I remember doing voice and video calls, and of course IM, on a PC with 128MB of RAM and a single core CPU around the turn of the century. It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency.
> It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency.
I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
> This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption.
That's not the same thing. If you make batteries more efficient then people build more devices that run on batteries and then you need more batteries than ever. But you also get a bunch of new devices you didn't used to have.
When computers get more efficient, miserly corporations cut staff or hire less competent programmers and force their customers to waste the efficiency gains on that, because they don't have enough competition or the customers are locked in by a network effect. The difference is whether you actually get something for it instead of having it taken from you so somebody else can cheap out.
There's a lot of advanced home insulation out there. In theory, buying expensive insulation is much better than making energy cheaper, because you only pay for the insulation once, and then save money indefinitely from it. But most people don't re-insulate their homes (or try to find cold-spots, seal leaks, etc). Despite the fact that we have more efficient insulation, it hasn't driven up demand for insulation. Why is this? The idea that efficiency == increased demand is a logical idea. But humans aren't logical.
We have more efficient hardware, so we should be seeing hardware everywhere. But actually we all use the same amount of hardware we did 20 years ago. We all have a desktop, a laptop, a smartphone, a modem, hell even a computer watch, like we did 20 years ago. But they're more efficient now.
Where we do see more hardware now, is in pre-existing appliances, like fridges, TVs. And why is there more hardware? Sometimes it's just a remote control ("turn off TV"). But more often, the increase in adoption follows a specific motive: like figuring out that they could sell ads or subscriptions through it. And the hardware itself is not what's making the ads work: it's the software, that collects the information, feeds it to companies over networks, lets them data-mine it and sell it continuously. Both of these are just serving a human interest to make more money through the creative use of surveillance and marketing. And honestly, most of this could've been done with hardware and software 20 years ago. But because it's in vogue now, we see more of the hardware and software now.
We are comforted by coming up with an explanation that makes logical sense, like the paradox. But the paradox applies most when it coincides with an unrelated human interest. What motivates us is not A+B=C, but a combination of different calculations that sometimes involve A and B, and incidentally add up to C.
I see where you went sideways, you confused trigger with consequence completely. Here the efficiency for the very same application got very, very very, increadibly hugely, galactically worse. Not better. The premise of the linked article is that the same application gets more efficient. Then comes the increased use of the affected resource. Here the same application went shit, complete shit, concerning efficiency, and had no effect on memory manufacture and prices, WhatsApp is not that significant in computing.
Probably a better analogy was that if technological and tigtly related economical advances raise the availability of resources (here memory, CPU) then things go dumb. If something then the generalized (from time to any resources) Parkinson's law is relevant here: increasing available resources beyond reasonable leading to waste and bad quality outcomes, overcomplication.
That said, I do firmly agree with the parent: there is choice involved here, engineering decisions.
The Microsoft world is particularly bloated, as they insist on shoehorning in unwanted anti-features into their OS. Much more efficient operating systems (and ways of building a chat client) exist.
Jevon's paradox may describe a general tendency, but it's no excuse for awful software.
