Just wanted to say you’re a great employer to be so incredibly accommodating to the point you get them an Alienware and let them roll an accessibility solution
I think generally the consensus of Apple Silicon is that they're great _for a laptop_, but still aren't going to beat a dedicated graphics card + high-end CPU like i9/Ryzen 9. Biggest thing going for apple is the performance/watt though which is critical for a laptop.
I think this is missing the main reason to use Apple Silicon, which is that your dedicated graphics card probably has 24GB or less of RAM, whereas e.g. an M2 Ultra Mac Studio can have 192GB of RAM with a far superior memory bandwidth to anything on x86. This is important because even a "small" LLM like Llama2 13B would require quantization to fit in the 24GB RAM that the dedicated graphics card will give you, whereas the Mac could run Llama2 70B without quantization (at FP16).
They're better than most consumers x86 CPUs but worse than using a GPU. Where they shine is when the ML model can't fit the GPU's VRAM since you have better options for ram size with macs.
>Just wanted to say you’re a great employer to be so incredibly accommodating to the point you get them an Alienware
So gracious, to give a software developer some hardware to run the software they need to work, that costs a whopping nothing more than what other people in the industry get on the average.
>and let them roll an accessibility solution
"You're such a good employer! You let your employee build their own accessibility ramp to the back entrance in their own time, and even got them a mortar spatula to do so!"
We need more support for employees like this!
I didn't downvote, but I considered doing so because nowhere that I saw in GP does it say in his own time, and that's a critical piece of the equation. Hallucinating that datum means they got the argument wrong, and worse they were harshly critical of the company based on that wrongly assumed information.
It reminds me of the Homer Simpson quote, "I don’t mind being called a liar when I’m lying, or about to lie, or just finished lying, but NOT WHEN I’M TELLING THE TRUTH!" I would be equally critical if it was warranted, but when it isn't it's deeply unfair to the accused.
If the person wanted to build their own ramp, and the employer let them do it on the clock, that's a completely different scenario than the employee having to come in during their off-hours to build the ramp just so they can go to work.
Yeah, it wasn’t on his own time. He had a full budget and this was right in line with stuff he had already done research in anyway, so he just went for it.
> He had a full budget and this was right in line with stuff he had already done research in anyway, so he just went for it.
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So you're saying, not only you didn't pay him extra, but that the company got to benefit from him building the system as it was already in line with your other projects?
Unless his working hours were reduced, he did it in his own time.
Unless his pay was increased, he did it in his own time.
Unless the expectations for him were scaled down, he did it in his own time.
Merely allowing them to hack on a project that is in line of his work is exactly like having someone build their own ramp because "it's already in line with other construction they did on the project".
>nowhere that I saw in GP does it say in his own time
Nowhere did I see that GP said the employee was paid extra, had the expectations on other projects reduced in writing and deadlines shifted, or had his working hours reduced at same pay.
Saying "oh hey, you can work on this during 9-to-5 as long as you get your other shit done on time" means the project was done in his own time.
>Not sure why you're being downvoted. Literally the equivalent of building your own ramp.
Because we are on Hackernews, where everyone likes to think themselves a scrappy startup owner, and not a person with a disability who might need accommodations from one.
Also, what about Apple’s latest M3 series chips? Are this in the same realm as Alienware in terms of AI compute?