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

71 points by behnamoh 4y ago

e.g., I feel bad when people buy M1 (or M2) MacBook Pros just to check emails, browse the internet, and do presentations (very common among managers). Or when an old iPhone or Android is sitting in a cabinet getting dust, while it can be used as a webcam, small home server, automation device, clock (I use an old iPad), etc. I think so much compute power is being wasted and I'm not sure how to feel about that.

PaulHoule 4y ago
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 are interested in putting every vendor of parts out of business (except seemingly Synaptics) so they can get more of the BOM, even if this means the new computer you buy will be the worst computer you ever bought. If there was some minimum standard of quality for devices, people wouldn't need to buy so many.
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  Are you talking about the Atom line of Intel CPUs? If so, I don't really understand this comment. Atoms are used in all kind of applications where low(ish) power x86 is required. They even support ECC RAM making them great fit for NAS and embedded servers deployed in the field. They may not shine as a general purpose CPU but they are definitely not ewaste.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    There are the netbooks which are e-Waste when they are new, and then there was https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_to_link_product_warning_to_faulty_chip/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_t... Any other vendor that had a failing product line would have retired the brand a long time ago and come out with a new name (look at how no small car brand from an American manufacturer ever survives more than a few years.) Instead Intel comes out with all kinds of forgettable "... creek" and "... lake" brands for their quality parts. The process difficulties they are having in particular stretch out the lifecycle of parts like the construction of a nuclear power plant, but the time the "s..t creek" chip is newly available you have been hearing about it for three years and it doesn't sound new it sounds more like "IBM System/360".
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      FWIW, I can never remember my CPU's generation numbers as quickly as I remember their codenames. Referring to generally-similar hardware by "Haswell" or "Skylake" is easier than "4000-series" or "6XXX". Just my two cents though.
    - nicolaslem 4y ago
      I still don't agree with the e-waste thing. As a student back in 2008, I did all my five years of CS degree on a 11" Atom netbook. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking but these things were awesome. They were super affordable, much smaller than the laptops of the era, ran Linux without trouble, were hackable... so much that using them as Hackintosh was basically the equivalent of a Macbook Air before the Macbook Air even existed. Besides the netbooks, plenty of sysadmins in my circles started their journey by renting small Atom dedicated servers for a few bucks a month from the likes of OVH.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I'll be fair and say that atom devices make much better NAS units than the MIPS and other off-brand CPUS in the 2000-2010 period which frequently did not have the horsepower to do even lightweight file server tasks. I remember finding some of these things provisioned with so little RAM that accessing files at all through Samba would lead to a swapping crisis that would make it take 20 seconds to list a directory, 5 seconds to open a file, etc. Atom-based NAS improve on that.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > 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. Setting aside the reliability concerns (see other comments) for a bit... I think a number of years ago Scaleway (or someone else) offered VPSes with Intel Atom CPUs and had some ARM offerings as well. This discussion appears to be the best I can find at the moment: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/77819/new-scalaway-c2-intel-avoton-based-dedicated-server https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/77819/new-scalaway-c2-inte... For my needs, really cheap VPS servers are essentially ideal since most of my workloads are RAM bottlenecked and can easily deal with a single core CPU. This would also be perfect for hobby projects. Why live on free tiers that have lots of limitations when you can just get new nodes per project (or group of projects) for 1-3 Euros a month? Actually, my current homelab servers (that I also use as CI nodes) run AMD GE200 CPUs with a TDP of 35W. If I could find something that's AM4 compatible, readily available and cheap, you can be pretty sure I'd go for it! Oh, and my notebook runs I think one of the Celerons, that have a <10 W TDP and that's still good enough for browsing the web, chatting, writing blog posts and so on, even some light development work. And the whole notebook cost around 200 Euros when I got it. Just look at how popular Raspberry Pi is as a platform for homelabs, now imagine doing the same with the x86 platform and not some overpriced novelty hardware that comes in small runs, but something to rival the mass production of Pi. I want to live in that world. If we weren't so heavily impacted by Wirth's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) both in regards to our OSes (just try running anything heavier than XFCE4 on any of those pieces of hardware) and platforms (e.g. comparing the footprint of Go vs something like Ruby or Java; though each have their uses; though there's also the facet of lots of browser-based software nowadays, e.g. Visual Studio Code vs a native text editor like CudaText), far fewer people would consider hardware like that "underpowered" or e-waste.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  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't compute their way out of a wet paper bag. Software is to blame for this problem as well. While we have gained a lot of features, modern software often uses system resources in a way that's not helpful to the user (either by active things like telemetry or lazy things like iterating over every object in a database unnecessarily). I get the feeling that software providers take my compute power for granted, and if I don't have enough, it's just time for me to buy a new computer again.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    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)
LinuxBender 4y ago
Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme? No. My devices are rarely utilizing over 40% CPU and tend to last for a very long time. I know it isn't much but this helps keep some gear out of the landfill. I can always find a use for older hardware. This Linux PC I am writing this post on is coming up on 12 years old and is more than adequate for my purposes. I expect it to last at least another 10 years, though I may have to replace the spinning rust with an SSD at some point. I recently bought my first smart phone despite not really needing one. I have mixed thoughts on how long this will last since I do not control the firmware yet. These devices are designed to be difficult to service. I will probably turn it into a glorified MP3 player since it has a large battery and just get the Caterpillar flip phone. I think the smart phone would be a great home audio entertainment system. I can not find a logical reason to push it to the extreme.
