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Maybe more efficient code will make a comeback.
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How many prompts include "make it as efficient as possible"? Or will efficiency clash with shipping as many features as possible(not even humanly anymore).
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I have bridge to sell you if you think that is likely.
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If the trend to disregard performance with ever-increasing CPU power had not stopped, C++ and Rust wouldn't be as popular as they are. Something did change with the end of the free lunch.
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What will change is more and more software will be moved over to a cloud based subscription model with the end user device just being a crippled thin client.

And I can already see the shitwank bean counters salivating over this prospect. Imagine the possibilities, we can stuff as much DRM as we want, charge as much as possible monthly, arbitrarily restrict the terms of usage in the future. What will the user do? Run the same heavy duty software on their Intel N150 + 4GB RAM shitbox? Blah.

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I mean you could always vibe code a replacement in 30 minutes. Thankfully I don’t see DRM being a problem when you can’t DRM an idea. They will try, but how is that going for the games industry currently?
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They are popular among a certain hobbyist community, just as they were in 2024. They are not popular among application developers. Remember how FAANG app developers keep bumping into platform limits, such as the old Android limit of 65k classes in an app, and necessitating workarounds?
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We can get refurbished phones with 8 GB LPDDR5 for less than regular DDR5 modules.

LPDDR5 is slower but maybe a small cluster could be useful?

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The wages of the West's deliberate deindustrialization and deliberate dependence on Asian manufacturing.

30 refineries were closed in Europe in the past 15 years about, and that is just a small example of a pathological situation.

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I was reading that oil from the Middle East had to go to South Korea to be refined before being shipped as diesel to Australia.

Cost of hiring an oil tanker has ballooned massively (like 40 fold) since America decided to bomb its supply chain, so these long supply chains are massively expensive.

The Republican Party has decided that running a world of global free trade was no longer desired. America wont pay the price for another decade or two, but it will.

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Europeans can lament the choices the Americans made all day, but Europeans deliberately chose over dependency on the Americans, Chinese and Russians.

Europe can easily be more dominant than the Americans if we chose it.

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Well capitalism is responsible for that.

I think in a few hundred years we'll have learnt what a disgusting, poisonous system it is.

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I think in a few hundred years the very small number of survivors of humanity will be living in caves and huts in the high Arctic and in a greening slowly-reafforesting Antarctic, they'll be hunter-gatherers with maybe some simple small-scale unmechanised agriculture, and they won't have money. Maybe a barter system for a few.

Among the many other things they won't have is an economic model.

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Europeans and Americans choose to make things unsustainable and unprofitable to do in Europe, and chose to make it possible to import things cheaply from places like China and India who use slave labour and destroy the environment … and then blame Capitalism.

As you like … but blaming capitalism is not going to bring industry back, and it won't stop China from using slave labour or India from using their rivers as landfills.

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I mean arguably, this is good.

The amount of waste produced due to phones not receiving new batteries and software updates was utterly insane, given what goes into making them.

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100% agree. This is generally a good news story. The e-waste issue is one of the darker aspects of tech which is mostly ignored. We should promote brands like Fairphone and Framework that are trying to make a difference here. Reuse more of your kit!
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It's good if you're a tech guy in silicon valley with a good salary who used to upgrade every year to the latest pro max.

It's terrible if you're a labourer in India who buys phones under 10k INR (~100 USD) when your salary is 20k INR per month.

Unfortunately there are way more in the latter category than the former, and most of them won't know what ram is. They'll just be paying more and getting less going forward for a few years.

(Source, the salaries and phones I've seen of the staff at office. And we're in a major region you've likely heard of, not some tiny rural village.)

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