I thought of making a joke that I expected to finally stumble upon a HN post that was not about AI and then Claude was mentioned on the wiki page.

The total image size is scaled each time such that each solution takes up the same amount of space. It is easier to browse that way.

So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM.

What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development phase. There's a lot of opportunity. We can even leverage AI these days to optimize existing software for RAM usage.

Unless you can use apps created 10 years ago the is no sense to produce phones with old specs.

Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway

> No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine

My personal laptop is a ULV 6th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM. Gets the job done, slowly but usably. That's about 9 years old. It runs Ubuntu. A dozen or so Firefox tabs, Kicad, VS Code, Slack. Computer things.

I'm of the opinion that application developers should be given middle-tier consumer systems as work machines. The whole notion of "dogfooding" is "dog-something else" if your devs experience the product using different hardware from the customer.

My initial reaction was that old compute levels are probably good enough for modern applications, but after thinking through all of the common use cases you’re probably right.

I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.

I think the reasoning is incomplete.

RAM isn't the only reason to upgrade. CPU's are more efficient, screens are significantly better and support variable-refresh-rates (and high refresh rates), battery technology has not stood still: even if they didn't degrade over 10 years.

There's plenty of reasons to upgrade to a new system even if it has the same memory capacity on paper. The memory will probably be faster and lower voltage too.

RAM usage doesn't just depend on the software that comes with the phone but also (or even more so) on the apps the user installs and on the content - so this is something that would need an ecosystem-wide adaption not just a single vendor.

Usually when one says 'I need xxx' it is followed by 'for yyy'. It seems nothing is needed for the sake of it.

That's another Michael Keat*

Blake'7, what i can remember is green stuff (?) and a computer saying 'confirm' as a 'i heard you' sentinel. I remember how it sounded.

Anything anyone wants to spend money on, can be converted into dollars. The currency has no tell in what it is used for.

The hypothetical was that the US "bans" bitcoin, presumably meaning it becomes illegal for US financial institutions (or US-dependent ones, which is nearly all of them) to convert bitcoin to dollars. Somebody else might give you dollars for bitcoin, but then it becomes their problem. As the saying goes, "you can't eat bitcoin".

It's not like the Dollar is the only worthwhile currency.

Convert it into Euros. Or Yen. Or Yuan.

> Requirements gathering is NOT a software engineering problem. Software is implementation, product is behaviour. That's the split.

That's a theory but I've never seen this work in practice. A piece of software is unique. If it weren't, we'd just use the cp command.

What usually happens is you get a set of requirements that looks simple. Then you start thinking about a design and see 10 different possibilities, each corresponding to a slightly different interpretation of the requirements set. You iterate a few times reviewing the designs with who set the requirements and a few peers and see more possible variations to the requirements. You need to double check its parent requirements up to the master requirements. Then you need to take time/feature/quality tradeoffs, affecting the fulfillment of requirements.

Once starting to implement, you see dependencies to other software (framework, sdk, drivers, language features,...) and understand that other software is not what you thought, or has bugs. Or you see an issue with performance or see that one particular feature becomes unfeasible.

That's where all the complexity goes. AI doesn't change that, but can make prototyping iterations and bug hunting faster, as long as someone holds it on a leash and understands its decisions.

I find that a very weird thing to write. I think the last BSOD i had was 10 years ago and when a laptop didn't work anymore, it was usually because some of its hardware broke. It's true though that over time laptops become too slow or have too little resources to run a recent (and secure) windows version over time, but that goes for most software in general.

Okay, but it's more that there are a lot of things you simply cannot do in Windows. It's got extremely poor hardware and software support.

Having friends is a bit like a love relationship : you have to work at it and sometimes you get hurt. Things that are worth the effort mostly take effort.

> you have to work at it and sometimes you get hurt.

This pretty sums up why there's so much negativity and pessimism every time this topic comes up. People want to have amazing friendships without taking a risk, making an effort and putting themselves out there. Nothing worthwhile in life comes easy.