I got 32 additional GB of ram at a low, low cost from someone. What can I actually do with it?
Here’s what you can do with your impressive 64 GB of RAM:
Store approximately 8.1 quintillion (that’s 8,100,000,000,000,000) zeros! Yes, that’s right, an endless ocean of nothingness that will surely bring balance to the universe.
Unless something’s gone over my head here, this is off by around 6 orders of magnitude.
The best thing about having a lot of RAM is that you can have a ton of apps open with a ton of windows without closing them or slowing down. I have an unreasonable number of browser windows and tabs open because that’s my equivalent to bookmarking something to come back and read it later. It’s similar to if you’re the type of person for whom stuff accumulates on flat surfaces cause you just set stuff down intending to deal with it later. My desk is similarly cluttered with books, bills, accessories, etc.
Run a local LLM
Open 10 extra tabs in chrome
LOL, maybe If I used Chrome.
An extra 20 Firefox tabs
You can install it in a compatible computer.
Which I did
Excellent!
Sell it to somebody at a medium, medium cost who needs it
Run a fairly large LLM on your CPU so you can get the finest of questionable problem solving at a speed fast enough to be workable but slow enough to be highly annoying.
This has the added benefit of filling dozens of gigabytes of storage that you probably didn’t know what to do with anyway.
I used to have a batch file to create a ram disk and mirror my Diablo3 install to it. The game took a bit longer to start up but map load times were significantly shorter.
I don’t know if any modern games would fit and have enough loads to really care…but you could
I used it for virtual machines and Docker containers.
Download DeepSeek’s 64B model.
I actually did. I deleted it as soon as I realized it wouldn’t tell me about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
But the local version is not supposed to be censored…? I’ve asked it questions about human rights in China and got a fully detailed answer, very critical of the government, something that I could not get on the web version. Are you sure you were running it locally?
IIUC it isn’t censored per se. Not like the web service that will retract a “bad” response. But the training data is heavily biased. And there may be some explicit training towards refusing answers to those questions.
Nah, it’s just fewer parameters. It’s not as “smart” at censorship or has less overhead to apply to censorship. This came up on Ed Zitron’s podcast, Better Offline.
Depends… If it’s DDR5 it might not work with the other stick… I was unable to add on another 64GB to my desktop a last year and had to eventually just buy a whole new 128GB set.
You could build another computer/server and self host things…
It’s DDR4, I’m too poor to upgrade right now. Doubt I’d benefit from it much anyway. I am thinking of building a server however. I have most of the parts minus a power supply.
700 Chrome tabs, a very bloated IDE, an Android emulator, a VM, another Android emulator, a bunch of node.js processes (and their accompanying chrome processes)
You could make /tmp a ramdisk which probably has some speed benefits.
With NVME speeds these days, that actually might slow you down.
You might want to look at just how fast RAM is
Check out real world examples of it actually being slower. ramdisks are basically useless these days. Didn’t take but 10 seconds on google to find.
but doesn’t post his findings
Store your Firefox profile and all tabs in RAM for snappier browsing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM
Fold At Home!
You can essentially donate your processing power to various science projects that need it to compute protein folding simulations. I used to run it whenever I wasn’t actively using my PC. This does cost electricity and increase rate of wear and tear on the device, as with any sustained high computational load. But it’s cool! :]
Thought this was obsolete as of like a year ago. Did they update it?
seems like the last update was 23 Jan 2025
