Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom never fear. Now that AI has set a new precedent by forcing RAM prices to double every 6 months, soon the era of needing to optimize for minimal memory use will return!
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@the_wub @fribbledom Let’s try to be socks positive.
@mathew @fribbledom Wear them with pride!
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I've written about programming languages, compilers, open source, distributed systems...
The Fediverse's response:
"Tell us more about CONFIG.SYS and sock surveillance!"
Love it!
@fribbledom you know the old saying. An army lives on its feet blogs. Or something like that.
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@fribbledom "do I really need the CD driver? can I go without for game X?"
Gods what time that was.
@SunDancer @fribbledom
ironically, most of the games would immediately run some code that was functionally speaking "hey fuck DOS and 8-bit real 8086 mode, we're running our own custom special purpose 32 bit protected mode operating system, just so we can use that honkin 4 megabytes of RAM! " -
@patterfloof
websites should be paying us for loading them in our browser! /hj
@fribbledom@wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom
I got a work laptop with 64 GB of RAM such that I can run VS Code, Slack, Obsidian, Spotify and Zotero (all Electron apps which ship their own copy of Chromium engine).I am kind of happy that RAM got expensive again such that programmers might actually start to value it again …
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom
I used to have 256 MB of RAM in the 64 MB era and it was luxurious. Now I have 16 GB in my personal laptop and I sometimes consider upgrading to 32 GB to fit all the browser tabs in there … -
@wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom
I got a work laptop with 64 GB of RAM such that I can run VS Code, Slack, Obsidian, Spotify and Zotero (all Electron apps which ship their own copy of Chromium engine).I am kind of happy that RAM got expensive again such that programmers might actually start to value it again …
@martin_ueding @patterfloof @fribbledom
you do realize this can be read as a "fuck you, got mine"?
I would appreciate if programmers and product managers started caring more about resource usage.
I'd also appreciate a job where I get to spend a significant portion of my time optimizing code.
But I'm not seeing any of these happen yet, and I'm not holding my breath.
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
…*frantically increases BUFFERS=*
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom To be fair - optimizing config.sys and autoexec.bat wasn‘t so much fun back in the days either. It was more a pain in the a** when your favourite game just wouldn‘t run. @bijram
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom @buherator accurate
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom It felt easy most of the time. If a program needed 640K, I could skip most of the startup. For protected mode, I could skip everything, just load the mouse driver, and it ran well.
It became harder with later computers, simply because the Bios was starting to become larger, but by then Dos was starting to be replaced.
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@fribbledom I somehow deleted AUTOEXEC.BAT once
@benofbrown This happend to me, too. Probably it was still in recycle bin, but I never got the computer running again, had no-one to help me with that. @fribbledom
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom
The names of the files are the reason I like to listen to 'MASTER BOOT RECORD'
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@wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom
I got a work laptop with 64 GB of RAM such that I can run VS Code, Slack, Obsidian, Spotify and Zotero (all Electron apps which ship their own copy of Chromium engine).I am kind of happy that RAM got expensive again such that programmers might actually start to value it again …
@martin_ueding @wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom
I was just compiling two copies of the business application I'm working on (policy management in insurance), in two IDE instances. It sent my 64 GB of RAM machine into thrashing.
NO, I was NOT running Outlook nor browsers nor much of anything else at the time!
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Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit everything into 640 KB.
Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.
@fribbledom @kevin
These kids today don't know what it's like getting 639k free base memory so your badly coded bbs will load. -
@fribbledom remember, exTENDed memory TENDs to be useful, while exPanded memory is Practically useless.
Back in those days I regularly had to talk sewerage workers through editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get the data from their gas safety monitors to upload. There was only one editor guaranteed to be installed on their computers, edlin -- which could be a challenge.
Funny enough, unlike a few of our directors, not one of them had any problems following the instructions over the phone.
@AbramKedge @fribbledom ironically I got a lot more use out of EMS back then. About all that would use XMS was a few games using the Wolfenstein 3D engine. Newer games and Windows 3.1 were DPMI, older either EMS or just conventional.
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@mtnrbq65 @jeroenvanbergen @fribbledom and SMARTDRV FTW.
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@mtnrbq65 @jeroenvanbergen @fribbledom and SMARTDRV FTW.
@Megawatt @jeroenvanbergen @fribbledom
Ha ha
, loving this thread -
@martin_ueding @patterfloof @fribbledom
you do realize this can be read as a "fuck you, got mine"?I would appreciate if programmers and product managers started caring more about resource usage.
I'd also appreciate a job where I get to spend a significant portion of my time optimizing code.
But I'm not seeing any of these happen yet, and I'm not holding my breath.
@wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom
I didn't intend that meaning but I see what you mean.My job is in LLM Inference, and there we actually look into performance as it is a business interest to have that run efficient on the servers. I guess when it runs on customers's computers, the motivation is less clear.
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@lord @fribbledom and this amount of "partners" is considered low, by current standards ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@KasTasMykolas @lord @fribbledom oh my god. I feel like just one is plenty?!
