(of course if i'm being honest 640kB is fine, i'm sure tons of the world's commerce is handled by less for example, the delta between a system with 640kb of ram and a modern one is near nil for many people, the UX on a PoS terminal does not require more than that for example, the hacker news UX could also be roughly the same)
How refreshing to hear this kind of old-school hacker thinking, in a thread where most people have given up on local computing in exchange for convenience and permanent third-party dependency.
With embedded systems affordable and ubiquitous, hopefully a growing segment of the new generation will also learn to push the limit of available hardware and see how far we can take it. As an engineer there's a satisfaction in solving things with what you got.
There's a new technique, 1-bit family of language models that can achieve up to 9x memory efficiency compared to existing models. Still multiple gigabytes for practical use I imagine, but it's great progress toward local AI, which I believe will be common in the near future. https://prismml.com/news/ternary-bonsai
