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Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

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Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#211

Post by whimsicalism »

azalemeth wrote: post #203
dash2 wrote: post #78

As a scientist, I'm interested how computer programmers work with data. * They drew beautiful graphs! * They used chatgpt to automate their analysis super-fast! * ChatGPT punched out a reasonably sensible t test! But: * They had variation across memory and chip type, but they never thought of using a linear regression. * They drew histograms, which are hard to compare. They could have supplemented them with simple me…

> ChatGPT punched out a reasonably sensible t test! I think the distribution is decidedly non normal here and the difference in the medians may well have also been of substantial interest -- I'd go for a Wilcox test here to first order... Or even some type of quantile regression. Honestly the famous Jonckheere–Terpstra test for ordered medians would be _perfect_ for this bit of pseudoanalysis -- have the hypothesis t…

12,000 builds? Sure maybe the build time distribution is non-normal, but the sample statistic probably is approximately normal with that many builds.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#212

Post by yieldcrv »

prvc wrote: post #190

How about: incentivize efficient use of resources by making devs use slower computers!

there is a perpetual ESG argument that always wins, older computers which are slower use more energy than the new one thats fast. older computers that were top of the line use waaay more energy than the new one that’s fast.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#213

Post by firecall »

kingTug wrote: post #10

Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.

I’m a SublimeText die hard!

I do regularly try VSCode to see what I’m missing.

VS Code has great remote editing that I do use.

However, on my M1 Pro 16”, VS Code is noticeable laggier than sublime Text!

Just clicking on a file in the side bar and waiting for text to appear has lag. Many non-nerdy people might think it’s instant, but I can see the lag clearly! LOL

For my tastes the VS Code UI is cluttered and generally feels slow. The extensions are great but also a nightmare of updates and alerts of things broken.

If it’s your thing, you can use CoPilot in Sublime Text through a plugin that actually works really well!

I’m on the fence about CoPilots benefits though.

Sometimes I’ll flick over to VS Code to use the chat copilot if I need an answer for an API call etc….

If I had to stick with one, I’m sticking with Sublime Text.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#214

Post by jayd16 »

eysi wrote: post #191
LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

My team has been developing against a fully remote environment (K8s cluster) for some years now and it makes for a really powerful DevEx. Code sits on our laptops but live syncs to the remote services without requiring a Docker build or K8s deploy. It really does feel like local. In particular it lets us do away with the commit-push-pray cycle because we can run integ tests and beyond as we code as opposed to waiting…

Kind of interesting to think that CI is significantly slower in practice and both systems need to be maintained. Is it just the overhead of pushing through git or are there other reasons as well?

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#215

Post by alecthomas »

berkut wrote: post #153

It's interesting to me that being on A/C and Battery power showed a performance difference: when I benchmarked a M1 Pro MBPro against an Intel 2015 MBPro two years ago, I didn't notice any performance differences between being on battery or using mains power in either laptop, which surprised me at the time: https://pixelesque.net/blog/2022/08/basic-apple-m1-pro-cpu-b... I wonder what the difference is... Maybe my tes…

My M2 defaults to using a "low power mode" when on battery, which I noticed initially because some graphics code I was writing was getting significantly lower frame rates when on battery.

Edit: 310fps vs 240fps

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#216

Post by RayVR »

whimsicalism wrote: post #211
azalemeth wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT punched out a reasonably sensible t test! I think the distribution is decidedly non normal here and the difference in the medians may well have also been of substantial interest -- I'd go for a Wilcox test here to first order... Or even some type of quantile regression. Honestly the famous Jonckheere–Terpstra test for ordered medians would be _perfect_ for this bit of pseudoanalysis -- have the hypothesis t…

12,000 builds? Sure maybe the build time distribution is non-normal, but the sample statistic probably is approximately normal with that many builds.

Many people misinterpret what is required for a t-test.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#217

Post by dinvlad »

sweetjuly wrote: post #175
dmos62 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dev box died (that I used for remote work), and instead of buying something new immediately, I moved my setup to a Hetzner cloud vps. Took around 2 days. Stuff like setting up termux on my tablet and the cli environment on the vps was 90 percent of that. The plus side was that I then spent the remaining summer working outside in the terrace and in the park. Was awesome. I was able to do it because practically all…

How much does this cost you? I've been dealing with a huge workstation-server thing for years in order to get this flexibility and while the performance/cost is amazing, reliability and maintenance has been a pain. I've been thinking about buying some cloud compute but an equivalent workstation ends up being crazy expensive (>$100/mo).

There’s a crazy good deal for a dedicated server with 14-core/20-thread i5-13500 CPU and 64GB RAM, for just around 40 EUR/mo: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex

This is honestly a bit overkill for a dev workstation (unless you compile Rust!), but since it’s a dedicated server it can also host any number of fully isolated services for homelab or saas. There’s nothing else like it in the wild, afaik.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#218

Post by packetlost »

LanzVonL wrote: post #105
packetlost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed building of what ? Because for every language the answer of whether it's easy or not is probably different.

[flagged]

Sooooo... C? You didn't answer the question and I would be surprised to hear that freaking Java had support for distributed compilation, and that has been around since the 90s.

Take your pretentious non-answers elsewhere please.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#219

Post by balls187 »

drgo wrote: post #201

To people who are thinking about using AI for data analyses like the one described in the article: - I think it is much easier to just load the data into R, Stata etc and interrogate the data that way. The commands to do that will be shorter and more precise and most importantly more reproducible. - the most difficult task in data analysis is understanding the data and the mechanisms that have generated it. For that…

That is effectively what the GPT4 based AI Assistant is doing.

Except when I did it, it was python and pandas. You can ask it to show you the code it used to do it's analysis.

So you can load the data into R/Python and google "how do I do xyzzzy" and write the code yourself, or use ChatGPT.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#220

Post by behnamoh »

jiggawatts wrote: post #97
LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I disagree though. If a task is boring and repetitive, I just won't ever do it. So the comparison for people like me is:

    "spend X time to automate this task vs not do the task at all".
Whereas the xkcd is like (n = frequency that you do the task):

    "Spend X time to automate this task that takes Y×n time normally and get it down to Z×n time, vs spend Y×n time to do the task"
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