Well, until you open a browser… or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn’t have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

I think it’s meant to be short for Mega-elements, so millions of elements.

I warn about AI. I don’t care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.

I’m worried about (in no particular order):

• Software companies amassing technical debt because AI-generated code gets used without proper review
• Massive security problems in critical infrastructure, for the exact same reason
• Cost savings being used to make the rich richer while the people who used to do the work are just fired
• Companies forcing AI into every single product even if it doesn’t make sense, just to make their shareholders happy
• Rapidly increasing prices of RAM, SSDs, HDDs, graphics cards and consequently pretty much all electronic devices
• The environmental impact because companies would rather build new power plants than optimize AI for efficiency
• A lack of education about the limitations of current implementations. People tend to feed every question they have into ChatGPT and trust the results even when they’re completely incorrect
• The inherent privacy nightmare that comes from funneling that much data into a centralized service

Nothing about this is small or cute.

I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.

Hey, at least this one won’t become a murderer when the relationship breaks apart.

I once did an even more extreme version of this. I showed up with a contract for a new job that would give me a 30% raise and an opportunity to work from home as much as I want. I told my boss to match that offer or I would sign it.

He took a few days to decide and made me an offer that was significantly worse, so now I have a new job, more money and haven’t seen the inside of a corporate office in months. My old team has been completely dissolved because the old crew left faster than they could train replacements.