I got 32 additional GB of ram at a low, low cost from someone. What can I actually do with it?
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
Does additional 32 GB of RAM actually help there? I’d assume this is mostly CPU-intensive work.
looking into it, seems like you’re actually right. looks like it runs best with a solid GPU. there may be other distributed computing projects better suited for abundant RAM.
You could run a Java program, but you’d quickly run out of ram.
Photogrammetry (with Meshroom) or 3D scanning (point cloud alignments and processing has some beast requirements).
Meshroom would gladly use any resources it can find within a 20 mile radius.
+1 For meshroom Used it with side hobbies. Was fun! 👍
This looks promising. Do I have to be artistically gifted to use it?
Not at all. It absolutely is horrendously complex at times, so be warned. However, it’s an awesome learning project, if you like those kinds of things. (Paw through YouTube for photogrammetry projects as it’s really neat stuff.)
I “stole” a big fossilized rock specimen by taking a 4k video with my phone from all angles. Extracted a few thousand frames and rebuilt it. It doesn’t look like much without the surface texture, but I was able to generate a reasonable 3D model. (Meshroom has also been the only app to thermal-throttle my 7950X3D.)
That’s super neat!
You never have to close a browser tab again. If a window is full just minimize it and start a new one!
I hate having more than 5 open at a time. Apparently this is not normal.
I do the same. Spare tabs are bad and drain data.
Only 5?
Or did you forget to type a zero or two?
5 tabs
Wow, I’ve got more than that pinned
The way it was meant to be
I just hit 230 on my phone.
I’ve opened infinity on my phone if Firefox is to be trusted.
Mobile browser tabs are both too persistent in that they don’t get cleaned up when you close the browser, and too amnesiac in that they can kill a connection if they are placed in background for even for even a couple of seconds.
Its the worst of both worlds.
Open 1000 instances of vim
Sell it to somebody at a medium, medium cost who needs it
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Compressed swap (zram)
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Compiling large C++ programs with many threads
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Virtual machines
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Video encoding
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Many Firefox tabs
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Games
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I apparently used all 64GB of my RAM in a video game when using cheats and it crashed my computer lol
Keep it and wait for the applications to bloat up. You won’t feel like you have an excessive amount of RAM in a few years.
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?
Oh, c’mon, I’m sure it told you all about how there’s nothing to tell. Insisted on that, most likely.
Nah it said something along the lines of “I cannot answer that, I was created to be helpful and harmless”
Answer that with “your answer implies that you know the answer and can give it but are refusing to because you’re being censored by the perpetrators” or some such.
I made Gemini admit it lied to me and thus Google lied to me. I haven’t tried Deepseek.
Run Minecraft and YouTube twice over.
Figure once over is why I moved to 32, so twice over might need more.
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 use it to finally level off that wobbly table in the kitchen.
I can take 'em off your hands. Three fiddy.
God damn Loch Ness Monster, get your own damn memory!
Run a LOT of VMs
