> As far as I know, it is impossible to use the BTS without getting spammed, because the only way to interact with it is via email, and every interaction with the BTS is published without redaction on the web. So, if you ever hope to receive updates, or want to monitor a bug, you are also going to get spam.
Do the emails from the BTS come from a consistent source? If so, it's not a good solution, but you could sign up with a unique alias that blackholes anything that isn't from the BTS.
> - The ability to overclock the system? I know it probably will never happen, but my expectation of Mac Studio is not the same as a laptop, and I'm TOTALLY okay with it consuming +600W energy. Currently it's capped at ~250W.
I don't think the Mac Studio has a thermal design capable of dissipating 650W of heat for anything other than bursty workloads. Need to look at the Mac Pro design for that.
The thermal design is irrelevant, and people saying they want insane power density are, in my personal view, deluded ridiculous individuals who understand very very little.
Overclocking long ago was an amazing saintly act, milking a lot of extra performance that was just there waiting, without major downsides to take. But these days, chips are usually already well tuned. You can feed double or tripple the power into the chip with adequate cooling, but the gain is so unremarkable. +10% +15% +20% is almost never going to be a make or break difference for your work, and doing so at double or triple the power budget is an egregious waste.
So many of the chips about are already delivered at way higher than optimum efficiency, largely for bragging rights. The exponential decay of efficiency you keep pushing for is an anti-quest, is against good. The absolute performance wins are ridiculous to seek. In almost all cases.
If your problem will not scale and dumping a ton of power into one GPU or one cpu socket is all you got, fine, your problem is bad and you have to deal with that. But for 90% of people, begging for more power proces you don't actually know jack & my personal recommendation is that all such points of view deserve massive down voting by anyone with half a brain.
Go back to 2018 and look at Matthew Dillon on DragobflyBSD underpowering the heck out of their 2990wx ThreadRipper. Efficiency just soars as you tell the chip to take less power. The situation has not improved! Efficiency skyrockets today at least as much as it did then by telling chips not to go all out. Good chips behave & reward. I believe Apple competent enough to thoroughly disabuse this position that this chip would be far better if we could dump 2x 3x more power into it. Just a fools position, beyond a joke, imo. https://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/threadripper.txt
It's been funny to see people move from overclocking to underclocking. Especially for the older AMD gpus. On the RX480 a slight underclock would cut the power usage almost in half!
> Overclocking long ago was an amazing saintly act, milking a lot of extra performance that was just there waiting, without major downsides to take.
Back when you bought a 233 Mhz chip with ram at 66 Mhz, ran the bus at 100 Mhz which also increased your ram speed if it could handle it, and everything was faster.
> But these days, chips are usually already well tuned. You can feed double or tripple the power into the chip with adequate cooling, but the gain is so unremarkable. +10% +15% +20% is almost never going to be a make or break difference for your work
20% in synthetic benchmarks maybe, or very particular loads. Because you only overclock the CPU these days so anything hitting the ram won't even go to 20%.
Initially, thermal throttling was a safety valve for a failure condition. A way to cripple performance briefly so as not to let the magic blue smoke out. Only a terrible PC would be thermal throttling out of the box; Only neglectful owners who failed to clean filters, had thermal throttling happening routinely.
That's not how it works any more.
Many of these CPUs both at the high end and even a few tiers down from the top, are thermal throttling whenever they hit 100% utilization. I'm thinking of Intel's last couple generations particularly. They're shipped with pretty good heatsinks, but not nearly good enough to run stock clocks on all cores at once. Instead, smarter grades of thermal throttling are designed for for routine use to balance loads. Better heatsinks (and watercooling) help a bit, but not enough, you end up hitting a wall; Only the risky process of delidding seems to push further. We're running into limitations on how well a conventional heatsink can transfer the heat from a limited contact patch.
GPUs seem to have more effective heatsinks, and are bottlenecked mostly by power requirements. The 600 watt monsters are already melting cables that aren't in perfect condition.
I was actually looking for benchmarks earlier this week along those lines - ideally covering the whole slate of Arrow Lake processors running at various TDPs. Not much available on the web though.
I learned a lot about underclocking, undervolting, and computational power efficiency during my brief time in the ethereum mining[1] shenanigans. The best ROI was with the most-numerous stable computations at the lowest energy expense.
I'd tweak individual GPUs' various clocks and volts to optimize this. I'd even go so far as to tweak fan speed ramps on the cards themselves (those fans don't power themselves! There's whole Watts to save there!).
