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Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#111

Post by quickthrower2 »

drewzero1 wrote: post #59
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I 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'…

Same with phones. I wanted a seperate cheap phone for reasons, anything under A$250 is usually not OEM and definitely will run slow as hell according to reviews with poor battery. Why are these things sold? At the 250 point you still need to read reviews and be careful. It is so much nicer to pick an iPhone and know it will be good (there are probably similar heuristics on android for pick an X model)

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#112

Post by CrypticShift »

Two different questions here:

For old, discarded devices: It is the conjunction of Moore law and programmed obsolescence that makes this unsolvable on any large scale.

Suppose that Android was modular, not ara-phone-modular, but almost custom-built-pc-modular (+long term software updates). will you replace it that fast in the first place ?

For new devices: The waste/potential is rather on the "software level", not the compute one: These are 2 very different things. It is not the CPU meter that matters.

And you know what, 20 years ago I was hopeful that a lot of people in 2020 will be using their computer more creatively. I was naive of course: If you are not a curious person to start with, computers will rarely make you so.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#113

Post by Canada »

dmitrybrant wrote: post #58

Yes, 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 insta…

> 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 app

Blaaah. Ship it and enjoy the moment!!

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#114

Post by itake »

vineyardmike wrote: post #97
itake wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> b/c migrating from sync to async takes 2-5x longer I very firmly believe that the future of concurrency is with language features that let you basically “write blocking code and run it in parallel” like fibers/CSP/etc. It’s how I’ve started pushing everyone to write where I work and it’s made everyone so much more comfortable (and error free) at writing things in parallel. It’s way easier to reason about than async…

I write a lot of golang now. Golang has the easiest to use concurrency model of any language I've used (js, java, c#, ruby, python), but to perform any task properly, still requires fine-tuning (e.g. how many threads/go-routines do you use per stage in the pipeline?). Implementing a pipeline still adds ~15 additional lines per stage when compared to the sync version.

I push ppl at my job to write concurrent code, but we also work on high traffic systems at slow moving company and its better to do it fast the first time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#116

Post by itake »

thoughtFrame wrote: post #56
itake wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really liked golang's blog on pipelines:

https://go.dev/blog/pipelines

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#117

Post by jrockway »

samus wrote: post #57
jrockway wrote: post #41

Chips 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 in…

Yeah. I didn't mean to be dismissive. From the perspective of companies like TSMC and Intel, making chips is just what they do. If they sell their thing for $8 and you only use it to look at cat pictures, I don't think they're sad or anything. You gave them your money, they gave them their chip, everyone is happy.

If someone nukes the factories and engineers, obviously society suffers an incomprehensible loss. All I'm saying is that it's OK to take it for granted. The people that know how to do the thing are doing their thing. It's wonderful.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#118

Post by madsbuch »

tharkun__ wrote: post #77
trap_goes_hot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this. Does Apple market their M1 as "it depends" ? Or do they say "When you need the highest level of performance ever in a Mac notebook, there’s M1 Max.". I would be insisting Apple actually backup their claim rather than criticizing the OP.

How does marketing come in? The OP made a claim of basically (paraphrasing here): "this thing blows, it results in a 50% performance drop for test suites". I believe him for his case. Our case was showing the oppositebehavior. Thus it seems to depend. Simple logic.

Please refrain from indicating that I wrote something I absolute did not.

I said "As an example ..." which you are paraphrasing into "... for test suites".

You are paraphrasing my existentialistic argument into a universal argument. Please never do this.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#119

Post by madsbuch »

tharkun__ wrote: post #26
madsbuch wrote: post #22

To be honest an M1 (M1 Max, 64GB RAM) performs quite poor doing serious software development. As an example, it takes 22 sec to run a test suite on the M1, in our CI the same test suite takes 9 sec. These might be due to software that has not been written yet. To be honest, the computer seems like a high end office computer, so I think that use case seems spot on.

You say "a" test suite as if this was universal truth. I can tell you that it is not and your suspicion is correct. It depends. Our own test suites saw 25-50% performance increases / decrease in runtime on our developer machines when we switched to M1s for example.

> You say "a" test suite as if this was universal truth

In my comment I wrote "As an example ..." and I absolutely did not say this is a universal truth. It appears like you are able to comprehend basic English, and should be able to read my commentary.

You wrote the following in another comment

> but feeding this troll is sort of fun

Who do you think you are to write stuff like that? Why do you feel like it is OK to make these types of personal attacks on a forum like this?

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#120

Post by madsbuch »

dijit wrote: post #32
madsbuch wrote: post #22

To be honest an M1 (M1 Max, 64GB RAM) performs quite poor doing serious software development. As an example, it takes 22 sec to run a test suite on the M1, in our CI the same test suite takes 9 sec. These might be due to software that has not been written yet. To be honest, the computer seems like a high end office computer, so I think that use case seems spot on.

Is your CI running on docker for mac, perchance?

CI is running on Github actions on their Ubuntu instances.
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