UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 3 days ago:
I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.
I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.
Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.
Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.
But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.
- Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman 3 days ago:
If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.
If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr. That’s what Oxycotin was.
If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive pain pills and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 3 days ago:
Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean?
Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.
Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.
- Comment on Is this real life? 3 days ago:
Black, White, and Red All Over
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 3 days ago:
Been saying that about a lot of these rich, reactionary fucks.
DARE promised me that five years of crack would put anyone in the ground. Meanwhile, Mike fucking Lindell is currently running for governor in Minnesota, fully coked out of his gourde. Dude’s been rolling deep in that powder since the 90s.
I feel extremely lied-to.
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 3 days ago:
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 3 days ago:
My Polymarket Bet isn’t printing. We’re still waiting to hear if Milo Yannapolis was right about him just being in hiding and saying racist things under a rock all day.
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 3 days ago:
The miracle of the Chinese Economy (and, really, all the BRICS countries) has been their willingness to educate and industrialize their population.
Yeah, it takes a ton of R&D, but when you’ve got 1.4B people you’re going to sift out a few who can get the job done. India’s Tata is already building their own semiconductor facilities. Brazil’s semiconductor sector has been struggling to break into the global market for… decades. Russia’s so sanctioned that they’ve got no choice but to go in-house. South Africa is finally building industrial facilities to match their role in the raw materials supply chain.
I would suspect this crunch in the global market is going to incentivize a ton of international investment in manufacturing entirely to meet domestic demand. And heaven help us all if there’s an actual flashpoint in the Pacific Rim, because that’ll shut down the transit that companies like TSM and Broadcomm need to produce at current scales.
I just wouldn’t hold my breath, especially under the current protectionist political environment. You’re not going to be buying outside of the US sphere of influence any time soon.
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 3 days ago:
4kb of RAM and an office packed with hundreds of engineers using slide rules, sure.
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 3 days ago:
The latest semiconductor manufacturer specializing in RAM is ChangXin Memory Technologies
As of 2019, CXMT had over 3,000 employees, and runs a fab with a 65,000 square meters clean room space. Over 70% of its employees are engineers working on various research and development related projects. CXMT uses its 10G1 process technology (aka 19 nm) to make 4 Gb (gigabit) and 8 Gb DDR4 memory chips. It has licensed intellectual property originally created by Qimonda.
So… whatever that costs.
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 3 days ago:
I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.
I wonder if we’ll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.
- Comment on My Religion 4 days ago:
Has that ever been a taboo?
Pretty much since their inception, although it has waxed and waned with public perception.
I still can’t think of many more significant examples
Pedophilia is always one that leaps to mind. Faith groups regularly wrestle with the age of consent, and largely shape their views around secular consensus rather than any liturgical instructions.
The Madonna / Whore Complex has it’s imprint stamped all over modern Christendom, with religious leadership being the textbook cases.
- Comment on My Religion 5 days ago:
Do you have examples?
Medicalized secular acceptance/resistance toward vaccination has been picked up by religious organizations and turned into a sectarian belief.
The NIH even had a study illustrating how outreach to religious leadership heavily impacted how communities adopted vaccination.
I mean, a lot of religions don’t particularly denounce cannibalism
Virtually every modern world religion has a stated position on murder generally speaking, human sacrifice specifically, and dietary taboos around cannibalism.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 5 days ago:
Unironically what conservatives actually believed
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 5 days ago:
you’re sick, buy some medicine
Absolutely how that works
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 5 days ago:
“My cardiologist smokes a pack a day”
- Comment on My Religion 5 days ago:
I can understand something like cannibalism and incest resulting in some diseases, which is fair, although they’re not exclusive to religion.
They don’t need to be. Religious and secular moral codes regularly inform one another.
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 5 days ago:
Cocaine, famously great for your mental health
- Comment on We can play that game too 5 days ago:
stupid people vote Republican
That’s not true, though. Partisanship is far more tied up with local industry than individual intelligence or educational attainment.
People who earn money in Republican friendly industries vote Republican.
- Comment on We can play that game too 5 days ago:
I’ve heard this argument before. It seems to neglect how much modern libertarian ideology is packed into the modern school curriculum.
Conservatives scream about education being Marxist and Woke. Thousands of teachers are purged. Curriculum gets ratcheted further to the right. And by the time your own kids are going to school, they’re asking why history textbooks are venerating Newt Gingrich, bio textbooks include disclaimers decrying evolution and germ theory, and math class is just 8 hours a week of long division exercises the whole semester.
But you can’t just pretend we’re living in a Shepard Tone of a society, because we’re here now in spite of “superior” education we received a generation or two ago.
We can’t just blame this on “schools make you smart/dumb” because so much of your modem understanding of the world is formed after you’ve graduated.
- Comment on We can play that game too 5 days ago:
- Comment on We can play that game too 5 days ago:
If only there was some way to change that
- Comment on We can play that game too 5 days ago:
Sorry, but someone heard a story about a rich black woman using food stamps to buy a fancy car, so now we’re cutting the Give Surplus Food to Starving People program in half and giving twice it’s value to a company run out of Hondorus by Peter Thiel’s Ket dealer called QueefCoin.
- Comment on My Religion 5 days ago:
Harm inflicted across the general public, either to particular individual victims or as a negative externality experienced universally.
- Comment on My Religion 6 days ago:
Taboos aren’t just intended to uphold individual moral integrity. They exist to prohibit social harm
- Comment on they know what they need to do 1 week ago:
Famously, energy was cheapest when we used candles sparingly and is expensive now that we have always-on LEDs.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung 1 week ago:
But wait… there is another.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung 1 week ago:
If you think shit is bad for the retail gamer, imagine how fucked actual industry consumers have it.
- Comment on Scheduling is hard 1 week ago:
Unironically. Watch what happens when unemployment gets over 6%. Occupy in 2008. BLM in 2014. J6 in 2021.
Left, right, and center, shit pops off when work drops off.
- Comment on Choose wisely! 1 week ago:
The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.
The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.