- thfuran 4y ago
  You're still booting off HDD? That's pretty wild.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    Yup, 7200 RPM no less smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep ^Model Model Family: Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (AF) In the morning I flip the switch on my inverter, look out the front window, grab a caffeinated beverage and it's booted up. The only notable slow part is the first time I run BleachBit takes longer because I have it search for temp files and it has to build the inode cache. I suppose I could just add this to the boot sequence.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  > This Linux PC I am writing this post on is coming up on 12 years old and is more than adequate for my purposes it is very very likely wasting a ton of watts doing what a secondhand stick PC such as https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08G1CCWN5 https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08G1CCWN5 can do in less than 10 watts, so no, it is very much not adequate from a global point of view
  - 4y ago
bongoman37 4y ago
Barrin92 4y ago
Not to the extreme, but what I don't like is when you see people spending thousands on hardware and all they do is watch youtube, or rich folks who can't cook with the most expensive handcrafted set of knives or buying their kid that plays once a month a great guitar. There's just something aesthetically wrong with seeing a great tool not being utilized. On the other hand I'm not super frugal to the point where I'm on a eight year old phone to never waste a cpu cycle or something.
mk_stjames 4y ago
It would only be considered 'wasted' if energy was free. But energy is not free, and thus choosing how to use compute resources is still important. e.g. I own a few high powered workstations for fluid dynamics computations. If energy was free, I would be just running 'what-if' solves all the time just for the hell of it. But because energy isn't free, they stay in sleep unless I need them for what is deemed 'necessary' for research.
- dirheist 4y ago
  That's fair, but I have a half a dozen servers sitting in a colo with networking/energy/cooling included in the lease agreement so energy is not a concern. I usually just run game servers with the extra RAM/cpu threads for my friends. If my elasticsearch cluster is particularly unused some days and I have extra bandwidth I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed. Anything that makes the btop graph look active and lively makes me feel nice.
  - ambicapter 4y ago
    > so energy is not a concern. You're talking about paying for energy, some people are concerned about consuming energy.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed Your colo does that mind this use?
- nrp 4y ago
  For most consumer electronics devices, the energy that goes into manufacturing them vastly exceeds the total energy used during their lifetimes. In that sense (ignoring differences in emissions from different energy sources), from an environmental perspective it’s better to have fewer products running at a higher duty cycle (may not be applicable to high-performance workstations).
  - 4y ago
Havoc 4y ago
Not massively - though I am somewhat careful not to overspec things too wildly in the first place.
valar_m 4y ago
Reckless and wholly unqualified armchair psychologist here. Seems like this isn't really about wasted compute power at all and more about feeling like you aren't working on something that matters.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  As someone who this also bothers. That might be right.
  - nandhinianand 4y ago
    I'll third that...
ahelwer 4y ago
There is such a staggering quantity of electronics (or just stuff, generally) wasted that if you're putting something to literally any use at all - like your ipad clock - then you're miles better than standard. I also encourage everyone to be aggressive in putting things on the used market, or even giving it away for free (commonly in those local facebook "buy nothing" groups). For a lot of mass-produced things you can view the used market as a storage space. Sell/give it away one year, and if you need it the next year you'll probably be able to find someone else doing the same. On the flip side, avoid buying new stuff. Try to only buy used electronics, especially.
prettyStandard 4y ago
Yes! This has bothered me for a long time. Been wanting to do something about it but I doubt anyone would care.
i_am_proteus 4y ago
Think about buses and trucks. They have enormous motors that are often idling, or not running at full capacity when the vehicle isn't accelerating up inclines on the freeway. It's okay to not use full capacity all the time because demand is varied and intermittent.
barbazoo 4y ago
No, not at all.
