omg i used that conditioner for like 2 weeks because I could buy it with dining dollars at my school’s mini store thingy. It kinda fucked up my hair but I have really specific needs
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the girlies are taking over cookie thread
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hi okay im going to talk about virtual memory because it’s something that is commonly misunderstood (at least that’s been my experience at my company) and the stimulants are kicking in.
computers have RAM which is more appropriately referred to as its physical memory (physical as in hardware dedicated for volatile memory used by applications and just efficiently running an operating system). your hard drive is called non-volatile memory (as it persists if you shutdown the machine), and there’s a ton of it available, but operations to read and write on a disk are orders of magnitude slower (IIRC physical memory is nanoseconds, disk access is milliseconds, and I think it can be as bad as 10,000 times slower depending on the hardware). these types of memories serve different purposes which means the hardware can be and designed differently so one has extremely access but much less total space whereas the other has a lot of space and lower access speeds.
the other thing is that if you run out of physical memory and applications or parts of the OS need to allocate more physical memory to operate, the kernel only has a few options to keep functioning: kill processes using a lot of memory that are deemed inessential or crash. neither option is good so we really don’t want an operating system to ever run out of memory to allocate. however, hardware for physical memory can be expensive and the motherboard only has so many available slots.
so, early on kernel/OS developers came up with a concept of virtual memory where a slice of disk space will be dedicated for memory. accessing that part of memory will be much slower, but it’ll give the system a buffer to reduce the likelihood of reaping processes for memory or crashes. in unix systems, this is called swap and in windows it’s called the page file, but im going to call it swap. virtual memory is the combination of physical memory (fast) and swap (slow)
anyway, as i’ve really hammered home here, accessing the disk is slow. swap can be used for memory, but it shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable with physical memory. the kernel has heuristics for when to use move memory pages from physical memory to swap based on memory pressure and how often that memory page has been accessed recently. these parameters can be tuned in some cases, but the gist is the computer is making a best guess at when to move pages into swap to try and maximize the efficiency of the system. if you’ve ever like tabbed into something you haven’t touched in 3 days and it was really slow to load, that was your computer moving a bunch of memory pages off of the disk and back into physical memory.
another interesting element here is that because accessing the disk is so slow, the system can actually use physical memory to improve efficiency by storing frequently accessed/modified files in memory and queue any changes to eventually be written to the disk in the background without actually making a user sit around and wait for the slow ass disk to do the changes. this can make things so much more efficient that the system will basically keep as many files in physical memory as it thinks is reasonable, and the file system cache is the first thing that gets culled when userland processes request more physical memory than is currently unallocated.
sooo another benefit of having virtual memory is that the system can recognize you haven’t touched that open word document for homework you haven’t touched in 4 days and probably aren’t going to touch it any time soon, so it can throw that application’s memory onto the disk in swap and use that physical memory for the files needed by fortnite or umamusume. so, at the low low cost of that word document loading a bit more slowly when you tab back in, your computer has run slightly faster for a week. pretty cool!
unfortunately, the vast majority of users have no idea this is happening. all they know is that there word document was a bit slower in 11 days and it’s 3 hours until it’s due so every second counts. and some users only have half-baked baby bullshit understanding of operating systems and realized if they turned off swap (reducing the capacity of virtual memory to just physical memory), that that occasional slow down stopped happening. this lead to years of just bad fucking advice being propagated that somehow using swap was bad or inefficient and cascaded into some truly poor decisions that dear reader to this fucking day haunt me at work.
the amount of times that i have had to gently explain that no, swap usage does not indicate a problem; no, it does not mean things are going to be slower; no, it is not making your server slower; yes, having swap enabled does, sort of, cause thrashing, but the alternative to thrashing was killing processes unpredictably or crashing, so you should be fucking thanking it for its service; is too fucking high. coworkers still don’t fully understand it and facilitate this continued madness with our clients, and idk how to tell the Brazilian branch they’re wrong because i don’t know them like that, it’s not my responsibility technically, and i don’t speak Portuguese. (it’s been vaguely more my problem lately because we’ve been migrating where some of code repositories lived, and i reviewed some of their many, many scripts related to this and wanted to die inside.)
okay rant over
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tl;dr
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oh sorry for my computer nerd rant we can go back to hair products
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I started wearing my hair in braids more and I can’t recommend it enough for curly haired people
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Bc I get a solid 2-3 days in braids
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And then I undo the braids and it looks rlly nice for one more day
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if i could braid my own hair i would
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I had to teach myself the first few weeks were brutal and it looked horrible but it was worth it
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i reccomend all people unfamiliar with pcs watch kaze emanuar because the miconceptions you come out with will at least be significantly funnier
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Computer architecture is a topic for the girlies right
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yeas
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when the 9 bits in a byte
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tbf i don’t think the mario 64 devs knew how computers worked either
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really??? I couldn’t tell
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its so beyond that. its SO beyond that. why do they have a gpu specific bit that exactly one game uses. who asked for that. who at nintendo got that idea across. not even like error correction which is fair enough its straight up just the special bonus bit for the gpu to stare at
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This was the most psychologically long car travel of my lifetime
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poofy hair look good too, i feel like i remember liking ur hair in a selfie of urs u have sent at some point
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Thank you gray for this long wikipedian essay. I now have a question
What is the catalyst that culminated you to write this
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