CS PhD Student. Running a laptop with 16GB of RAM. I dont train ML models on my machine but whenever I have to debug stuff locally, I realize precisely how starved for RAM my computer is. I start by closing down FF. Just plain killing the browser. RAM down from 12GB to 7. Then I close the other IDE (usually working on two parallel repos). 7GB to 5. Squeeze out the last few megabytes by killing Spotify, Signal, and other forgotten Terminal windows. Then I start to load my model to memory. 5 times out of 7, its over 12-13 GB at which point my OS stops responding and I have to force reboot my system cursing and arms flailing.