Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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I bought a new System 76 machine about this time last year, and splurged (by my standards) on 64GB of RAM. BEST. DECISION. EVAAAR. as far as I'm concerned. For probably the first time in my life, I feel like I can do basically whatever I want and not have to worry about RAM. Have 8 Firefox windows with 200 tabs open, 3 or 4 Eclipse instances, and a few server apps running, and want to launch a bunch of VM's with Vagrant? Done. Want to launch one more Eclipse instance? Not a problem. Opening another couple of dozen browser tabs? No sweat.

Of course that's not my normal mode of operation (well, except for the 200 tabs part), but the point is, I'm finally not limited by memory. I don't have to think about it now. I don't find myself always running "top" or "free -h" to try and figure out "OK, do I need to kill some stuff now?" and if so, "what should I kill?" Nope. Any and everything I do in my routine workflow fits in the scope of the hardware. It's incredibly liberating.

"Oh," the critics will say, "RAM that isn't used is wasted." To which I say "so fucking what? It's my RAM and I'll damn well waste it if I want."

It took me a week but think about switching to jetbrains. So far I’ve had 0 people regret my pressuring to get off eclipse. My old workplace didn’t blink about the expense and my new job has it as the standard kit. Just a thought even though it is a pain in the tush in the beginning.

I've tried it. And TBH, I don't get all the hype. It was usable, but I didn't see anywhere near enough appeal to justify investing the time/energy to learn Jetbrains as well as I've learned Eclipse over the years. And for its warts, Eclipse pretty much "just works" at this point, especially given that I have suitable hardware for it now. I think a lot of my issues with Eclipse in the past where pretty directly attributable to running on under-powered hardware.

As a collolary, RAM that's not being used by programs still gets used by the OS as a filesystem cache, so it still contributes towards the system feeling snappier.

I'm terrified to think that in a not-so-distant future we'll be complaining about laptops shipping with only 64 GB RAM. I bet it'll still be because of Electron.

I still remember upgrading my first PC from 1 meg of RAM to 4 meg. I thought I was a god, and couldn't imagine what I'd ever do with "all of this memory". Times change...

Who would be able to productively use 200 open browser tabs? Seems like a strange argument to waste even more resources on a more and more ruined planet.

Sometimes if I'm buying some stuff from Amazon I'll do a ton of research on each one, looking for alternatives, specs, discussions, reviews, etc. Each search can sometimes go up to 40-50 tabs, especially if I'm looking for a specific set of attributes in a product and I just can't find the perfect match. I'll do the searches in parallel and switch between them, so I'll keep everything open since closing and re-opening 50 tabs whenever I want to revisit a session is tedious. Getting to 200 tabs is pretty normal in these situations.

If you don't like hundreds of browser tabs, don't open hundreds of browser tabs. I'll keep my own counsel on how I manage my tabs.

If you ruin the planet it's not your private business anymore.

Sounds like a bit of a stretch. By this line of reasoning, it's not "your private business" that you breathe, since you are consuming oxygen and emitting carbon dioxide with every breath.

That's why uncontrolled population growth is not considered a sustainable pattern. But granting those who are already born the right to breathe few would dispute.

However, those consuming more resources than the share the planet has to offer for everyone are just denying others an equally good life. Either now or in a future generation. https://www.overshootday.org/

Rather useless growth of computer performance might not be the worst problem. But it's easy to address. I can tell you that working with an old 2 GB computer is no problem at all for many tasks with just a bit of thinking. (For sure there are tasks that require more memory. I also use such machines, but not all the time.)

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