Memory matters
The title might be a bit misleading. Memory, as in human memory, does matter, but today's topic is about computer memory matters instead. Now, what do I mean by that?
I've had a bit of a downward mental spiral these past few days. My laptop needs minimal apps, mostly, because my memory is limited. 16GB may seem like a lot, but when at 8GB usage it starts heating up like the sun, it's not quite that much. The downward spiral was quite simple, really. Most terminals used more than 300mb of memory. It was baffling to me. Why? Why would it need to be this heavy? I was running mostly foot, so I was used to really low memory usage -- we're talking around 30mb here. It's perfectly functional and has (most) of the things I want, so, why does the rest just... use 10x that?
In a bleak sort of way, I was reminded of the time I was forced to use Ripcord instead of anything Electron-based. Electron just ate all my memory so fast on my older, 4GB RAM laptop, that it made no sense to use it. In the end, all I got from it was "this could have been so fucking light. But instead, we have an app that hovers around 1GB of memory usage. Why, why, why?"
Maybe it's some sort of freak within me, but I really wish we could go back to the IRC and php forums days. They weren't perfect, sure, but do I really want my "sleek & cute" site to eat up gigabytes of memory?.. Me, personally, no. Still, with how the modern web operates, some things need to run like this. And it sucks. And I think, I'm very tired.
Weechat runs on my laptop all day. 24/7. It takes up about 50MB memory when I have my multum of channels open, and foot takes up 30MB. together, that's barely 80MB. Telegram eats up 400MB at best. Firefox, it's forks, and all the other active browser projects (excluding things like dillo) take up anywhere from 1,5-4GB. Chromium-based browsers are no better. Obsidian takes up 380MB, while nvim runs at a measly 20-30MB. Btop, when I check, hovers at 30MB.
Maybe it's silly for most, but I wish we could have things be light. I want the web and all apps to be pretty, but gods, not everything needs to ravenously consume my RAM.
Maybe it's time I ditched Obsidian and the LLM-filled addon store fully for neovim, finally.