Comment by nicoco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoco | Hacker News Reader

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Let me jump on this opportunity to give a little unpopular opinion on the M1 MBP, after 1 year of using one (being completely new to apple), since most (all?) of the comments I have seen here are dithyrambic.

Granted, the hardware is great. Silence, good perf, no heating, amazing battery life. I love this.

The software part has not been that smooth for me:

- I use the python scientific stack, and it's not there yet. This will probably improve in the future, but for now, I'm stuck using rosetta stone and well the perf is not as good as it should be.

- I thought the stability of Mac OS X would amaze me. It did not. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely OK and I did not lose any work. But I have had to 'hard poweroff' the thing quite a few times.

- As a long time debian user, and for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion. Homebrew helps, yes, but feels so 'second-class' compared to [your favorite distro] package manager.

> dithyrambic

I pride myself on knowing words, and I did not know this word. Thanks!

According to Merriam-Webster: a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein

Great word and apparently an old one:

Webster's 1913 Dictionary:

• Dith`yram"bic (?), a. [L. dithyrambicus, Gr. ?: cf. F. dithyrambique.] Pertaining to, or resembling, a dithyramb; wild and boisterous. "Dithyrambic sallies." Longfellow. -- n. A dithyrambic poem; a dithyramb.

• Dith"yramb (?), n. [L. dithyrambus, Gr. ? a kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus; also, a name of Bacchus; of unknown origin: cf. F. dithyrambe.] A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain. Bentley.

> I use the python scientific stack

> for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion

I'm in a similar scenario (genomics, not ML). I pretty much gave up on using any local machine for this work and use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work. It just isn't worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments setup and in sync for work like this. I still use the Mac for other things like email, writing, generating figures, etc... but there are far faster machines for more difficult number crunching.

One of the exceptions here would be something more interactive like video or image editing (which is a workflow the Mac is really well designed for).

>use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work

In my case, the primary computer is the linux desktop machine and I use the macbook to remotely connect to it when I am not home. Feels a bit weird to use a $2500 laptop as a dumb terminal, but I guess that's the world we live in (and which I am part of).

>worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments

In my experience, debian stable + poetry + the occasional container have been great so far. De gustibus...

Similarly, I'm kinda looking at a Macbook Air and running Jetbrains Gateway to a big fileserver, as well as pushing a bunch of personal stuff off to my NAS as well. Remote desktop into a VM for casual browsing and doing my taxes and so on.

I could get old RDIMM/LRDIMM sticks (it's not widely known but some X99 boards support it) and a 1660v3 and be up and running with 8 cores at ~4 GHz for basically the cost of RAM, and that would probably be sufficient for my needs. And using RDIMM/LRDIMM would set up a migration path forward to Epyc eventually - Epyc is still Ryzen and still likes fast RAM, but those faster sticks are 3-4x the price per GB, so getting something running now with an upgrade path forward would be fine.

> rosetta stone

I'm confused, are you doing scientific Python or learning a language?

You got me, rosetta, not rosetta stone.

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