Can confirm, have ventured all over the deserts of my homeland, and every time I do, I am filled with awe at the temerity of life on the brink of hardship.
It is a spiritually rewarding activity to look out over a landscape, be still for a while, and notice the absolute abundance of life, as robust as ever.
Even in the dustiest Earth voids, there are colours and growth. It pays to look for it.
In my opinion this is one of the most productive uses of the Internet.
It can really help to have this running on some spare screen while trapped in the deep, deep depths of cubicle hell.
Even the wind is soothing.
Another great Namibian destination is the "Ocean Conservation Namibia" channel, where one can witness the rescue of ocean life (mostly mammals, i.e. seals) from the plastic trash of humanity.
This has been a constantly soothing device in my life for a few years. There is something so cathartic about seeing the little pups being chased down to have their bindings removed.
Because CRUD is the opposite of collaborative editing, and people are sick of it - CRDT represents a solution to getting humans working together through computers that isn't based on decades of cruft (disclaimer: imho)
Perhaps there is a better analysis available, but the lines of the phallus appear to me to have been cut by the same author of the letters in the words.
Besides that, having dated an archeology student who left their interesting books around, I seem to remember there being a standard for identifying the cut of these objects. Perhaps it was more easily verified than we might think.
>You can run quite a lot in 512MB of RAM if you use the right languages to write code in.
I recently delivered a production-ready embedded system running Armbian with 512megs RAM, and indeed disabled systemd-journald for our uses, also .. but even with it enabled, our Lua-based app was (science/data analysis on sensor network) running in the best environment it has ever run, so I can confirm: 512MB is enough for a lot of things.
512MB is absolute overkill for the application that you built, it is the choice of OS + the tooling used that resulted in that requirement. Not all that long ago 32 MB served a whole bank, and embedded systems used kilobytes of RAM, not megabytes. We've gotten so used to slapping a full unix server into stuff that we hardly even think about it any more and just take that kind of power completely for granted. I'm not saying you made any wrong choices, it's just that most of the embedded stuff that I come across would be just as feasible on a fraction of the CPU (and power) budget than what we typically choose because for instance Lua is such a convenient choice for a platform like that.
Windows 95 ran an entire OS with decent UI in 8 MB of RAM. One really has to wonder, where is all the RAM going these days? I think the knowledge of doing anything with only 8 MB of RAM has gone away, we don't know how to do it anymore.
It's not the knowledge - it's the increased complexity of the entire stack, all the way down to the hardware. A modern linux kernel image is easily bigger than 8MB, and that needs to be in memory at all times. Why? Because of all the functionality it has these days, to fit all the possible usecases people need. Windows 95 didn't have Swap, didn't support many filesystems, didn't have central logging, didn't have ASLR, let alone support for containers, and many other features I'm forgetting along the way.
Sure you could strip away a lot of that functionality, even at the distribution level (by for example not using an init system at all, instead just one shell script to initialize things), but then you'd end up with an operating system that's not general purpose for today's standards anymore.
Don't forget how much higher screen resolutions are these days. Color depth also. Those 8 MiB systems were driving single-buffered displays with perhaps 800x600 resolution at eight bits per pixel, with a color palette and dithering, which requires about 480 KB to hold the framebuffer image. Most applications would render directly into the framebuffer. A full HD (1080p) screen at 32 bits per pixel requires 8 MiB just to store the framebuffer (16 MiB with double-buffering), and that's not counting any of the input data or code needed for rendering. Figure on two or three times that to hold separate textures for each window (depending on the window sizes and how much they overlap) so that they can be composited live with desktop effects.
A huge amount of it is going to graphics. A 4K screen is ~31 MB just for the framebuffer. In comparison, 640x480x16 colors is 150K of memory.
Windows 95 also didn't do things the modern way. It didn't keep an image of every application's windows in RAM. It kept track of what covered up what, and then asked applications to redraw themselves when needed.
Another huge amount is going to features like internationalization. Unicode is a beast that takes a good amount of code to implement, and Arial Unicode is a ~20 MB TTF file.
Modern luxuries like being able to tweet in Japanese are quite expensive.
It is a spiritually rewarding activity to look out over a landscape, be still for a while, and notice the absolute abundance of life, as robust as ever.
Even in the dustiest Earth voids, there are colours and growth. It pays to look for it.