JohnFen 4y ago
I feel the same! My friends even tease me because in my hobby microcontroller-based electronics projects, I'll put the wimpiest microcontroller that will do the job instead of just slapping an R-Pi or Arduino board in them. I defend myself on the basis on minimizing power requirements, but really, I just can't bear to see capabilities go to waste.
luluthefirst 4y ago
I feel bad and impatient when my devices struggle to keep up, so in my ideal world, I should always under utilize them. Your managers might be perfectly right to use a MBP because they get the best display for checking emails and browsing the Internet all day in a thin, solid and secure laptop. Not all computer needs are measured in a CPU benchmark!
digitalsushi 4y ago
no i really dont it doesnt make me feel bad when my boiler isnt burning diesel as fast as it can or that my car is literally not even running right now or that i am not cramming for certifications and new languages or that my siblings are not working out or at college or that my laptop is waiting for instructions from me instead of me waiting for it
mmphosis 4y ago
Yes. Why can’t I use the radio transmitter/receiver in my phone as a fully programmable HAM radio? Why can’t I very easily replace the battery with a better and standardized battery? Why can’t I compile directly to microcode? Why can’t I boot from a camera drive, and eliminate the need for ROM?
dbrueck 4y ago
Yes. A similar scenario is when I use a cheap microcontroller in some one-off project that uses only one or two GPIOs. I'll use an esp32 because I've got a bunch lying around and it's only a few bucks, but the fact that it's loaded to the hilt with unused sensors & I/Os leaves me feeling guilty for some reason.
madsbuch 4y ago
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.
- tharkun__ 4y ago
  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.
  - madsbuch 4y ago
    > 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?
    - tharkun__ 4y ago
      "As an example ..." and I absolutely did not say this is a universal truth Fair enough that you may have meant it like that. However it can also read as "an example of the M1 being nothing more than a high end office computer" is that "a test suite" (universally) runs slower. The next example might be that say "a C compiler runs slower", "a web server will run slower" etc. As I understand you now, you meant that one of your test suites ran slower. You could have made it more clear by saying exactly that: "As an example, one of our main test suites ran ..." I read it the other way as just an example of test suite, compiler, web server etc. specifically because you then went on to say that it's just a glorified office computer, where it basically doesn't matter that this happens, because it's gonna be good enough to run a browser to look at Facebook ;) Who do you think you are to write stuff like that? This has nothing to do with "who". And also nothing with you. That's between him/her and me. It has to do with the fact that trap_goes_hot completely ignored anything you or I wrote and proceeded to accuse me of criticizing you. Again "criticizing" can be taken in multiple ways: To find fault with To judge the merits and faults of; analyze and evaluate. I think he meant that I was finding fault with in a harsh way. That's not what I was doing. I was analyzing and evaluating and responding to that. I analyzed your sentences and tell you that I read it such that you were saying the test suite thing "as if this was universal truth". That is how I read it and the rest of my reply is to be taken under that premise. He then went on to reply with yet another trolling reply. I simultaneously didn't want to validate it with a reply but I really had to. I bet we could have gone on from one thing to another for another 20 replies and gotten nowhere.
Netcob 4y ago
The compute power thing is becoming a pet peeve of mine. Consuming too much power is already a big ecological issue, and here in Europe it's becoming a financial problem too. I still want my computer to perform as good as possible, be it running a game or compiling some code or transcoding videos or whatever. In that moment. But the rest of the time, it should consume as little power as possible. I've been looking into ways to upgrade, and most of the reviews focus 95% of their time/space on peak performance (basically torture tests) and peak power consumption (but more from a "what PSU/cooler do you need" perspective). Office-type work, which is 95% of what I actually use it for, is always an afterthought. Back to your original question, I do understand where you're coming from. I'd love to use an old android phone as a webcam, it's just a shame that most don't work without a battery, and having a device like that permanently in a charging state will eventually lead to it ballooning.
midjji 4y ago
My devices have always taken more of a bai lan approach, they do what I tell them and nothing else.
techsupporter 4y ago
No, because always running at maximum capacity is an indication that something has no room for failure, or for growth. I have a M2 MacBook Air with the most amount of RAM and storage that Apple would sell me. I'm sure its CPU sits at about 5% utilization almost the entire day. This was intentional on my part. I bought a laptop with enough "extra" capacity that it will be able to handle increased inefficiencies, bloat, and new features from ever-expanding software for the next several years. So by buying one "over-speced" laptop now, I avoid buying two or three of them in the future. This is how I like to buy devices, especially since some items, like the screen or keyboard or the like, are mostly fungible.
- gompertz 4y ago
  Same reason I bought my Lamborghini... For that occasional time I need to get to the store real quick. But really it is mostly driven 30mph into potholes.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  I have a 2014 macbook air that I got the best specs for at the time (8gb!). It still works great, battery life isn't great but I've had no issues in the 9 years I've had it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Just out of curiosity- which computer did you replace with the M2 Air?
