left open just grows and grows.
Perhaps we should blame this on shitty website design. So many of them load huge assets for no good reason. They get away with it because modern processors are that good, bandwidth is cheap, and until now, RAM has also been cheap.
- the described behaviour is the one I experience on my Win10 notebook (Lenovo X1)
- Firefox wasnt always that, thats what Im refering to
- I can see in ProcessExplorer how many threads it starts & keeps, and for whatever reason this is always a lot, even if I open only 1 tab after coming from new start
There’s always going to be consumer products, even if the value proposition is worse.
If there’s a silver lining, I hope it leads to more optimisation, less Electron, and less bloat.
Typed from my 8GB MacBook Neo; which is honestly plenty fast enough. It “feels” like a 16GB windows laptop, even tho of course I know it’s not, but there’s something about optimisation.
Lots of more niche products than Apple’s laptop won’t exist for a while due to the price of hardware. At a smaller scale the inflation hardware companies experience is really, really massive
While I definitely agree that there will be a slow down in purchase decisions for both consumers and businesses I struggle with this idea that there will be “no consumer products” in the market. There will be.
You’re making what seems like a zero sum assumption. I am still using my M1 MacBook for work. I have a first version Mac Studio at home and countless other devices laying around. The world will continue to move forward and yes purchasing will slow down but folks will still be using their existing phones, laptops and other devices.
I don’t think Apple is gonna go home because of the three-headed memory cartel, since they didn’t spend/burn billions (one trillion?) of dollars on AI, I think they will replace the cartel in-house, Intel is out and Qualcomm is on the way out, the three headed cartel can follow them.
The future is starting to resemble smartphones that use predominantly RAM for local compute and inference while all persistent storage is managed by the cloud.
> I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot.
Same happened when the first smartphones came out, and everything was about "mobile first". Everyone will use their mobile phones for everything, desktop is dead, every app should be primarily designed for smartphones, everything comes after. Turned out smartphones just another interface that are good for some things, and not good for some other. Same for the "cloud native" movement.
Exactly this. Each new hype cycle, everything must be shoe horned into the hot new technology. So now there's a push to use chatbots for everything, why even have an interface? Just ask the chatbot to make one for you! Because the user totally knows what they want and what works, we've been wrong all these decades when it comes to UIs and customer preference. /s
I’m pretty sure that same discourse was seen every mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics. Yet here we are, hand-crafted high quality things are rare and expensive.
> mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics
I see this comparison a lot, and I think it's a trap, because it invites us to confuse scaling duplicates with scaling design changes.
Duplicative mass-production was always core to software from the moment it first became "soft". A factory churning out 10,000 copies of the same book maps to 10,000 downloads of a single software release. The paper and bindings of the book may be below hand-crafted standards, but the words are largely unaffected.
In contrast, LLM-coding is the design and prototyping stage. So if we want to learn from textiles/electronics, we shouldn't be thinking of acres of looms, but instead about fashion-design, custom tailoring, determining patterns for clothes, designing new appliances, choosing circuit layouts, etc.
They care in principle, for the most part bad code makes changes and extensions slow to implement and causes unnecessary production issues which costs time and money. But there is always the tension between implementing something quickly now and being able to implement things quickly in the future and unfortunately the preference is almost always quickly now despite everyone knowing that this is the way more expensive choice in the long run.
It isn't necessarily the more expensive choice in the long run. Let's say that companies A and B are direct competitors who start from the same point. Company A quickly codes a bunch of buggy software and ships it in a month. Company B takes its time and ships good, clean, well-organized, mostly bug-free code in five months. Company A makes money. Company B goes out of business and its code is useless, its nice qualities irrelevant.
This is just a hypothetical example, I'm not saying that this is how it would necessarily go in all cases.
But they also ask why the next feature is taking so long, because of the mess we created with the last feature, and I would consider this caring in principle. Unfortunately this almost always filed as unavoidable.
Disappointing. Instead of making battery life better that would benefit all of the Apple Watch users, here are some random AI features that most of you never gonna usa, and some new colors.
Even if they’re just matching battery life while adding frequent HRV readings, they’ve made a big advancement. Frequent HRV is a requirement to be a WHOOP/Garmin competitor.
Previous Apple Watch can do it if you tell it you have afib, but that hurts battery life.
FWIW I have told it I have afib. I used to have problems with battery life, but I find the Series 11 can finally last all day and overnight with always on display+afib/HRV monitoring; and it charges fast enough I can get close to 100% in the shower, meaning it effectively does not have battery issues.
I have hearth issues too, and the metrics Apple provides still do not help detecting them. Not to mention that there is no improvement of their high blood pressure detection. So despite the marketing that they have the most accurate sensor, there is no real advancement here.
Relying on an Apple Watch instead of a proper medical device if you're having heart issues is, well, uh... There's a reason an Apple Watch isn't a medical device.
Apple Watch Series 12 continues to offer up to 24 hours of everyday battery life9 and now offers up to 10 hours of battery life during an outdoor workout — 25 percent more than the previous model.10
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An increase to 10 hours of workout tells me battery life is better, but maybe not “better enough” to give the 24 hour number an increase (or the higher HRV checking frequency is eating the rest of the gains)
No, it’s not. 24 hours is the same as series 11. And you are comparing to series 10, not 11, that already had this improvement.
I do not work out 10 hours a day, so that number is literally meaningless/pointless.
For all their readability benefits under direct sunlight, prolonged exposure also damages or kills them. You need at least a UV blocker for outdoor use, but the heat cannot be avoided.
> He spent the next three years pursuing this vision.
I had the chance to try this procedure out when I was 20, and it saved my life. Without it there is a high chance I would be dead. And it is because he had an idea that he pursued.
It is fascinating what modern medicine is capable of.
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