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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

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Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#261

Post by sokoloff »

alt227 wrote: post #225
margalabargala wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly this sort of thing should be ignored, if not explicitly encouraged, by the company. Engineers are very highly paid. Many are paid more than $100/hr if you break it down. If a salaried engineer paid the equivalent of $100/hr stays late doing anything, expenses a $25 meal, and during the time they stay late you get the equivalent of 20 minutes of work out of them- including in intangibles like team bonding via…

> Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug. Luckily that comes down to the policy of the individual company and is not enforced by law. I am personally happy to pay engineers more so they can buy this sort of thing themselves and we dont open the company to this sort of abuse. Then its a known cost and the engineers can decide from themselves if they want to spend that $30 on a meal or some…

To give them enough money to buy that $30 meal as a personal expense, you need to pay them around $50 in marginal comp expenses.

It can be a win for both sides for the employees to work an extra 30-90 minutes and have some team bonding and to feel like they’re getting a good deal. (Source: I did this for years at a place that comp’d dinner if you worked more than 8 hours AND past 6 PM; we’d usually get more than half the team staying for the “free” food.)

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#262

Post by appreciatorBus »

margalabargala wrote: post #196
AtlanticThird wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous. I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?

> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous. I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served. I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware. Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same…

Nah the laptop and the dinner are exactly the same, they only differ in timing.

You can steal $2000 by lying about a stolen laptop or lying about working late. The latter method just takes a few months.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#263

Post by appreciatorBus »

necovek wrote: post #228
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If $20k is misspent by 1 in 100 employees, that's still $200 per employee per year: peanuts, really. Just like with "policing", I'd only focus on uncovering and dealing with abusers after the fact, not on everyone — giving most people "benefits" that instead makes them feel valued.

So then just set a limit of $200 per head instead of allowing a few bad apples to spend $20k all on themselves.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#264

Post by FergusArgyll »

brookst wrote: post #91
gruez wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because.. em-dashes? As many others have mentioned, ios/mac have auto em-dashes so it's not really a reliable indicator.

It’s so annoying that we’ve lost a legit and useful typographic convention just because some people think that AI overusing it means that all uses indicate AI. Sure, I’ve stopped using em-dashes just to avoid the hassle of trying to educate people about a basic logical fallacy, but I reserve the right to be salty about it.

I find adding some typos and 1 or 2 bad grammer things lets you get away with whatever you want

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#265

Post by margalabargala »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #262
margalabargala wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous. I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served. I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware. Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same…

Nah the laptop and the dinner are exactly the same, they only differ in timing. You can steal $2000 by lying about a stolen laptop or lying about working late. The latter method just takes a few months.

We're not discussing lying about working late, we're discussing actually working late.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#266

Post by alt227 »

miohtama wrote: post #2

Even better way to improve the quality of your computer sessions is "Just use Mac." Apple is so much ahead at the performance curve.

In my experience comments like these are generally made by people who dont have much experience outside of using laptops.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#267

Post by ak217 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #217
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For games its generally not worthwhile since the performance is almost entirely based on gpu these days. Almost all build guides will say ‘get midrange cpu X over high end chip Y and put the savings to a better GPU’. Consoles in particular are just a decent gpu with a fairly low end cpu these days. The xbox one with a 1.75Ghz 8core AMD from a couple of generations ago now is still playing all the latest games.

Anecdote: I got a massive performance (FPS) improvement in games after upgrading CPU recently, with no GPU change. I think currently, that build guide doesn't apply based on what's going on with GPUs. Was valid in the past, and will be valid in the future, I hope!

How old was your previous CPU? Different people have vastly different expectations when it comes to upgrading. I'm certain I can play all of the games that I'm interested in on my 3 year old Ryzen 7600x, and that I'm limited by the 5 year old GPU (which I dread upgrading because of the crunch). Would someone with a 5 year old CPU be well served by upgrading to a 9600x, absolutely. But some people think they have to upgrade their Threadripper every year.

(As far as work goes, I realize this directly contradicts the OP's point, which is the intent. If you know your workflow involves lots of compiling and local compute, absolutely buy a recent Threadripper. I find that most of the time the money spent on extra cores would be better spent on a more modest CPU with more RAM and a faster SSD. And more thoughtful developer tooling that doesn't force me to recompile the entire Rust work tree and its dependencies with every git pull.)

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#268

Post by pmontra »

einpoklum wrote: post #17

This is quite the silly argument. * "people" generally don't spend their time compiling the Linux kernel, or anything of the sort. * For most daily uses, current-gen CPUs are only marginally faster than two generations back. Not worth spending a large amount of money every 3 years or so. * Other aspects of your computer, like memory (capacity mostly) and storage, can also be perf bottlenecks. * If, as a developer, yo…

My most cpu intensive task is running the full test suite of a customer's Rails app. I can probably shave off a large percentage of its running time, but it also contains integration tests run with chrome. What I do to shorten the test time is running only the ones of the files that changed. The boot time of Rails is there anyway.

The CI system is still slower that my laptop. We are not really concerned about it.

I'm waiting for something to fail because $3000 on a laptop won't make me gain $3000 from my customer.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#269

Post by locusofself »

lukan wrote: post #221
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"$1,000 chairs" Not an expert here, but from what I heard, that would be a bargain for a good office chair. And having a good chair or not - you literally feel the difference.

Ergonomics is definitely something to skimp on!

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#270

Post by alt227 »

nine_k wrote: post #18
mgaunard wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have good performance, especially per watt, for a laptop. Certainly not ahead of the curve when considering server hardware.

Not just that; they have a decent GPU and the unified memory architecture which allows to directly run many ML models locally with good performance. Server hardware is not very portable. Reserving a c7i.large is about $0.14/hour, this would equal the cost of an MBP M3 64GB in about two years. Apple have made a killer development machine, I say this as a person who does not like Apple and macOS.

Multi monitor support is still flaky and unreliable, cant boot linux environments, cant upgrade M.2 drives yourself, magic mouse still cannot be charged whilst using it etc etc.

On top of that when you look at price vs performance they are way behind.

Apple may have made good strides in single core cpu performance, but they have definitely not made killer development machines imo.

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