  - techsupporter 4y ago
    A 2018 Mac Mini. I would have kept it longer but I really wanted to switch to the M-series/ARM platform. Going back to a portable device (I had a "cheese slicer" MacBook Air before that) was a nice-to-have that kept me from buying the M1 Mini when the M2 launched.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Plus performance on most laptops is N illusion anyway. Actually try to use it all and you’ll just thermal throttle.
dbg31415 4y ago
No. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
te_platt 4y ago
Yes, very much. Growing up I used to scramble to get whatever computer equipment I could. My parents didn't have much money but many of my friends parents did. I hated asking to borrow stuff even though people didn't seem to mind. Now when I see my extra equipment not get used I imagine some kid really wanting to just use it for a bit. Maybe just my own mental issues here but I know what you mean.
TbobbyZ 4y ago
No. Is the tool, regardless of the tool, getting the individual closer to achieving what they want? That’s all that matters. Now, there is something satisfying optimizing everything (Factorio), especially in a group setting.
zasdffaa 4y ago
Things have a purpose. You might use your oven 2% of the time, you don't turn it on and use it (or turn it on and leave it empty) 100% of the time just cos it's there. When the purpose is done, you stop.
bobleeswagger 4y ago
Wait till you meet most performance car owners. Also, the M1/M2 are more about efficiency than they are about raw performance.
dataflow 4y ago
I feel horrible that supposedly environmentally-conscious folks force perfectly good hardware to become obsolete through software (and often in the name of "security"), if that's what you mean. The whole "trade in your 1- or 2-year-old phone for a new one" thing is just absolutely insane to me. But once the hardware is acquired, your goal should be to stretch its lifetime and spend the least energy on it, not the most.
AdrianB1 4y ago
I did, in the past. The worst for me was people that bought big "adventure" BWM 1250GSA motorcycles that cost a couple of kidneys and never get offroad or on any adventure. But I learned to live and let live.
jrockway 4y ago
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 hours a day when you're not sleeping? Probably not. (Even if you use resistive heating to heat your living space, it's not necessarily a win to make a computer convert that electricity into heat and computation results. They're 100% efficient, but heat pumps are MORE than 100% efficient. So unless you really want the compute results, it's a waste of electricity.) Another angle that people always seem confused about is latency versus throughput. When you decide to look up cat pictures, your computer needs to perform billions of calculations in a very short period of time. That means that chips have to be able to do a lot of work in a short interval of time, or nobody will want them. A higher utilization could be achieved by building a machine that is less powerful, but spreads the cat picture rendering calculations out over time; if you want to see 8 cat pictures a day, and 100 compute units are required to display a cat picture, then you only need a CPU that can process 0.01 compute units per second. But, then the human is idle for 10,000 seconds in the time between wanting to see a cat picture and seeing the cat picture, which is annoying to the humans. So the chips have to be "overpowered" to be able to display cat pictures in a timeframe that is non-annoying to humans. TL;DR: don't feel sad for engraved chunks of sand.
- samus 4y ago
  > 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 industry to be competitive at the state of the art is mindblowing.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    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.
2devnull 4y ago
Power consumption is a thing to learn about.
JoeyBananas 4y ago
That's how consumer devices are intended to be used. The manufacturers don't give people what they need to troubleshoot, reconfigure or upgrade them. Most people don't know how to maintain a computer, so this makes sense. If you want to get more lifetime out of your computers, you have to get good at them. Realistically, that means switching to Linux.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  And since Linux doesn't support 386s, and will soon not support 486, you also have to get good at installing and using nonmainstream or very old versions.
_jal 4y ago
In earlier days, this used to be a fairly common attitude for sysadmins. The context then was different - systems were a lot more expensive and energy consumption wasn't considered at all. The argument was, basically, you can't save cycles. You get so many per second, whether or not you use them. And not using a machine you dropped mid-six figures for seems like a terrible business waste. Vastly cheaper machines, ecological crises, battery powered devices, and security eclipsing performance in importance changes that analysis a lot.
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ge96 4y ago
I have started contributing to fold at home when I sleep with my 3000x series GPU and i9. It's something. I use the heat for overnight winter.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  A few years ago I would sometimes play a few hours of Halo on my PowerMac G5 in the evening to heat up my room. It's an inefficient computer, but when the alternative is a resistive heater element it didn't feel so wasteful.
