I am loving this article. Read to the very end.
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This was very exciting until I read the article.
What a hack though!
Not only is it enormous, but it’s way way fast.
If this can actually be made in enough quantity at a low enough price to put it in normal people’s desktop computers we have to start asking a lot of questions and possibly rethink our systems architecture.
Should the OS just load your most-used applications fully into RAM on boot, and continue to load more in the background with idle cycles? Then when you actually go to click on Photoshop or Counter-Strike it appears instantly. No loading times because it loaded in the past.
If so much is loaded in the RAM, and we still lose that when we power off the computer, we really need to reconsider how sleep/hibernate/shutdown work. We want to avoid re-doing that full load as much as possible. We might possibly want to introduce some battery-powered circuitry to even desktop PCs to keep the data in RAM even if everything else is off.
Will people finally shut up about how much RAM their browser is using, even though they aren’t even close to 100% usage? Probably not. But I can see application developers caring a lot less about how much RAM their apps do use. We write-off a lot of algorithms as inefficient due to excessive RAM usage. If RAM is abundant and fast, a lot of those algorithms might make perfect sense.
And then there’s security implications. If you are keeping so much stuff in memory all the time, even stuff you simply pre-loaded in case of the future, that becomes a high value target.
This could change everything in a lot more reasonable time frame than things like memristors or quantum computing will.
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Do we? I feel like time is the constraint way more often.
Yes, time is the most frequent bottleneck, but this could really turn things on its head.
Consider this real example since I used it at work one time, and it’s a fav of mine that I bring up often.
The idea is that you have a huge file, and you want to randomly pick just one line. Reservoir sampling is a very clever solution. You scan through the file just once. You hardly use any RAM, storing only one or two lines from the file in RAM at any moment. Completely linear performance with regards to the number of lines in the file.
If you have 512 GB of RAM that is fast enough, the very naive approach might actually be better. Just load the entire file into RAM. Generate a single random number. Read that line and only that line. The end.
You have to read the entire file from disk in either option, so that is unchanged. What has changed is that you don’t need to have the CPU roll the dice once per line, you have it roll the dice once period.
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I’m hearing 1000 VFX artists getting ready to crank their texture resolutions to insane levels. Read the ingredients list on a candy wrapper blowing in the wind detailed.
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Hooray, extremely useful tool bought by megacorp. Can’t blame the team for getting paid, but this doesn’t bode well for the users:
Let’s fucking goooooo
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Never seen a leak quite this brazen before.
Looks like Vimeo might be on its way out.
Has everyone moved their stuff over to Youtube now anyway? Or is it not possible for certain content?
Vimeo’s problem is that they didn’t make vimeo.com a destination in and of itself. It’s a good place to host your videos, but you won’t get any views unless you embed/link them from somewhere else that gets traffic. Where exactly are you going to link from? Your web site that nobody goes to? Your social media account that has its own video hosting solution?
Your email newsletter is one option, ok. Patreon is the other option. With Patreon you can use YouTube as well. In what way is Vimeo+Patreon a better combo than YouTube+Patreon? It costs money, but what is the benefit exactly? Creator pays to save their Patreons from having to watch ads, when the alternative is that the viewers pay and the creator gets more revenue? Every Patreon I’m on uses unlisted YouTube videos. I’ve only seen one ever use a Vimeo, and they password protected the videos, so I guess that’s one feature?
Anyway, Patreon should buy Vimeo.
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I think Vimeo is slightly more open to mature content as well as less scanned for copyright. Where YT, even if it’s private listed, vids can be taken down or muted depending on the issue. So for example reaction channels where someone will listen to an album for the first time might try to use Vimeo to host the uncut reaction; since YT will instablock. One such channel I follow recently ran into an issue with Vimeo where so many people were subbing and using the videos, they were trying to charge like $5k a year for him to upgrade tiers. He ended up dumping Vimeo and going to a diff hosting platform.