Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

fanfan.rambo.codes

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 454 posts

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#31

Post by megous »

MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #4

That's pretty hilarious. Until recently I didn't think of the CPU fan as an auditory cue for how hard your system is working. But now I can remember times that excessive fan noise has prompted me to investigate the cause of excessive usage.

That would be useful for me today. Systemd again gone into some of those inifinite loops consuming 100% CPU in one of its daemons that try to replace what already worked before (systemd-resolved) today, while I was sitting in the train without AC.

I only realized something was wrong when the pinebook got way too hot.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#32

Post by hackathonguy »

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute. Is anyone else experiencing the same?

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#33

Post by brokencode »

mlyle wrote: post #14
halotrope wrote: post #5

It makes me a bit sad that for ten years I took it for granted that Moore’s law is dead and notebooks are constantly overheating incapable computers just to learn that the whole issue was Intel messing up their process nodes.

It's both. It's harder and harder to grind out progress (and if you compare M1 to where the 90's-early 2000's exponential progression, we're not so close). As it gets harder, it becomes more capital intensive and the probability of success on any given process node decreases. The marginal utility of a doubling of computing is likely decreasing with time, too. At some point, these factors are going to compound to slow…

I don’t think the marginal utility of doubling computing will diminish any time soon. As we gain more computing power, we just start doing more and more computation heavy tasks that weren’t possible before.

For example, VR games are notoriously demanding on today’s hardware, especially if you want to put that hardware in the headset.

And many applications get slower over time, not faster, as new features are added. This is especially true in an era of cross platform frameworks that are convenient for developers, but are much slower than native.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#35

Post by canjobear »

MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #4

That's pretty hilarious. Until recently I didn't think of the CPU fan as an auditory cue for how hard your system is working. But now I can remember times that excessive fan noise has prompted me to investigate the cause of excessive usage.

Hearing the disk going used to be an auditory cue too, which is now gone thanks to solid state drives.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#36

Post by rambambram »

jmkni wrote: post #25

Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down. It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire. I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm comprom…

Must be nice, using a fresh machine that's so silent. I recently switched from a powerful desktop PC with noisy fans to a passively cooled RPi4 running Ubuntu Mate. I just feel my productivity and focus going up now I don't hear the equivalent of a small fighter jet taking off. The RPi4 is still a fighter though, very quick and powerful for it's size, price and specs.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#37

Post by LASR »

hackathonguy wrote: post #32

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "cl…

Yes. The M1 is not magic. Or at least it has limits.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#38

Post by HPsquared »

amelius wrote: post #20
microtonal wrote: post #8

This is funny, but I prefer my computers silent. Semi-related: I can hear the inductors on my NVIDIA GPU, which is somewhat useful. When I am training deep learning models, the coil whine follows very regular patterns. Also, the pattern changes between training and validation. So, I can literally hear when an epoch is done. (Of course, TensorBoard for the real monitoring.)

Do you also hear this when your speakers/audio system are off?

I'm not GP, but yes: coil whine is audible as a high frequency whine/buzz, caused by power supply components (inductors) physically vibrating at high frequency.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#39

Post by stephencanon »

jheriko wrote: post #30
akmarinov wrote: post #22

No troll, the fan shutting off was how I knew my app had compiled and I could start debugging. With the M1, I now have to check the cpu usage history occasionally.

jesus wept. are your builds that slow, or your inability to add notifications that real? not sure if programmer, or just troll...

The fan _was_ their notification. Why would they have wasted time adding another?

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#40

Post by dstick »

hackathonguy wrote: post #32

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "cl…

> plus a couple of Electron apps

I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(

Post reply on HN