One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.

For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).

Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.

As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.

Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)

The Fastmail app itself is mostly a wrapper around the web app with integrations for notifications etc. Sans notifications it works perfectly as an installed PWA on Android. Ive been using it like that for months.

Alternatively there are lots of IMAP apps available. I was testing Thunderbird for Android recently and that works pretty well too.

Disclaimer: I work for Fastmail. But any opinions I have on here are my own.

Indeed

They already exist. $dayjob bought some 64GB ssds. They were about $7500USD per drive.

While not hard drives, at $dayjob we bought a new server out with 16 x 64TB nvme drives. We don’t even need the speed of nvme for this machines roll. It was the density that was most appealing.

It feels crazy having a petabytes of storage (albeit with some lost to raid redundancy). Is this what it was like working in tech up till the mid 00s with significant jumps just turning up?

I’m an atools kinda person

Yeah for my case it was easier in the initrd otherwise I’d be trying to roll back the active / partition.

Re run levels, they were a sysvinit thing so I wasn’t sure sure about systemd, this suggests that would work though https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet

And if you have to bail out even earlier, run level 1 will give you the rescue.target

Pass something stupid via your bootloader so it aborts boot and dumps you in an initrd busybox shell. No usb required.

This was my poor man’s boot environments when I was using zfs on root. I had a pacman hook to snapshot before package transactions, then if it became unbootable I’d interrupt the following boot attempt, edit my grub command line with something wrong so I’d get dumped in the busybox shell, import my zfs pool and roll back before finally rebooting again.

I used to turn to custom roms to extend the life of my phone. My first smartphone didn’t get an official update after I purchased it for example. The custom roms often made the phone snappier too.

These days I’m on a mid range Samsung phone released almost 4 years ago and it’s still getting updates.

The Android app has done this for years too.

After connecting my (non Microsoft) email account to the Outlook Android app I noticed the login location was geolocated in the USA… I live in Australia.

Unfortunately there’s no way to turn it off.

Not the previous poster. I taught an introduction to programming unit for a few semesters. The unit was almost entirely portfolio based ie all done in class or at home.

The unit had two litmus tests under exam like conditions, on paper in class. We’re talking the week 10 test had complexity equal to week 5 or 6. Approximately 15-20% of the cohort failed this test, which if they were up to date with class work effectively proved they cheated. They’d be submitting course work of little 2d games then on paper be unable to “with a loop, print all the odd numbers from 1 to 20”