you don't need to care about package managers if your distribution artifact is a single static-linked binary the size of a cat genome
@vyr damn that made me wonder what size a cats genome is and it's quite large huh
@halcy TIL that biologists quote genome sizes in base pairs (b), which has absolutely no chance of being confused with any other common units of information

@vyr it is extremely annoying since apparently they also like to use SI prefixes so it's like "Gb" but that's GIGABASEPAIRS which ????

anyways a cat is 625 megabytes if I understood all of this right. You can just fit a cat on a CD. That's neat, I guess!

@halcy @vyr it's cool but also remember that the cat stores a cat in a nucleus 5-20 micrometers across
@greg @vyr wait, what is information denser, DNA or a microsd card?

@halcy @greg DNA, massively. a base pair's about 0.34 nm, stores 2 bits, and can be rolled up into 3D chromatin. if we count the transcription mechanism it's bigger obviously but not by much.

meanwhile, microSD cards use flash ROM; semiconductor feature sizes have yet to properly hit 3 nm, the actual flash transistors are probably bigger than the feature size plus there are a bunch of larger control electronics floating around, we don't use that tech for flash memory anyway, and despite some attempts at stacking, flash memory is still fundamentally 2D.

winner: DNA

but if we talk I/O bandwidth, DNA is somewhat less competitive.

@halcy @greg actually you could make the case that DNA aggregate bandwidth could be ridiculous because of the storage density, but the latency to reading or writing the first bit is still pretty high i think
@greg @halcy the cat gets around this by putting a copy of the cat genome in almost every cell to compensate for poor I/O with great locality