I have started contributing to fold at home when I sleep with my 3000x series GPU and i9. It's something.
I use the heat for overnight winter.
Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
51–60 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#52I get annoyed by the opposite, people buying bottom-tier crapware-laden garbage thinking they'll just check emails and browse the internet, then replacing it every few years.
My mom used to do this until I gifted her my max spec Surface Pro a few years ago. She's probably saved more money on semi-disposable laptops than buying it new would have.
And I guess I get annoyed that anyone would actually be advocating for that garbage hardware...
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#53Yes. However hardwares have progressed so fast and prices have dropped so much that waste is unavoidable.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#54I do feel a warm, fuzzy sense of satisfaction when I get to light up all the cores on my workstation … but that might just be from the heat of the Xeons ;)
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#55It would only be considered 'wasted' if energy was free. But energy is not free, and thus choosing how to use compute resources is still important. e.g. I own a few high powered workstations for fluid dynamics computations. If energy was free, I would be just running 'what-if' solves all the time just for the hell of it. But because energy isn't free, they stay in sleep unless I need them for what is deemed 'necessar…
That's fair, but I have a half a dozen servers sitting in a colo with networking/energy/cooling included in the lease agreement so energy is not a concern.
I usually just run game servers with the extra RAM/cpu threads for my friends. If my elasticsearch cluster is particularly unused some days and I have extra bandwidth I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed. Anything that makes the btop graph look active and lively makes me feel nice.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#56What bothers me is that I don't know how to squeeze all of the juice out of my CPU (or any programmable device for that matter). I see instances of the Jevons effect everywhere (e.g. the use of Electron), and on the other side I see DOS-era programmers whose experience transfer really well to more modern machines, so they know how to get the best throughput on their data, how to isolate slow but necessary parts of th…
My issue is concurrency is so hard. One time tasks don't make sense to make concurrent, b/c migrating from sync to async takes 2-5x longer + higher bug risks and more complexity. So most tasks remain inefficient...
And a lot of concurrency resources just dump a list of tools on you. Just saying "here's a spinlock, here's a monitor, here's a condition variable, here's the definition of Dining Philosophers" is like teaching woodworking by just showing you a bunch of powertools without any explanation of how you make furniture out of them
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#57Chips aren't a living thing. You take some sand, project light onto it, dissolve the parts not exposed to light, and now it can execute instructions. No big deal. Electricity is required as an input, though, so when it doesn't have anything useful to do it can avoid consuming electricity. Therefore, it's not clear to me that it's a waste to leave it off or idle. Are you upset that your bed remains unused for the 16 h…
> No big deal.
Quite the opposite. Microchips are a high technology product, and making them consumes a huge amount of resources. More advanced technology nodes have increasingly stringent requirements regarding the purity of source materials, environmental conditioning, equipment, and energy consumption. And behind them is a huge supply chain where much the same is valid. The complexity and sophistication in this industry to be competitive at the state of the art is mindblowing.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#58Yes, definitely.
I feel a profound sense of despair when we purchase a mobile device with the most cutting-edge CPU and insane amount of memory, and proceed to saddle it with a bloated VM that's designed to guardrail and protect the device from even more bloated, leaky, crashy, unresponsive apps.
And when we purchase a new desktop workstation, equipped with even more staggering horsepower, we're totally OK with installing software that makes itself comfortable by consuming large fractions of this horsepower without any apparent need, all because the amazing hardware is able to mask the awfulness of the software.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#59I would turn it the other way around. So many underpowered devices are produced that sit in drawers, collect dust, and end up in the landfill. For instance Intel makes "atom" devices that if they don't die early because of design flaws, they die early because they aren't really useful. There was a time when Intel was interested in having you buy a new computer because it was the best computer you ever had, now they a…
While I don't have experience with the specific devices you mention, I have seen a lot of crap laptops get replaced quickly by other crap laptops. I don't mind cheap low-powered computers (they have their use cases) but it really frustrates me to see them marketed as general-purpose computers to average consumers. Intel and AMD have both been guilty of selling low-powered, low-cost "general purpose" CPUs that couldn't compute their way out of a wet paper bag.
Software is to blame for this problem as well. While we have gained a lot of features, modern software often uses system resources in a way that's not helpful to the user (either by active things like telemetry or lazy things like iterating over every object in a database unnecessarily). I get the feeling that software providers take my compute power for granted, and if I don't have enough, it's just time for me to buy a new computer again.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#60It would only be considered 'wasted' if energy was free. But energy is not free, and thus choosing how to use compute resources is still important. e.g. I own a few high powered workstations for fluid dynamics computations. If energy was free, I would be just running 'what-if' solves all the time just for the hell of it. But because energy isn't free, they stay in sleep unless I need them for what is deemed 'necessar…
That's fair, but I have a half a dozen servers sitting in a colo with networking/energy/cooling included in the lease agreement so energy is not a concern. I usually just run game servers with the extra RAM/cpu threads for my friends. If my elasticsearch cluster is particularly unused some days and I have extra bandwidth I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed. Anything that m…
> so energy is not a concern.
You're talking about paying for energy, some people are concerned about consuming energy.