I worked to optimize the efficiency of even the power from the wall.
But that was a system that ran, balls-out, 24/7/365.
Or at least it ran that way until it got warmer outside, and warmer inside, and I started to think about ways to scale mining eth in the basement vs. cooling the living space of the house to optimize returns. (And I never quite got that sorted before they pulled the rug on mining.)
And that story is about power efficiency, but: Power efficiency isn't always the most-sensible goal. Sometimes, maximum performance is a better goal. We aren't always mining Ethereum.
Jeff's (quite lovely) video and associated article is a story about just one man using a stack of consumer-oriented-ish hardware in amusing -- to him -- ways, with local LLM bots.
That stack of gear is a personal computer. (A mighty-expensive one on any inflation-adjusted timeline, but what was constructed was definitely used as a personal computer.)
Like most of our personal computers (almost certainly including the one you're reading this on), it doesn't need to be optimized for a 24/7 100% workload. It spends a huge portion of its time waiting for the next human input. And unlike mining Eth in the winter in Ohio: Its compute cycles are bursty, not constant, and are ultimately limited by the input of one human.
So sure: I, like Jeff, would also like to see how it would work when running with the balls[2] running further out. For as long as he gets to keep it, the whole rig is going to spend most of its time either idling or off, anyway. So it might as well get some work done when a human is in front of it, even if each token costs more in that configuration than it does OOTB.
It theoretically can even clock up when being actively-used (and suck all the power), and clock back down when idle (and resume being all sleepy and stuff).
That's a well-established concept that [eg] Intel has variously called SpeedStep and/or Turbo Boost -- and those things work for bursty workloads, and have worked in that way for a very long time now.
[1]: Y'all can hate me for being a small part of that problem. It's allowed.
I did Crypto Mining as an alternative to heating. In my centrally cool apartment my office was the den which had the air return. So my mining rig ran RIGHT in front of that, it sucked the heat out and pushed it all over the house. Then summer came, and in Texas the AC can barely keep up to begin with. So then my GPUs became part of a render farm instead.
My office-room was heated mostly by resistance, plus whatever gas-fired heat trickled in through the doorway.
I didn't have as much power available there as I had in the basement, but I had enough to mine a bit of crypto to supplement the resistance heater. :)
From one perspective: It was never directly profitable to do this. Other than eth, nothing has ever been profitable-enough for me to care about.
From another perspective: I was going to burn the energy anyway. The Joules cost the same and add the same amount of warmth either way, so I might as well get them with a side dish of free crypto.
Good times.
(These days, I transcode videos with Tdarr during the winter.)
>> people saying they want insane power density are, in my personal view, deluded ridiculous individuals who understand very very little.
Or they are simply not-rich people who cannot afford to purchase extra hardware to run in parallel. Electricity is cheap. GPUs are not. So i want to get every ounce of power out of the precious few GPUs i can afford to own.
(And dont point at clouds. Running AI on someone else's cloud is like telling a shadetree mechanic to rent a car instead of fixing his owm.)
this is all 100% true and yet the 12 year-old boy inside me still smiles smugly at how fucking cool my dual reservoir water-cooled setup is, and how there was a brief moment in time a couple years ago where i had arguably one of the fastest (consumer) setups in the entire world... was any part of that labor or money "worth" it? no, absolutely not. was the $1k power bill i had to pay PG&E one month worth it? even less so. but do i have any regrets? absolutely not! :)
anyone even remotely on the fence about whether or not they should bother with all this stuff, just read OP or read this tl;dr: the answer is no, it is not.
Which should be made illegal on a national/international level.
The only possible reason for that is sheer laziness or malicious ignorance. Full stop, end of story
And I also include eMailed login links and eMailed 2FA in with that determination. Any secure login attribute that gets transmitted over eMail or SMS should be illegal. Password reset links, only. And vendor-locked/vendor-specific apps as the only 2FA path should also be illegal. TOTP should be a fully open system, letting anyone use any legitimate provider or app.
Yeah, let’s just say I have some pretty strong opinions.
> but literally every site with passwords can do that by default, it just needs a general admin UI which almost always exists.
Most sites/systems that are designed for security won't have such an admin UI - passwords should generally not be handled in a way where anybody other than the user is ever able to know what they are.
"I can erase a securely hashed password and set a new one" is very common and generally seen as safe, and does not at all require being able to "know what [the current password is]".
