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The NASA computers were among the most advanced computer science of their day. They were built by engineers with cutting edge technology. Chrome is a web browser, an absurd behemoth intended to view everything from a static page from twenty years ago to a dynamically assembled webapp using frameworks even the app’s creator doesn’t know one tenth of, but still has to import, and the whole thing is built to spy on what you do while you surf for cat pics and pussy pics for the ten trillionth time, feeding google’s monopoly.
Not even apples to oranges. Apples to the lump formerly known as the planet Pluto.
Back in 69 more people were carrying the load of logic in their heads. Its been a double edged sword of progress with more responsibilities offloaded to automation
STOP. DOING. UX.
Computers were meant to do math, not make pictures.
Trillions of pixels illuminated, but no real life benefit has been discovered.
GUI. Ray Tracing. Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models.
Terms dreamed up by the deranged.
They are playing you for fools!
GUI. Ray Tracing. Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models.
Those things can have their place. But not on a restaurant website when I’m trying to order curry.
It’s infuriating!
I just want static html webpages back. The sheer volume of scripts that run just to display text these days drives me nuts.
Agreed! Bring back usenet and keep the normies out. Judging by all the fascist uprisings, they weren’t ready for it anyways.
lol, Committee for the Extermination of Eternal September.
What if we just used math to make pictures? 🤔
This is the kind of picture a mathematician expects you to take seriously.
Mandelbruh
Mandlebroooooo
Mathicc
Well how else is google gonna keep tabs on you.
Heh
Good thing they didn’t need chrome to go to the moon.
The guys that went to the moon were engineers and highly trained to use the computer. We can dream to have users half as competent.
After separating from the Command Modupe for lunar descent, there was a faulty abort switch discovered on the Apollo 14 lunar module that required Alan Shephard and Edgar Mitchell to reprogram the lunar module computer in lunar orbit.
Link to the memory module used: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/core-memory-module-saturn-v/nasm_A20210580000
It’s more impressive when you see this giant block of wires in person.
Games today: “Om nom, I take 16GB, om nom…”
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Apps like Chrome use available RAM if it’s available, but they should be releasing it for other apps to use when there’s high memory pressure.
It’s the same with disk caching. If you have a lot of free RAM, the OS will use all of it for caching files.
No, the reason why browsers use so much RAM is because every tab is it’s own process and sandbox. That and lazy handling of content.
Edit: apparently i overestimated the overhead of process & sanbox per tab? So it’s more lazy handling, i.e. keeping pictures in RAM instead of pushing them to cache?
Sandboxing does use some RAM, but it was a big win for security. One site can’t crash the entire browser or use a security hole to get access to data on other tabs. Still, the majority of the RAM is taken by the site itself. The processes do share some RAM - they’re not entirely isolated.
my problem with certain programs, chrome included, is they tell the os “no, you can’t have this ram back. i’m using it”
i understand the logic of your argument, but it’s never played out in life
In some cases, the RAM actually is in use by the site. That’s especially the case on sites with heavy client-side logic. In that case, it’s not Chrome’s (or Firefox’s) fault, it’s the website’s fault. If you hover over the tab, it should show memory usage in the popover.
Chrome has a “Memory Saver” feature where it’ll unload tabs that are offscreen/hidden which helps quite a bit. Not sure if Firefox has something similar.
Not sure if it’s included in base firefox, but I use a extension that does exactly that
My desktop with 64gb sat idling with a web browser open:
You got 32gb to play with chump
so many reasons to ditch chrome and google altogether…
Isn’t it great that we don’t have to be so efficient anymore?
You can do math without a computer, it turns out.
People in 1969: What is a browser tab?
You know those paper folders? Yeah imagine that each flap is actually a screen.
You’re welcome.
Putting shit on the moon is very easy from a maths PoV
That’s not why we were able to get Apollo 11 onto the moon using only 8 kilobytes. The real reason is because we used the most batshit sorcery mankind may ever know to eek out every last ounce of usefulness we could muster from those 8 kilobytes.
There was some sorcery involved, yes. But that does not mean it wasn’t a fundamentally easy problem. Orbital mechanics are the easiest and cleanest physics around. That’s why classical mechanics was so incredibly useful: it’s a near perfect predictor for movement in the sky. There ain’t no friction no nothing. Just clean positions, gravity, and propulsion.
STOOOPPP, you’re breaking my narrative that Chrome tabs ought to fit in 8KB.
Games were impressive in this way too. Computers and consoles didn’t have much CPU power or memory, so they had to squeeze every little bit.
This was still happening even with 5th gen consoles. Crash Bandicoot couldn’t fit in the Playstation’s memory so they ended up overwriting system memory and memory allocated to features of Sony’s standard library they weren’t using.
These days, game development is more “boring” in that aspect. Systems are powerful and frameworks like Unreal Engine handle all the core stuff. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though - it lets the game developers focus on the game itself.
And they had bugs that were a direct result of limitations. The Minus World in Super Mario World, for example, comes from a combination of uninitialized values, how data structures are packed, and imperfect collision detection.
People don’t talk about the problems that result from doing things that way.
Most regular players didn’t encounter these bugs though, as often they’re edge cases that don’t occur during regular gameplay. A lot of them were found by people intentionally looking for them.
I’d argue that games today are bugger than games in the past, just due to how complex they are now. Sure, they’re a different class of bug (and arbitrary code execution via buffer overflows isn’t really a thing any more thanks to ASLR and the NX bit), but I don’t think there’s fewer bugs at all.
If you’ve played SMB a fair amount, there is at least one that you’ve almost certainly ran into at random. It is exploited by speedrunners, but you’ve probably hit it just playing the game normally.
Pirhana plants only check the hitbox every other frame. Obviously, this is a speed optimization. At some point, you’ve probably gone right through a piranha plant that should have hit you. Speedrunners can and do exploit this, as well, of course.
An extension of this idea in other games is when you have split-screen multiplayer. In games like the OG Mario Kart, player inputs are processed on alternating frames. Which means the game has an average of 0.5 frames of input latency in multiplayer before anything else gets calculated in. (And people say retro games don’t have input lag on CRTs; these people are wrong for a lot of different reasons).
Go with Unity at least. I know no Unreal game without stuttering.
I’m not a game developer so I just used the first example I could think of.
it lets the game developers focus on the game itself
Downside to that is there isn’t a ton of people putting effort into efficiency/performance. And they sort of seem to be a dying breed at this point
Anyone who wants to know more about the exact craziness in retro game code should read “Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System” by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Constraints are amazing for creativity.
Yet, some of the most anticipated titles released are streamlined, soulless and boring. Every edge has been rounded off to such a degree, it makes Disney look gory.
