22 pointsby matt_d16 hours ago3 comments
  • PeterStuer3 hours ago
    Immediately made me think of "latency numbers every engineer should know" [1].

    Still a nice hack.

    [1] https://pesin.space/posts/2020-09-22-latencies/

  • BobbyTables28 hours ago
    Similar could be done by exposing a block of RAM as a PCIe endpoint.

    To the host, it’d be already mapped as a BAR.

  • rekabis7 hours ago
    No… we don’t want this.

    Think of it: industry cottons onto this idea, sets up entire server farms to make memory more efficient at lower cost, and then starts mining what is in memory for profit. The process accelerates and intensifies the memory shortage, snowballing the industry move.

    Finally, the government steps in because it makes it so much easier to monitor “dissidents”, and mandates into law that all systems have to run with cloud memory, thereby putting anyone who is online under 24/7 surveillance. Because memory for every system has been abstracted out into server farms, it is beyond the control of users and no-one is safe anymore.

    Right now the government has to employ non-trivial efforts to monitor an educated and even moderately-skilled person. This will reduce that effort to zero.

    This is an immensely dangerous proposition wrapped up in an innocent solution.

    • saidinesh57 hours ago
      From the article:

      "I was kind of surprised how quick the memory was, but clearly this thing isn't practical. This project was really supposedly be more of functional tech satire rather than being anything useful."

      I mean swap has been a thing for so many decades...

      • burnt-resistor5 hours ago
        I swear that all of life and computing is a game to maximize entropy and energy consumption as quickly as possible to hasten the heat death of the universe.