anon7000 parent
Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo, and it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside vs a smaller airplane… you’d probably do it! There’s no incentive in software to get a smaller, more efficient plane, and plenty of incentive to use the big thing for free that has all the extra features
> it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside
I think this is not the case. E.g., we replace our computers every few years, but not because the new ones can do things that you can't do with your current computer. It's because the software you use to do the same things keeps getting more resource-hungry.
Its called externalized cost and its as real in software as it is IRL
So the cost is there, it's just not paid (directly) by the developer. But we all end up paying someone else's externalized cost, included said developer that is paying some other developers' externalized costs.
Yeah. I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post doing the math on that. If I spend $2000 on a computer, and that gets me a certain amount of ram and cpu and so on, we can figure out a dollar figure on that bloat.
Then multiply by the number of people who use a piece of software (eg slack) and we’d get a figure for the externalised cost of a piece of software.
Consider also the missed market opportunity: my personal devices are 13yo laptop and 9yo phone. If an app isn’t compatible or makes it lag, I delete it and download a competing one. I’m not alone, and yes: I have money to spend on your app. I just don’t want/need to upgrade hardware that often.
Kudos for keeping your devices for so long, I also try to have mine last as long as it's practical, but so far i didn't manage to have them last so long. Unfortunately, you're in a minority. Most people would change their phone once the apps they're using aren't compatible with it anymore. So devs don't consider this aspect much.
Worst offender being Google, who toggled on VP8 / VP9 decoding on YouTube despite the vast majority of devices only having h264 hardware decode.
The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams.
Or they could just send the video uncompressed and then it would take even less hardware resources to decode on the client side. Why, in a sense it would be a lot more like decoding analog television signals at that point. (Not least of which since few clients would have the network bandwidth to handle more than 360-480p of that ;)
That analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space…
When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.
That is more a tragedy of the commons thing. For each individual app the comparison holds true
And since we do have app stores as gate keepers, this could easily be remedied by the app stores. They wouldn’t even have to penalize you. Just put a score on there for app size (and app responsiveness) compared to the median in that category. Put this near the star rating from the reviews. Executives don’t generally care that you as an engineer want to reduce an app size by 10% but they really really care about how the app looks on the app stores because that’s what they show to people and what they are judged on.
It doesn't "take up a ton of memory" and if you think 47MB is "a lot of disk space" then maybe you need a bigger disk. Most laptops have at least 250GB, so this program would take up about 0.0188% of disk space, which is frankly not a lot. I had PDF files way larger than that. And you only need to run it once, you do not need to keep it loaded and running all the time, so it doesn't "take up a ton of memory".
This is how we have ended up with huge cars and huge houses etc. Storing huge volumes of unneeded junk isn’t solved by have more space. Store less junk.
47MB is about 3x the space once required by a widely used commercial graphical operating system. It was even enough to also include Microsoft Word with plenty of space left.
How far we’ve fallen.
You're living in the past. Hard drives are now up to 36TB. Hard drives are always getting bigger. 47MB isn't worth worrying about, at all.
This is such a weird rationalization. You’d sell a kidney to be a 10x developer but making an app 1000000x smaller isn’t worth a thought? Maybe that’s why the former hasn’t happened.
While it is true that hard drives have large amount of storage, it is unlikely that are any Mac with a 36TB hard drive attached that needs to overcome WiFi time limit.
People usually think that but when it comes to attack surface, change management, upgrade issues, etc —- the extra stuff isn’t entirely free…
Upgrades shouldn’t ever break things, bugs and vulnerabilities never exist, and Rube-Goldberg machines should work 100% reliably day in and day out.
Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way…
Even Rube Goldberg sometimes included a simple alternative at the end of his machines. If the opossum or woodpecker get sick, there is a knife handy to sharpen the pencil.
> Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo
Qatar might even give you a plane!
This has to be Soviet Shoe Factory Principle in action, not just ignored negative externalities. Everyone relies on shipping more code for their employment, rather than more values, which incentivizes that behavior.