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

51–60 of 454 posts

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

#51

Post by owenversteeg »

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…

Hmm. I’ve never ran into that myself and I’ve used a lot of swap on my 8gb M1 Air, so you may be running into another issue, but one thing I have noticed is that performance is far better with native Apple apps. I switched to using Slack in the browser and Safari as my main browser and battery life and performance have been amazing.

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

#52

Post by semi-extrinsic »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #23
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 do anything special for cooling the GPUs? I mounted a giant CPU heatsink to my gtx 1080, and it still has to turn on the fans when running ML workloads.

If you have something that produces ~300 W of heat and you want to keep it from becoming hot, you're going to need either fans or liquid cooling (which also has fans, on the radiator).

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

#53

Post by blunte »

Haha! I sort of need this. It's amazing how the only time I realize I have a runaway process is if my laptop heats up.

It's truly incredible how much serious heavy work I do on a "little" M1 Air.

MySQL and Postgres, Redis, Sidekiqs, Mailcatcher (small, but still), a couple of Rails apps, Spotify, Spark mail app, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Safari, Calendar, Photos in the background hopefully identifying faces, etc. etc.

I do three times as much on this machine as I could do on my 32GB i7 Dell. There's some magic in here.

I still cannot build some older versions of libraries. So I do a little of my work on an old Intel Mac. But that's not the architecture problem, that's a problem of fragile builds.

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

#54

Post by alisonkisk »

jedberg wrote: post #43

This is funny. For the last ten years I've used Mac laptops as my primary machine. Of course the fan noise was a great auditory clue to tell me to check out Activity Monitor/top for rogue processes and help me optimize which tasks took too many resources. I didn't realize how much I relied on that cue until I temporarily switched to a Mac desktop machine during the pandemic when I didn't need to travel. The desktop f…

is it better to have rogue processes silently wasting energy and creating heat?

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

#56

Post by bangonkeyboard »

jareklupinski wrote: post #47
bentcorner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I believe that as developers we don't use audible feedback enough in our tooling. Imagine diagnosing your app health like you could diagnose your connection speed of a dial-up modem.

i stick the OS's equivalent of `bell` at the end of long-running scripts :)

  && say 'All done, come get some'

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

#57

Post by alisonkisk »

enlyth wrote: post #50
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…

A bit of a tangent but I am quite impressed how Apple's marketing campaign was so effective that they've managed to redefine what PC (personal computer) means

PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).

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

#58

Post by reader_mode »

canjobear wrote: post #35
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.

Yes, I miss that calming crackle telling me that my PC didn't lock up and it's just chugging along. And the floppy boot sound. Objectively worse but still nostalgic.

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

#59

Post by lukevp »

alisonkisk wrote: post #54
jedberg wrote: post #43

This is funny. For the last ten years I've used Mac laptops as my primary machine. Of course the fan noise was a great auditory clue to tell me to check out Activity Monitor/top for rogue processes and help me optimize which tasks took too many resources. I didn't realize how much I relied on that cue until I temporarily switched to a Mac desktop machine during the pandemic when I didn't need to travel. The desktop f…

is it better to have rogue processes silently wasting energy and creating heat?

I think this is a case where the meaning of the parent can be taken multiple ways, and one of the HN rules is to take the more generous case. My interpretation is that they are saying they see the purpose of needing some type of cue when CPU usage is high, but didn’t realize that they were using the fan speed as a proxy for CPU utilization until this was posted, at which time, they put 2 and 2 together. That’s not saying that the product is bad or not, just an anecdote.

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

#60

Post by alisonkisk »

habibur wrote: post #12

Reminds me, 10 years back, battery cars suddenly seemed so much silent, that they added engine noise played on speaker to alert pedestrians.

"suddenly" was because that's when they started existing in noticeable numbers.
Post reply on HN