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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

#241

Post by drgo »

balls187 wrote: post #219
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.

so ChatGPT can build a causal model for a problem domain? How does it communicate that (using a DAG?)? It would be important for the data users to understand that model.

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

#242

Post by jeffbee »

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 company piles so much ill-considered Linux antivirus and other crap in cloud developer boxes that even on a huge instance type, the builds are ten or more times slower than a laptop, and hundreds of times slower than a real dev box with a Threadripper or similar. It's just a pure waste of money and everyone's time.

It turns out that hooking every system call with vendor crapware is bad for a unix-style toolchain that execs a million subprocesses.

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

#243

Post by bee_rider »

aranke wrote: post #136
lawrjone wrote: post #2

Author here, thanks for posting! Lots of stuff in this from profiling Go compilations, building a hot-reloader, using AI to analyse the build dataset, etc. We concluded that it was worth upgrading the M1s to an M3 Pro (the max didn’t make much of a difference in our tests) but the M2s are pretty close to the M3s, so not (for us) worth upgrading. Happy to answer any questions if people have them.

Hi, Thanks for the detailed analysis. I’m wondering if you factored in the cost of engineering time invested in this analysis, and how that affects the payback time (if at all). Thanks!

They could also add in the advertising benefit of showing off some fun data on this site :)

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

#244

Post by kamikaz1k »

mcny wrote: post #144

> All developers work with a fully fledged incident.io environment locally on their laptops: it allows for a This to me is the biggest accomplishment. I've never worked at a company (besides brief time helping out with some startups) where I have been able to run a dev/local instance of the whole company on a single machine. There's always this thing, or that, or the other that is not accessible. There's always a got…

I used to work in a company like that, and since leaving it I’ve missed that so much.

People who haven’t lived in that world just cannot understand how much better it is, and will come up with all kinds of cope.

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

#245

Post by postalrat »

ewoodrich wrote: post #238
postalrat wrote: post #160

If you are working at home why bother with a laptop? You can get a much more powerful desktop for the same price.

I ditched my desktop once "plug in a single USB-C cable and get dual 4k monitors + peripherals all ready to go" became a thing. I love the flexibility of a laptop combined with a dedicated workstation setup.

If flexibility is your #1 priority then usb-c never mattered. You could get mobility long before usb-c.

I'm saying if you want a fast machine then you can't beat a desktop for value or potential.

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

#247

Post by Ambroos »

kaishiro wrote: post #165
rsanek wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might have to do with scale. At my employer (~7k employees) we started down this path a few years ago as well, and while it has taken longer for remote to be better than local, it now definitively is and has unlocked all kinds of other stuff that wasn't possible with the local-only version. One example is working across multiple branches by switching machines instead of files on local has meant way lower latency…

One thing I've never understood (and admittedly have not thoroughly researched) is how a remote workspace jives with front-end development. My local tooling is all terminal-based, but after ssh'ing into the remote box to conduct some "local" development, how do I see those changes in a browser? Is the local just exposed on an ip:port?

Facebook's web repo which includes all the PHP and JS for facebook.com and a bunch of other sites is one big massive repo. For development you claim out a server that has a recent checkout of the codebase. Right after claiming it it syncs in your personal commits/stacks you're working on, ready to rebase. You access that machine on a subdomain of any of the FB websites. As far as I remember it was something along the lines of 12345.od.facebook.com, but the format changed from time to time as infra changed. Client certificate authentication and VPN needed (that may no longer be the case, my info is 1y+ old).

There was an internal search provider (bunnylol) that had tools like putting @od in front of any FB URL to generate a redirect of that URL to your currently checked out On Demand server. Painless to work with! Nice side benefit of living on the same domain as the main sites is that the cookies are reused, so no need to log in again.

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

#248

Post by maerF0x0 »

hmottestad wrote: post #157
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be plenty of friction depending on your use case.

What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!

PSA: Dont get a mac with apple silicon if you need/want Virtual Box https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

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

#249

Post by maerF0x0 »

Erratic6576 wrote: post #40
lawrjone wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on, I’ll bite: why?

2,356 € is way over my budget. The machine is amazing but the specs are stingy. Returning it and getting a cheaper one would give me a lot of disposable money to spend in restaurants

Yes, you can get a lot more hardware for your money than buying the Apple Logo.
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