this is exactly, and i cannot stress enough just how exactly, the plot of “Don’t look up”

thank you very much!

also: ha! i’m doing the same thing! currently at book 2 ;)

you probably already know this, but for anyone else:

The Cosmere Series (of which the Mistborn Saga is a part of) does heavily feature Sci-Fi as well as post-apocalypse themes alongside (mostly) fantasy (Sci-Fi: the sunlit man, tress of the emerald sea; post-apocalypse: Stormlight Archives, Yumi And The Nightmare Painter), which made me think OP was talking about this series specifically.

In some of the other books it is mentioned that all of the powers originally came from a being called Adonalsium (basically God). what fuels all these manifestations of powers is called Investiture. Each Shard of Adonalsium manifests different Powers, Allomancy is just one of them.

so it’s a unique mix of classic fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse genres in a single gigantic saga, in which the sci-fi and post-apocalypse themes are intentionally kept vague and in the background.

highly recommend all of the other books!

they are great in their own right, and also give a LOT of extra bits and peaces of the overall lore!

what’s best about the series is, as you’ve already explained, the “hard-fantasy/sci-fi” approach to powers: all power requires some kind of source, everything comes from something.

best to do the Stormlight Archives after Mistborn (either order works), then the rest; order doesn’t really matter, although i recommend Tress of the emerald Sea and The Sunlit Man to be read last, because they contain a lot of sci-fi lore, which is best enjoyed last (imho)

also: Stormlight Archives Book 5 is coming relatively soon, i think it’s december?

i mean you weren’t actually off on the altered carbon, it just isn’t described in as much detail, but is effectively the same thing ;)

Thirteen, also by richard morgan, features similar themes as well!

this is not true.

it entirely depends on the specific application.

there is no OS-level, standardized, dynamic allocation of RAM (definitely not on windows, i assume it’s the same for OSX).

this is because most programming languages handle RAM allocation within the individual program, so the OS can’t allocate RAM however it wants.

the OS could put processes to “sleep”, but that’s basically just the previously mentioned swap memory and leads to HD degradation and poor performance/hiccups, which is why it’s not used much…

so, no.

RAM is usually NOT dynamically allocated by the OS.

it CAN be dynamically allocated by individual programs, IF they are written in a way that supports dynamic allocation of RAM, which some languages do well, others not so much…

it’s certainly not universally true.

also, what you describe when saying:

Any modern OS will allocate RAM as necessary. If another application needs, it will allocate some to it.

…is literally swap. that’s exactly what the previous user said.

and swap is not the same as “allocating RAM when a program needs it”, instead it’s the OS going “oh shit! I’m out of RAM and need more NOW, or I’m going to crash! better be safe and steal some memory from disk!”

what happens is:

the OS runs out of RAM and needs more, so it marks a portion of the next best HD as swap-RAM and starts using that instead.

HDs are not built for this use case, so whichever processes use the swap space become slooooooow and responsiveness suffers greatly.

on top of that, memory of any kind is built for a certain amount of read/write operations. this is also considered the “lifespan” of a memory component.

RAM is built for a LOT of (very fast) R/W operations.

hard drives are NOT built for that.

RAM has at least an order of magnitude more R/W ops going on than a hard drive, so when a computer uses swap excessively, instead of as very last resort as intended, it leads to a vastly shortened lifespan of the disk.

for an example of a VERY stupid, VERY poor implementation of this behavior, look up the apple M1’s rapid SSD degradation.

short summary:

apple only put 8GB of RAM into the first gen M1’s, which made the OS use swap memory almost continuously, which wore out the hard drive MUCH faster than expected.

…and since the HD is soldered onto the Mainboard, that completely bricks the device in about half a year/year, depending on usage.

TL;DR: you’re categorically and objectively wrong about this. sorry :/

hope you found this explanation helpful tho!