BoorishBears 4y ago
I get annoyed by the opposite, people buying bottom-tier crapware-laden garbage thinking they'll just check emails and browse the internet, then replacing it every few years. My mom used to do this until I gifted her my max spec Surface Pro a few years ago. She's probably saved more money on semi-disposable laptops than buying it new would have. And I guess I get annoyed that anyone would actually be advocating for that garbage hardware...
ww520 4y ago
Yes. However hardwares have progressed so fast and prices have dropped so much that waste is unavoidable.
feifan 4y ago
I do feel a warm, fuzzy sense of satisfaction when I get to light up all the cores on my workstation … but that might just be from the heat of the Xeons ;)
pcdoodle 4y ago
The amount of energy that goes into the manufacturing to point of sale, should also be considered when a newer more efficient tech comes along. I'm still using a 17" macbook pro for the 1920x1200 screen, it's still fast and I hacked mojave 10.14 onto the unit even with a bad primary GPU.
thoughtFrame 4y ago
What bothers me is that I don't know how to squeeze all of the juice out of my CPU (or any programmable device for that matter). I see instances of the Jevons effect everywhere (e.g. the use of Electron), and on the other side I see DOS-era programmers whose experience transfer really well to more modern machines, so they know how to get the best throughput on their data, how to isolate slow but necessary parts of their programs (like certain OS APIs). I feel like having started programming on a high level language affected the way I program even in lower level languages, so I don't know how to do better resource utilization, or how to do I/O efficiently. So I don't have a problem with, say, writing a script in Python even though it's not the most efficient use of my CPU, because I'm just looking to get things done. But when I have a problem that needs horsepower (and I know my 8 core 3.6 GHz can absolutely deliver that), I don't know how to tell it to do it. It doesn't help that many programmers' first thought would be to go for the cloud, when a single computer can be much faster than a bunch of AWS VMs Another example is the .kkrieger demo, which seems like wizardry when you've only seen similar things done in Unity/Unreal
- itake 4y ago
  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...
  - thoughtFrame 4y ago
    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
    - itake 4y ago
      I really liked golang's blog on pipelines: https://go.dev/blog/pipelines https://go.dev/blog/pipelines
dmitrybrant 4y ago
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 installing software that makes itself comfortable by consuming large fractions of this horsepower without any apparent need, all because the amazing hardware is able to mask the awfulness of the software.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Yeah, I feel an immense loss of "art" in modern software. Very specific example, but looking back at the sheer beauty of innovation to program the original Pokemon on a Gameboy, with it's complex compression schemes and systems to render the menus and battles. Compared to today where they release a $60 "next-gen" Pokemon game with massive performance issues and huge graphical bugs. It's just kinda sad to see software become so industrialized and commodified.
- Canada 4y ago
  > 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!!
thenerdhead 4y ago
Everything has their purpose in life. I don't think the comparison of underperforming or not performing at all to not be "serving its purpose" anymore. Not everything needs to be utilized or seen as a "waste". This is no different than the likes of like electricity, buying crap we don't need and never using it, etc.
knaik94 4y ago
I don't feel bad because I enjoy using technology myself. I realized a long time ago that the bigger waste of energy is caring about how other people use their own devices. For people my age, I can safely say that the Apple Mac vs Windows PC ads where they showed Apple being "better" is a big reason people care more than they should. After gifting technology to some family members, I realized that what matters most at the end of the day is they enjoy using technology stress free. You could get away with non M1 MacBook Pros for presentations, but if using an M1 makes you feel good then you should use it. If you're worried about e-waste, then pass down old technology. My sibling got a phone a lot younger than her peers because I love technology and when I switched to a new model, I passed it down. She didn't care about the specs, like 99% of the population she doesn't think about compute power. Compute power isn't a limited resource in the world. If someone has a need for compute power, they will probably find a way to use old technology on their own. That's not something you should feel bad or worry about. I don't.
yieldcrv 4y ago
People using older devices uses much more energy to do at rest and mundane tasks, that alone is useful for having a newer more powerful device because they are efficient in power draw too.
tinktank 4y ago
No. It's a stupid piece of silicon designed, manufactured and produced to serve a human need. Why would I care how well-utilised or idle it is?
monkeydust 4y ago
Yes for sure. I am far from a crypto bro but it's one reason why I supported Gridcoin and still do.
bravetraveler 4y ago
I used to concern myself with it, but then I realized I'm really bad at tracking time/utility For example, I've always had 'more computer' than I truly need. It hasn't turned out to be a bad thing though, because sometimes usage does surge. Maybe the situation calls for being able to build that thing really ridiculously quickly. Whatever. I think 'opportunity cost' applies, and attempts on that calculus are beyond me
kjkjadksj 4y ago
I wish I could jailbreak my old iPhones in my drawer and turn them into an arm cluster, but I’ve forgotten the passcodes, so they are just ewaste now I guess.
