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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

A pragmatic solution that requires users to have 43GB of RAM? Right.

I'm going to upvote this comment because not everyone in the world can afford $300 for 64GB+ of RAM. The solution to not dump everything into RAM is a great one.

Fortunately, I've had a fancy Silicon Valley job for 15+ years which now lets me afford many GBs of RAM if I wanted to but it was a different story in my 20s. I relied on free or almost free hardware to learn. And that free hardware usually lagged in specs.

Yeah I agree with you not everyone can afford it, but lots of young people build $1800 gaming PCs. If you want a powerful Linux workstation desktop PC for fun projects like this you can get a Dell t5610 with two 8 core xeons and 128GB of ram on eBay for $650, then add your own $100 SSD.

I would not recommend running out and buying a new current gen Ryzen board+cpu or core i7-whatever and 128GB of new ram at ddr4-4200 prices.

To put it in perspective, 43GB of RAM to browse the entirety of Wikipedia doesn't sound that ridiculous when popular Electron-based IM programs use 1GB+.

It's around £300 for 64GB of Corsair RAM - you need a motherboard that supports it but you can go cheap and you don't need a great processor. You could probably put this together for £600? It's not exactly crazy if this was for an office or something.

I mean sure it's for enthusiasts, but my 3 year old pc already has 32GB ram. It's definitely not out of the question

2021 called, memory is cheap.

Is it though? We are in the middle of a chip crisis where prices are raising to record levels...

Yes it is. In the grand scheme of things, looking at how far we've come DDR4 modules are cheap dollar per gigabyte.

20 applications x 50GB = 1tb of memory.

o... kay?

You're not wrong, but who's talking about 20 applications?

Look at the amount of applications and web-application you have open at a given point.

If this is such a good idea, let's just all use iscsi and mount the internet.

Notebook vendors didn't get this memo.

Don't buy a garbage laptop with soldered RAM and just upgrade it yourself?

Good solution. Which one that allows for 128GB do you recommend?

A workstation. Any professional one.

And how many users have more than 16GB of RAM?

On phones too?

Phones are not first class devices.

Says who?

I do. Many others too. Or do you see books written on phones, programing being done on phones? Being able to install any program you like? No? Not first class then.

There are many things that can't be done on a phone that are possible on a PC. The reverse case is much harder.

I see Wikipedia being read on phones, which is the problem at hand.

The fact that you can't even add memory (be it RAM or storage, the later one is of course doable on some devices) to your phone makes them not first class devices.

Same with MacBooks? Sorry this sounds like utter nonsense.

Yes.

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