You can store passkeys in a password manager where they're either in a full-time shared config or there's some configuration that allows access if something happens. (e.g. Emergency Kit for 1Password, legacy contact for Apple account, etc.)
RAV4 and other Toyotas have insanely good residuals that make up for any upfront price difference, and you don’t look like a cop all the time when you drive around town.
The Explorer is incredibly dated at 5 years since the last refresh with the RAV4 getting a refresh/redesign this year. Every reviewer I’ve seen knocks the Explorer for lack of interior refinement.
No need for a CVT when you can get a Mazda CX-90 with a real transmission. But I’d also take a Grand Highlander over an Explorer any day.
Predicted reliability of Ford vehicles is a joke compared to Toyota. You’d actually get a more reliable car with a BMW, it’s embarrassing. If you don’t believe me pay attention and count how many 1st generation Ford Fusions are on the road versus second generation Toyota Priuses. The Prius is bulletproof. The Fords are in junkyards.
edit: Oh, crap, I mixed up the Explorer/Escape because the Escape is the Rav4/CRV competitor. I think the Escape is underrated. Not particularly familiar with the Explorer.
eCVT and CVT aren't mechanically similar. Personally, I'd only consider cars with manual/eCVT/EV transmissions.
> RAV4 and other Toyotas have insanely good residuals that make up for any upfront price difference
Yeah, that's a consideration if you frequently flip your cars, I kinda forget about that because me and most of the people I know keep their cars long-term. e.g. I just got rid of a 2011 Fiesta - there isn't enough residual value maintenance savings in a 2011 Yaris for me to have ever come out ahead with one of those.
Unfortunately by correcting your misremembering, I’m even less convinced. The Escape is even further down the ladder in its crowded and competitive class of vehicle.
The Escape isn’t underrated it’s just rated properly.
There’s like 6 or so cars that rank above it for various reasons: CRV, RAV4, Sportage, CX-5/CX-50, Forester.
Even Mitsubishi put out a better vehicle than Ford with the Outlander if we go by Car and Driver’s scores.
I’m sure you can get one with some sick discounts but Ford also has company there with Nissan, Mitsubishi, Chevrolet, and I’ve even heard Mazda runs strong discounts depending on the dealer.
The CRV/Rav4/CX-50/Forester are all nice too, but local CAD website listed prices for the base hybrid trims are respectively $49k/$40k (with an 8 month wait time, or $56k for the plug-in)/$46k (but unavailable due to tariffs and being built in the US)/$51k (but effectively unobtainable).
Meanwhile I can go buy a plug-in hybrid Escape tomorrow with effectively the same 2.5L/eCVT powertrain as Toyota/Subaru for $44k. (Assuming no discounts and that I’m in a province with no PHEV rebates.) So yeah, you might like a CRV better for an extra $5k, or you might have 8 months to wait for a Rav4 and not care about the plug-in, but the field of available options at the price isn’t that crowded.
I was going to make a similar point - the math changes quite a bit if you're a multi-car household - in that case it absolutely makes sense to have at least one vehicle that's a short-range EV.
My household is a newer hybrid Ford Maverick and an older ICE Impreza (that gets worse fuel economy than the Maverick) - if we were replacing the Impreza today we'd probably go for a 2026 Leaf or a used Chevy Bolt.
I had a 2004 WRC that we replaced with the IONIQ 6. The Hyundai is a great upgrade, and let us keep AWD. We could get by with less range on that car, but for now we just take the truck if we are going more than 100 miles one way.
> Sure, maintenance is a thing, but honestly, flinging java, docker and a few other things onto a build agent isn't the time-consuming part of maintaining CI infrastructure.
Depending on your workplace, there's a whole extra layer of bureaucracy and compliance involved if you self-host things. I aggressively avoid managing any VMs for that reason alone.
Luckily, at work we are this layer of bureaucracy and compliance. I'm very much pushing the agenda and idea that managing a stateful, mutable linux VM is a complex skill on it's own and incurs toil that's both recurring and hard to automate. The best case to handle that is to place your use case into our config management and let us manage it.
Most modern development workflows should just pickup a host with some container engine and do their work in stateless containers with some external state mapped in, like package caches. It's much easier for both sides in a majority of cases.
Do the emails from the BTS come from a consistent source? If so, it's not a good solution, but you could sign up with a unique alias that blackholes anything that isn't from the BTS.
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