- chapium 4y ago
  You’d probably be better off using more efficient hardware if the goal is to reduce waste
balaji1 4y ago
I mean my old phone is built to pop at anytime. I really have no old working devices or those work frustratingly slow. My last old phone just died -- maybe it was from disuse.
jupp0r 4y ago
I feel bad about dedicated cloud compute being paid for and idling on a dedicated VM when it could be co-hosted with other payloads. I don't feel the same way about personal devices. As an extreme example, I'm happy to have a gas mask and a microcontroller powered Geiger counter in my storage room for emergency purposes and never use them ever.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
It's ironic that the most successful examples of effortless distributed computing are things like botnets and bitcoin cycle piracy. There's no reason why distributed computing couldn't be made official, but there aren't all that many personal applications which could work across a public distributed systems and tolerate long latencies and built-in unreliability. It would be nice to see a massively redundant distributed web/cloud where every device was part of a global server system - as opposed to just a global system for accessing remote servers. But aside from the security issues, it would need a whole new set of protocols for handling extremely robust fault-tolerance. That's a bit more complex than setting up a spare webcam. (I tried that with a spare iPhone once, but it ran too hot for extended use.)
jfitzpa22 4y ago
To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal. Light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.
geocrasher 4y ago
I think the better question: Does the device serve a purpose? And is it doing so in a reasonable manner? ? There's no need to have everything fully utilized all the time. My 64GB 8c/16t Ryzen build (which I haven't got yet...) will be partly utilized for work, and sometimes for play. But it'll last me at least another 5 years, which is part of its utility.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
Not really. It seems like hardware tends to get replaced more often because software gets slower rather than the hardware failing, so buying over-speced devices will last longer. I buy new gen GPUs not because I need all of the compute, but because I only want to buy a new GPU every 5 years or so.
unregistereddev 4y ago
I do not feel badly underutilizing a device, particular its computing power. I do feel badly replacing a device before the end of its useful life. Buy that fancy MacBook, high end phone, or shiny PC - buy quality. Buy longevity. Then use it as long as possible. It's better to underuse a powerful device that lasts 8 - 10 years rather than it is to buy a new low-end device every couple of years.
a_square_peg 4y ago
I think the same but about people. The wasted potential of a product is probably capped to just the price of the product so at the end of the day, it's probably not much. The wasted potential of people on the other hand, due to either socio-economic circumstance, mental health, political situation - this I do feel bad about.
Canada 4y ago
Yes. In the past I've been guilty of this... buy gear and than not use it. I stopped, I only buy it if I'm going to use it immediately. But it also now annoys me to see people under buying... people cheap out to save a few hundres bucks or a grand on something they are going to use more than most thing they own. Like yes, drop that cash and max out the storage on that laptop! Sure, it seems unnessary now, but those few extra terrabytes available in a couple years are worth so much more in time savings later than the money now. When were talking hardware you cant easily upgrade later.. which everything but PCs and servers.
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kevinfiol 4y ago
Smartphone waste is the big one that makes me feel bad. I use my Pixel 5 for the same things I used my old Moto G5, but it was either I looked for an obscure custom ROM with an up-to-date AOSP version, or risk using an outdated now-slow phone. I hope to keep my Pixel 5 as long as possible. One thing I'm trying to do is to only use stock apps or lightweight FOSS apps where possible, since most "big" commercial apps seem to get slower/more resource intensive with time cough Discord cough.
brailsafe 4y ago
Yes, that's why I'm very frugal and critical of new purchases. I have a 2019 intel mbp, and I definitely use it to its limit, and it's relatively slow compared to M1, but I don't think I'd get $4500 worth value out of a new one. People who buy new iPhones even once every 2 or 3 years kind of gross me out with that choice (lookin at you ATP). I have what I consider a phone that is nice enough for the money, and just don't consider anything beyond it to be a suitable use of money. Also don't push it to any limit, have a very standard set of minimally demanding activities I use it for. I haven't had a car in 4 years. When I had one, it was easy enough to justify the stupid gas and insurance expenses. Since then, I'll periodically do the math on the ongoing and initial cost of getting even a used one, and I can't think of what I could do with it that would justify its expense and existence in my life. A new GPU would be neat, but then I think "what game would be fun enough to warrant this purchase? what am I currently doing that would usefully push it" and the answer is nothing.
Wheatbow 4y ago
I'm not sure that we are browsing the same internet, but many sites made with React and similar do utilize an entire core, so you do need a powerful processor. It's one of the problems people are trying to solve with server-side rendering and resumability, to only execute the JavaScript on the client needed for interactivity, when it's needed. Obviously the machine is a tool, to be used for what you need it for. Just because you have a genitalia capable of making a thousand children it doesn't mean that you need a thousand children. Besides children are expensive to have, and so is electricity. Batteries don't grow on trees either.
fifanut 4y ago
My oven spends most of its time off, and when I use it, it's heats only to 70% of its potential. My hair clippers are unused 99.9% of the time. There are benefits to having the ability to opportunistically burst into 100%, and some benefits aren't easily measurable in performance terms (having an up to date secure MacBook). We can find wasted potential in various places: * the millions of people receiving poor education * people working in jobs below their potential skillset * galaxies with vast idle resources * people spending time on logistics/bureaucracy There's a world of opportunity out there for improvement.
otikik 4y ago
A lot of our most intelligent minds work on serving ads, or the financial industry. Think about that and weep.
maximus-decimus 4y ago
I'm sure software being slower than molasses wastes much more computer resources than unused outdated phones. Plus, if computing power isn't strictly necessary to achieve a task, but makes the experience smoother, is it really wasted? Nobody wants their web browser to look like a power point (which it kinda does on my pinebook pro, a $200 arm laptop). Most people could daily it, but stuff running smoother is worth something.
