source.

In case anyone suspects, merely because the author is a blaster by trade, they might be too quick to suggest explosives as the solution to a problem, fyi they also co-authored Boulder buster : breaking rocks without explosives. (The rest of their work here is about using explosives, though.)

Hold it down

I looked at that, and thought "ha, that is a funny and obviously fake screenshot of a headline, created to ridicule photomatt for being petty in his fight with his company's biggest competitor".

Then, after closing this tab I did a double take and thought: maybe it's actually real?

And, it turns out, yeah, he really actually did that (after a court injunction required them to remove the checkbox which required users to pledge that they were "not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise"):

😂

they out here using "out here" two sentences in a row, smh my head

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

weird, i wonder why. i just checked on an ubuntu 24.04 system to confirm it is there (and it is).

i guess your computer's power button might not be supported (out of the box, at least) by Linux's acpi implementation :(

same here; other articles there load fine but this one gives me HTTP 500 with content-length 0.

(the empty body tag in your screenshot is generated by firefox while rendering the zero-length response from the server, btw.)

it's more likely they're a regular-sized linux user and it's only their inflatable penguin which is giant

It's free software which you can host yourself. The source is here (GPLv3). You can read more about the people that make it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framasoft

because you carefully photoshopped the silhouette of a prone person into the bar graph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supine_position

It's getting harder to discern reality from satire, but Tim Onion has actually been The Onion's CEO's name^* ever since he bought that job. And he is trying to buy InfoWars. (And the company formerly known as Twitter has joined Jones' fight to prevent it.)

^*(his bluesky display name, at least)

I work in tech, and I don’t understand people’s obsession with having all their RAM free at all times.

If you don’t use it, why do you have it?

Windows (not the best OS, but the one I know the most about), will lie to you about how much memory you have that’s free. It puts data in RAM as cache. In the event you need that data, it’s already loaded in RAM. Usually this is stuff like DLLs and executables for programs.

There’s a difference between “free” memory, and “available” memory.

Linux and macOS do the same, although I wouldn't call it lying per se :)

There is certainly a lack of understanding of the difference between free and available RAM. TLDR: yes, free RAM is indeed wasted RAM.

If you actually have a lot of free RAM, it's probably because you either booted or freed a lot of RAM very recently. After using your computer for a while, most of your available RAM should not be free but rather being used for page cache and other caches.

After a program has just read and/or written more data from disk than will fit in available RAM, the kernel's page cache (which is typically the bulk of that not-free-but-available memory) should be mostly populated by the most recent of those operations. This means that if that program (or any other program) reads those files again, before they are evicted from cache by other things, they will not need to wait for the disk and will get them back much faster.

However, managing all of this is the kernel's job, and the not-free-but-available RAM being used for page cache is not (in any OS, as far as I know, though I mostly know Linux) attributed to the program(s) responsible for putting things there.

So, when people are complaining about an application using 40% of their RAM it is not necessarily due to them misunderstanding free-vs-available RAM. The used number for an application does not include the portion of the system's not-free-but-available RAM which the application is also responsible for occupying.

(If you want to know which programs and/or which files are responsible for occupying your page cache... on Linux at least, it is not really possible without instrumenting your kernel. The kernel is just tracking blocks. There several tools which will let you see which blocks of a given file are cached, but there isn't a reverse mapping from blocks to files.)

just in case Ars Technica has to remove it someday (perhaps for licensing reaasons? 😭), i am pasting a screenshot here of the excellent image illustrating this article: