5 ms·

There sounds like a decent amount of insight here, but it's a little vague for me. Could you give a bit more detail, possibly a worked example?

vanjajaja1 2y ago
apple added hw instructions to m1 chips just for the obj c reference counting use case. claimed up to 15% boost. technically this is a violation of separation of concerns, but if it delivers results then it delivers results
- afiori 2y ago
  If those instruction act like a macro that is faster than the expanded instructions then it is not really a just a tradeoff. If the instruction were to have some magical one-off effect it would be a violation.
llm_trw 2y ago
Sure. Assume you're writing an OS from scratch that will be used by people, rather than by servers in a data center. Building the system to be as responsive as possible at the lowest possible latency is what you should do. Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Ignore how much more throughput you could have with a traditional OS. Users get a lot less annoyed by a job that takes 20 minutes instead of 10 than by a window which takes 3 seconds to resize. This goes against every instinct that engineers have, because you're not optimizing for the scarce resource on your layer - cpu cycles above. The way I got around that brain damage was to find what metric matters to the ultimate user and trace it back to the layers I had control over, then optimize the hell out of it.
- jordanb 2y ago
  > Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Of course then you slam into a wall when people want it to run on battery-powered devices.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    You can't be everything for everyone. I'd imagine you'd still be using less power than the average JS hot mess today though.
- xinayder 2y ago
  So, optimize for user experience rather than efficient use of resources?
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Your user might be another application whose bottle neck is much more expensive than your own bottle neck.
  - afiori 2y ago
    More like optimize towards the quality of the whole product rather than just the quality of your isolated component
- AndrewOMartin 2y ago
  Thanks, this comment, and comment 40986327 from afiori cracked it for me.

vanjajaja1 2y ago

apple added hw instructions to m1 chips just for the obj c reference counting use case. claimed up to 15% boost. technically this is a violation of separation of concerns, but if it delivers results then it delivers results

afiori 2y ago
If those instruction act like a macro that is faster than the expanded instructions then it is not really a just a tradeoff. If the instruction were to have some magical one-off effect it would be a violation.

llm_trw 2y ago

Sure. Assume you're writing an OS from scratch that will be used by people, rather than by servers in a data center. Building the system to be as responsive as possible at the lowest possible latency is what you should do. Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Ignore how much more throughput you could have with a traditional OS. Users get a lot less annoyed by a job that takes 20 minutes instead of 10 than by a window which takes 3 seconds to resize. This goes against every instinct that engineers have, because you're not optimizing for the scarce resource on your layer - cpu cycles above. The way I got around that brain damage was to find what metric matters to the ultimate user and trace it back to the layers I had control over, then optimize the hell out of it.

jordanb 2y ago
> Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Of course then you slam into a wall when people want it to run on battery-powered devices.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  You can't be everything for everyone. I'd imagine you'd still be using less power than the average JS hot mess today though.
xinayder 2y ago
So, optimize for user experience rather than efficient use of resources?
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Your user might be another application whose bottle neck is much more expensive than your own bottle neck.
- afiori 2y ago
  More like optimize towards the quality of the whole product rather than just the quality of your isolated component
AndrewOMartin 2y ago
Thanks, this comment, and comment 40986327 from afiori cracked it for me.