CrypticShift 4y ago
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.
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mindslight 4y ago
For a rough first pass, I would just look at monetary cost. I was going to dispute OP's comment. Thinking of my old Athlon server that used around $20 of electricity per month, cost about $600 new IIRC (mobo+CPU+RAM), and ran for more than a decade ($2400). But there has been a concerted effort to lower device power consumption, and my current 5700G server (two generations later) uses only around $5/mo of electricity.
t14n 4y ago
https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00188-4 https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00188-4 > We stress that this estimate carries some uncertainty but gives us a reasonable idea of the impact of ICT. Across studies, roughly 23% of ICT's [information and communication technologies] total footprint is from embodied emissions, yet the share of embodied emissions for user devices specifically is ca. 50%. This is because, unlike networks and data centers, user devices are only used for parts of the day and use less electricity, but are exchanged often, especially in the case of smartphones. "embodied emissions" being emissions generated from manufacturing. older blog discussing data from older devices and electronics: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-d...
nrp 4y ago
Sure. Two good sources are: 1. Life Cycle Assessment of Fairphone 4, showing an estimated 75% of energy use occurring during production and 16% during the lifetime of use: https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairphone-4-Life-Cycle-Assessment-22.pdf https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairpho... 2. Eco profile of a 13.5" Surface Laptop 5, showing 85% of energy use occurring during production and 12% during the lifetime of use: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=55974 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?i...
- solardev 4y ago
  What about for desktops? Servers operating at capacity? GPUs?
- fock 4y ago
  now a fairphone uses 2W during use, a dual-socket server 100W in idle (!). Assuming emissions scale with weight, I'd say for a typical server, this is very different. Still, I agree with you: design for efficiency and then mend and use efficiently.

madsbuch 4y ago
To be precise: An Elixir test suite written using ExUnit, heavily reliant on a Postgres container. The Postgres container is being emulated. I realise that this might not be due to the architecture or the M1 per se but due to the fact that we are emulating an x86 docker image. Regardless the test suite runs significantly slower, than if my computer would have been x86, which is the experience I am commenting on – a point that I also fleshed out even. However, I love browsing the web, watching movies, writing email, etc. on the computer, at which it excels. ---- I read the troll judgement as being passed towards me, if that was not the case, I apologise. Yes, internet communication can be difficult.
- tharkun__ 4y ago
  Ah yes. That's why I wrote that your suspicion on why it was slow is probably correct. We had the same thing. Emulated stuff either runs not better, way slower or even crashes and you gotta get a new image/package/compile it for the M1/M2. A database is a prime example of where any minor slowdown due to emulation can be disastrous. A database does lots of things in an optimal way to make it fast. For that it has to make assumptions (or know) how certain things behave, what properties they have. Emulation can screw with that. This is also why running your production database in a VM against virtualized storage (not even thinking docker/k8s etc. here - tho that's also bad in the same way - just plain old running that postgres in production in a VM provided by your vmware esx cluster) is not a good idea. It's just going to be abysmally slow and slow down at exactly the wrong moments even if it "usually" runs "just fine". If your tests rely on that postgres database in any significant way, I am not the least surprised that your test suite slows down like that. My advice would be to replace it with a native image or better yet, write less tests that rely on that postgres database and write the integration tests that aren't reliant on actual postgres behavior against an in-memory database like hsqldb and only have a very thin layer of tests running against an actual postgres, if you still need them at all. Fun exercise: take an ARM version of postgresql and run it under emulation on an x86 computer and see how your test suite behaves ;)
  - madsbuch 4y ago
    These are very good suggestion to make it go faster. However, it is also a distraction. My raison d'etre is not to make our infrastructure run fast on Apple's hardware, but to build our core product – again an argument to support my experience of the hardware. I actually think it is Apple's responsibility to make these things run fast. replace it with a native image This is not possible, as we work with a specific version and the test DB needs to be the same version / have the same feature as production. The other advice would be terrible for our team. It would increase the behaviour surface significantly. Now we have huge discrepancies between what runs in production on what runs in test. Alternatively: We could also just eat the 13 seconds slowdown, as we doe now or don't use Apple M1s. Both are much better approaches and much more cost efficient.
