If you’re really interested in the idea, you could ballpark whether it’s plausibly worthwhile by creating an actual ramdisk partition from your regular system memory and pointing swap at it, then comparing behavior to if you point swap back at the actual disk drive (don’t free the ramdisk! otherwise it won’t be apples to apples in terms of available system memory).

If you’re seeing good performance there, it’s possible something like this would work (but even in this case, the latency and bandwidth are going to be way different, as the hardware ram-drive would be going over the SATA/PCI bus, rather than directly to a different segment of main memory like the ramdisk does).

They used to make these, possibly still do! I can’t find any good current references, but based off vague memories of reading about one in maximumPC in the mid 2000s, I found this thread which confirms they did at one point exist: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/ram-disk-enclosure/213360

I’m pretty sure this is also just thinly veiled Rising of the Shield Hero fanfic??

There is one narrow case in which I’ve found the compiler analogy useful: explaining my frustrations with LLM-assisted design/architecture doc generation. Here, it’s useful because handing someone a design document that was output by an LLM is a lot like handing someone a binary and asking them for a code review.

I’d much rather work with whatever disorganized soup of thoughts someone fed into the machine, because those at least contain intent, rather than a document that actively obscures what the designer wanted in a barrage of detail.

I wonder whether the slides look so much like shitposts because the image-gen AI has ingested so many from scraping the internet. Like “Goose value 71” overlaid on an image of a goose is an image I can truly only ever imagine having seen as a shitpost prior to GenAI.