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mikekohn.net

31 points by matt_d 2 days ago · 10 comments

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PeterStuer 2 days 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/

nubskr a day ago

Until I saw this, I thought my weirdest infrastructure decision was using NFS for swap. Now I'm wondering if I can mount my browser tabs over UDP.

BobbyTables2 2 days 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.

rekabis 2 days 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.

  • saidinesh5 2 days 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...

  • hulitu 13 hours ago

    > Finally, the government steps in

    Who do you think is sponsoring the idea, in the first place. Careful with thought crimes. /s

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