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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

"Humans have limited RAM"

I would suggest we have flexible RAM. Also, we have an awful lot of it. The analogy breaks down as soon as you look at it too seriously!

In IT we largely deal with compute, persistent storage and non-persistent storage. Roughly speaking: CPU, RAM, HDD. In humans we might be considered to have similar "abilities" but unlike IT there is a mostly a single thing that performs all of those functions - the brain. That organ is both compute and storage.

LLMs can be surprisingly useful but they are a tool. As with all tools they can be abused and no doubt you have spotted all those tech blogs that spout the same old thing and often with subtle failings (hallucinations).

Keep your tools sharp and know how to safely use sharp tools.

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Just because the brain is a single “thing” doesn’t mean it doesn’t have distinct types of memory. Consider looking up “working memory” as it’s probably the best analogue to RAM here.

Not really, it's more like CPU registers. Very limited and stuff has to be in their to be computed on (consciously) (lots of unconscious computation as well of course; a lot of efficiency to be found in moving computation from conscious to unconscious).

These kinds of similies make less and less sense nowadays because we've got nvme storage nowadays, and that can be as fast as 7GByte/s. That's a lot faster then the RAM in most devices today. And with less latency too.

RAMs differentiating factor is increasingly just that it can handle a lot of read/write cycles, not it's speed. And that doesn't map to anything in biology

> These kinds of similies make less and less sense nowadays because we've got nvme storage nowadays, and that can be as fast as 7GByte/s. That's a lot faster then the RAM in most devices today. And with less latency too.

7 GB/s is the low end of the DDR3 performance range; DDR3 is 17 years old. Meanwhile, DDR5 performance ranges from about 33.5 GB/s to about 69 GB/s. RAM latency, even on DDR3, is measured in nanoseconds; NVMe latency is measured in microseconds, making it about three orders of magnitude higher.

By quantity, most devices are low-end and old androids. But I admit, I might have phrased my comment poorly. I didn't mean to imply that high end RAM has the same performance profile as high end NVMe storage

Wat? NVMe storage is much slower than RAM. And orders of magnitude slower than VRAM.

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