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Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

theregister.com

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Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#171

Post by momoschili »

moomoo11 wrote: post #135
mNovak wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.

this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature” it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types. it’s all uninformed fear mongering

on the contrary it's important for these people to be unencumbered by the technology of today to imagine the future. Imagine thinking in 1900 about flying, or even going to the moon in the context of what existed back then?

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#172

Post by MadnessASAP »

ecshafer wrote: post #88
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#174

Post by Cyan488 »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #98
HumblyTossed wrote: post #63

It will be interesting to see what happens to the consumer electronics market the next few years. Companies are right now gambling that consumers will pay extra because of RAM shortages. I suspect with the cost of everything else rising as well, a large portion of consumers (remember, HN, not everyone makes tech money) will just not be buying new devices for a bit.

I think I'm in this boat. I'm just choosing to interact with technology less. Everything has just gotten more hostile that it has reached a tipping point.

I'm with you on this one. I'll be using my 11th gen i5 and GTX3080 for the foreseeable future. The 'hostility' you mention puts me off doing so more than price of an upgrade.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#175

Post by ecshafer »

xg15 wrote: post #164
ecshafer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible . That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI d…

Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#176

Post by aaroninsf »

snowwrestler wrote: post #55

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.

I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to

Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.

As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.

Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...

...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.

Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#178

Post by GuB-42 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #135
mNovak wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.

this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature” it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types. it’s all uninformed fear mongering

What is the issue? It is fiction, it doesn't pretend to represent reality in any way. It is more about badass cyborgs than it is about fear mongering.

But it is dystopian fiction, a genre that has its roots in real society problems turned up to eleven. It is not realistic, but it tends to feel real because of how psychology works, the negativity bias in particular. Same idea with 1984, pure fiction, looks nowhere near modern society, but people will go out of their way to find similarities.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#179

Post by yieldcrv »

pjc50 wrote: post #37
herodoturtle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and contains significant embedded carbon emissions Hi - thanks for the insightful comment - could you please expand on the above? Genuinely curious :)

From the paper: "Second, memory dominates the carbon footprint of the fleet [8], accounting for 69% of CO2 emissions and posing a significant sustainability challenge [4]. DRAM dominates datacenter embodied CO2 largely because it is ubiquitous and deployed in large quantities across essentially all servers. Based on our internal fleet data, and aligned with studies from other hyperscalers such as Microsoft [33], memo…

> recycle pls

> not like that

this is insightful to me as well, I'm glad to know modern memory is less polluting in use but now I wonder about how it compares to the manufacturing process

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#180

Post by dvngnt_ »

ecshafer wrote: post #88
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

Well it was before electron was created so all they knew were efficient native applications
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