121–130 of 522 posts
I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. It is of course more expensive but that allows them to offer the latest and greatest to their employees without needing all the IT staff to manage a physical installation. Then your actual physical computer is just a dumb terminal.
Great, now every operation has 300ms of latency. Kill me
I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. It is of course more expensive but that allows them to offer the latest and greatest to their employees without needing all the IT staff to manage a physical installation. Then your actual physical computer is just a dumb terminal.
> I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. In which movie ? "Microsoft fried movie" ? Cloud sucks big time. Not all engineers are web developers.
The desktop latency has gotten way better over the years and the VMs have enough network bandwidth to do builds on a shared network drive. I've also found it easier to request hardware upgrades for VDIs if I need more vCPUs or memory, and some places let you dispatch jobs to more powerful hosts without loading up your machine.
But single core performance has been stagnant for ages! Considering ‘Geekbench 6’ scores, at least. So if it’s not a task massively benefiting from parallelization, buying used is still the best value for money.
Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference. The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.
I've been struggling with this topic a lot, I feel the slowness everyday and productivity loss of having slow computers, 30m for something that could take 10 times less... it's horrible.
So, in a way, slow computers is always a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we always wrote software to be as performant as possible, and if we only ran things that were within the capability of the machine, we’d never have to wait. But we don’t do that; good optimization takes a lot of developer time, and being willing to wait a few minutes nets me computations that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than what it can do in real time.
To be fair, things have improved on average. Wait times are reduced for most things. Not as fast as hardware has sped up, but it is getting better over time.
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I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.
Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees. For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time. XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.
Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.
Tangential: TIL you can compile the Linux kernel in < 1 minute (on top-spec hardware). Seems it’s been a while since I’ve done that, because I remember it being more like an hour or more.
OK, I'm convinced. Can someone tell me what to buy, specifically? Needs to run Ubuntu, support 2 x 4K monitors (3 would be nice), have at least 64GB RAM and fit on my desk. Don't particularly care how good the GPU is / is not. Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?
Fastest threadripper on the market is usually a good bet. Worth considering mini-pc on vesa mount / in a cable tray + fast machine in another room. Also, I've got a gmktec here (cheaper one playing thin client) and it's going to be scrapped in the near future because the monitor connections keep dropping. Framework make a 395 max one, that's tempting as a small single machine.
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Huh, that's a really good deal at 1500 USD for the 64Gb model considering the processor it's running. (It's the same one that's in the Framework desktop that there's been lots of noise about recently - lots of recent reviews on YouTube.) Get the 128Gb model for (currently) 1999 USD and you can play with running big local LLMs too. The 8060 iGPU is roughly equivalment to a mid-level nVidia laptop GPU, so it's plenty t…
Yeah, I like the look of the Framework but the (relative) price and lead times are putting me off a little. There are also these which look similar https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gtr9-pro-amd-ryzen...
Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…
Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the p…
Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
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Isn't it about equal treatment? You can't buy one person everything they want, just because they have high salary, otherwise the employee next door will get salty.
I previously worked at a company where everyone got a budget of ~$2000. The only requirement was you had to get a mac (to make it easier on IT I assume), the rest was up to you. Some people bought a $2000 macbook pro, some bought a $600 mac mini and used the rest on displays and other peripherals. Equality doesn't have to mean uniformity.
Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things.
So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.