Not really, no.

Optane was RAM that was on the CPU bus, but nonvolatile. No need for disks. Boot, and just turn off; when you turn back on all your RAM contents are still there.

You’d need some normal RAM. Optane was big and fast but it had a finite number of write cycles. 3 orders of magnitude more write cycles than Flash, and Flash can only be rewritten a whole block at a time while Optane can be rewritten 1 byte or 1 word at a time, but you’d still need a few gigs of plain old RAM as workspace… plus another terabyte of RAM that held its contents forever.

The basic plan is called Single Level Store and it’s much older than Unix itself. IBM i is the only modern shipping single-level store OS.

DDR 2 was expensive when new.

DDR3 wasn’t massively. I have about 20 or 30 2GB and 4GB DDR3 SODIMMs in a bag right here. There are a handful of 0.5 and 1GB ones in there too.

I wish someone made a cheap mini PC with four DDR3 SODIMM slots. I could provision at least 3 machines with 16GB each, no problem.

Here’s a more realistic solution for folks with phat GPUs who don’t game 24x7: swap to VRAM. There were patches for this years ago, and it was revived earlier this year:

https://github.com/c0dejedi/nbd-vram

Make that generic and cross-platform so it works equally well on AMD and any other weirdo GPUs out there.

:-o

Ew.

the non stop glazing

I don’t understand what this word means here.

Glazed eyes?

There are several distros like that…

Perhaps so, but this one is the giant 10km tall giant space elevator base station that stands out far above all. I pitched a story on it when he raised $8M in sponsorship for this dross. By the time I wrote it, a couple of days later, it was $10M. By the time it was published it was $12M.

That was a week ago and it’s $18.5M now.

So long as it was kept out of corporate clutches, that kind of cash could do wonders. It’s very sad to see.

I didn’t either.

He’s an odd dude, but I haven’t seen anything that makes me think he’s fash-tinted TBH. Most of his tech opinions are sound, IMHO.

I don’t like Wayland myself – not as much as he hates it, but it brings nothing I want or need, breaks a lot of stuff that I really like, and is so utterly pathetically technologically unambitious it actually angers me. Also, just like GNOME, like Flatpak, like everything to come out of RH, everything about it betrays its developers deep, broad, profound ignorance of all the prior art except the bits they had to work on.

I am heartily sick of this constant BS dialog of “X is bad, W is the brave new future”. It’s bollocks, and I am glad someone is standing up and saying no.

Friiiick, the ladybird dev?

I’d heard some rumours but this spelled it out and it’s not nice. I was formerly engaged to a Norwegian, and learned quite a lot about Scandinavian culture and beliefs. Some of it is nasty and the Mullvad dude, DHH, and “Awesome Kling” as well, are saying the quiet part out loud.

surprised to see him on this list

:-o

Oh hell yes. He emailed me angrily when I wrote a piece saying the new GNOME Exec Dir was a shaman. He was angry I didn’t make more fun of it. I said it’s no weirder than the dead-Jew-on-a-stick religion, and he flamed me and started calling me names in the blog.

He’s always been a loudmouth but I think he’s worked out that being an alt.right loudmouth wins him fans/viewers/subscribers and thus $… so he has gone all in.

Oh this is good.

Um. Lots of questions, but none are important, because TBH if I don’t know then it is probably stuff that does not personally matter to me.

What and where are or were Vibecamp and Vibegala? Never heard of them.

What does “harm reduction” mean? What does “SA’d” mean?

I loved this.

A few simple rules explain so much of the world, and they are not the nice clean rules of logic, but the Peter Principle, Hanlon’s Razor, the Laws of Parkinson, Murphy, and Sod, and a few other such things.

Also, I still find this one amusing:

Wednesday, December 01, 2010: Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html

I read this yesterday with the most remarkable mix of emotions for a tech post: astonishment, revulsion, traces of hilarity, mounting disgust and disdain, shock, fear, dismay, pity, sadness.

For those who don’t know the name… Yegge has been writing (very very long) blog posts about tech for about 20 years now. In his early days he wrote some of the most insightful stuff about Lisp I’ve seen anywhere. One of his similes is an all-time favourite tech quote of mine that I have quoted before:

Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.

Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: “the car that’s always in front of you.”

Common Lisp is Howl’s Moving Castle.

Source: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html

Yes, this bloke wrote an Emacs addin that lets it run Javascript. That has implications: it’s important, it’s almost guaranteed to infuriate the Emacs purists, so he wouldn’t get much help, had to do it solo, and fast.

He got all excited about moving to S.E. Asia somewhere a bit before COVID. From a mention in this piece, I guess he married a local woman. That might explain it.

It didn’t pan out and he came back. He’s worked for a few of the FAANG type giants. Then he was going to revive his hobby videogame and make his millions from that.

Now he drank the Koolaid and his brain’s run out from his ears. It’s a damned shame. I didn’t agree with him about many things but he was very smart and really could write – text, not code, but code too.

There are a lot of highly opinionated people in tech. Few of them can write. Fewer of them can write short (it’s a real skill, hard to learn and hard to do) and few have the sheer patience and stamina to write long (which is the next best thing).

Yegge wrote long, and it was worth it.

TBH this reminds me of the people who say they’ve given up (e.g.) using Facebook because “fsck Zuck” and then they still use Instagram and Whatsapp. Still Meta.

Look, sorry dude, but if you vape, you haven’t given up smoking. If you take nicotine pills, you haven’t quit.

Don’t make BS statements. QUIT ALREADY.

If you use Windows for your toys, you’re still using Windows. If you need Youtube so badly you haven’t quit brainrotting online media. If you use VPNs then you are still playing pretend.

Just bloody stop, or shut up about it.

I hadn’t seen this post of yours before. I like it. I like it a lot.

My $SPROG can’t really read very well yet but she can open a saved program in Scratch and run it and show off the results, in SUGAR. I was so proud.