alt Hacker NewsWhen I was a kid software that would "double your RAM" was a thing. I remember thinking it was awesome, and at the same time feeling a huge sense of doubt that you could do that.
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I’m surprised the concept of drivespace/double space died off. Maybe most files self-compress well from their native app, but I’m sure it’s not universal. OSs don’t seem to offer a prompt to compress relatively unused files and transparently uncompressed them on-demand.
AI has kinda already gone through that phase, with quantisation you can effectively double your ram with almost no negative effects by going from fp16 to int8.
MacOS does memory compression as standard since 2013. Linux has it, and iirc even Windows has it since 10.
This exists for LLMs it is quantization.
SoftRam. Raymond Chen wrote a great technical analysis on what it actually did: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...