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points by pixelpoet 4 days ago | 0 comments

I have been saying this for years, and the answer hits a nerve that gets you downvoted into oblivion: people prefer the aesthetics of laptops, simple as that. They will absolutely go to the grave arguing that they need the mobility etc, then just leave it plugged in. They simply prefer how laptops look, and they absolutely hate it when someone dares say it.

[–] monegator 4 days ago

I have a laptop for work. 95% of the time i'd prefer a tower or at least a mini PC with proper cooling, but that remaining 5% i have to be around with the laptop is enough. I don't like the idea of having to remember to sync the projects every time (especially while i'm in the middle of testing something new so it's not like i can just pull the latest commit or sync the latest good version of something)

[–] dumberquestions 4 days ago

If you do any travel whatsoever a laptop is usually not optional.

[–] DaSHacka 3 days ago

A laptop that is so beefy it can even run GLM 5.3 locally (while sounding like a jet engine, being as bulky as an old-school travelling briefcase, and having a 1.5 hour battery life) though?

GGP's point is just: keep the bulk of your compute at home, where airflow and energy is cheaper (in an opportunity-cost sense). Keep the laptop portable, cool, and light, with long battery life by offloading your own computing tasks to your own hardware.

[–] barrkel 4 days ago

To be absolutely crystal clear:

I am not saying don't use a laptop.

I am not saying you have to use cloud inference.

I am saying using a laptop for inference is dumb. If you want private inference:

- use a dgx spark or similar plugged in at home

- set up tailscale so you can connect from anywhere

- use your phone as a hotspot on the go

- work on your laptop, using tailscale to connect to your home inference server if you're on the go

This gets you everything except for the few hours you might be on an airplane.

[–] pixelpoet 3 days ago

100% agreed, and people saying they need a laptop are missing the point; I wasn't saying don't use laptops, either.

The simple point I'm always trying to make is that area vs volume is a fundamental physical difference regarding cooling, which is critical for high performance applications (that's why they're considering an RTX Spark in the first place, right?).

There's so much more I could say about my Strix Halo machine, which fits in the palm of my hand and I have a wonderful portable screen and keyboard+touchpad (and only cost me 2k with 128 GB fast memory, idles at 4w, amazing 32 thread Zen 5 CPU with AVX-512, ...), but it's either preaching to the choir or pissing against the wind.