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Cloud RAM (https://www.mikekohn.net)

32 points by matt_d 5 days ago | 10 comments | View on ycombinator

rekabis 5 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.

PeterStuer 5 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 4 days 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 5 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.