    - tharkun__ 4y ago
      I don't agree that it's a distraction. You want to build your core product. You want your productivity to be high to do that. Part of that is being able to run tests with a fast turnaround so that you can be confident in your changes. Why would it be Apple's responsibility to make x86 optimized code run at native ARM speeds? That makes no sense to me. It's Apple's responsibility to make your upgrade path to ARM hardware as painless as they can. Thus the emulation layer so that for most cases you can just migrate your Intel Mac to the M1 and keep going as before. But you'll want to slowly replace every binary you can w/ the native ARM version if you want to get the performance gains of the M1. I think it's like saying "it's a distraction to change my software take advantage of multi core CPUs. It's Intel's job to keep making single core performance faster and faster". Intel was making things faster by going from upping the clock speeds to multi core and hype threaded CPUs. If you choose to call it a distraction you'll be missing out on the performance gains other people can take advantage of because their software can take advantage of having more than one CPU available. An easy example is older computer games that basically don't run any faster today than 15 years ago because they can only use one CPU and the clock speeds are almost the same. Other games are able to run enemy AI, pathfinding, the UI rendering thread etc. on different threads and thus take advantage of the multi-core CPUs. This is not possible, as we work with a specific version and the test DB needs to be the same version / have the same feature as production. I would like to understand this better. You say it's not possible. Whenever I hear that something is not possible, I instinctively want to dig deeper. Maybe it really isn't. Or maybe there's an assumption somewhere that turns out not to be universally true or that w/ a slight modification and perhaps a divide and conquer strategy it actually is possible. So I'll start w/ the first of the "5 whys": Why is it not possible? ;) The other advice would be terrible for our team. It would increase the behaviour surface significantly. Now we have huge discrepancies between what runs in production on what runs in test. What are those huge discrepancies? What exactly are you afraid of will run differently between what runs in test and in production? Keep in mind that I don't know anything about your test suite and what specifically you're testing. Maybe in your exact scenario you're right and it would potentially be bad. In many many situations I've found it's mainly just fear of the uncertainty and in fact there's no issue. Alternatively: We could also just eat the 13 seconds slowdown, as we doe now or don't use Apple M1s. Both are much better approaches and much more cost efficient. Like I said, I don't know your specific circumstances but these things can add up. 13 seconds here, 9 seconds there etc. and suddenly your test suite doesn't take 2 minutes to run but 10. That's a significant slowdown of a developer. Even 2 minutes wait time is an eternity if you're trying to move ahead w/ something and now you have to sit there and wait. Worst case your developer decides that 2 minutes is a long enough period of time to "quickly go check HN" and 45 minutes later he emerges from the browser window to see that the test suite failed 10 seconds after he switched to reading HN ;)

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

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.

tharkun__ 4y ago
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.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  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.
  - tharkun__ 4y ago
    Not sure why you felt the need to say the same thing twice. My reply to this would be the same as above, i.e. see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844284 It seems like something that is prone to happen in text and 'on the interwebs' in particular, where we don't have intonation and don't know each other. FWIW, I wasn't being mad or anything. I just read your post in a different way than you meant it and as I explain above I think it's absolutely possible to read it that way. Everything else is just following from that and the thread you're replying in here has almost nothing to do with you any more and is just trap_goes_hot going on some tangent and me replying to the trolling more than your topic. I spontaneously laughed at the moldy cookie thing and I almost had to upvote him/her for that lol!
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  People review products for their own use case. I see the comment and I go okay - thats a one star review. You may give it a 4/5 star, so its all good then?
  - tharkun__ 4y ago
    I apologize in advance to other readers, but feeding this troll is sort of fun. I only have this one cookie left anyway. In fact, yes, that is exactly how reviews should work, if there wasn't so many fake reviews that it's not helping. People have a tendency to review and especially comment on a review, if they have an issue with something. Even a product with 3 stars could actually be a 4.5 star overall. The comments are more important than the number. Like with most 'metrics'. They can make you look but you really have to take a qualitative look after that. Take lots of Amazon reviews that are 1 star and if you read the review comment it says something along the lines of "Product came damaged in the box and Amazon support wouldn't replace it". Or 5 star reviews with text like "Arrived super fast, haven't had a chance to try it yet". The reviews are meant to be for the product not Amazon's service or shipping speed. Likewise if someone buys say a fish knife and then comments with a 1 star review of "Useless, can't make proper feather sticks or split wood at the camp site." And then I may give a 5 star w/ comment "Awesome fish knife, cut up and filleted the fish I caught beautifully. Been using it for a year now and shows no signs of wear."
    - trap_goes_hot 4y ago
      The OP used a product and it didn't perform as expected. The expectations are set by the marketing material, and conversations and comments by other fans enthusing about "awesome performance". I have no clue what you're talking about calling it a fake review and such. Your cookie was a bit moldy ;)