Make it clear it's an estimate, or maybe even abstract away the time units so that there is no expectation of any particular time. -- Vagrant My theory is designed with tolerance of <5 min with max tolerance of =10 min with methods that I am confident will get us within <30 sec assuming sufficient amount of data to construct the variables. -- Jacob "Kreyren" Hrbek Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Wednesday, November 24th, 2021 at 8:23 PM, Vagrant Cascadian wrote: > On 2021-11-24, zimoun wrote: > > > On Tue, 23 Nov 2021 at 18:50, Julien Lepiller julien@lepiller.eu wrote: > > > > > Do we even care that much about accuracy? I don't really care that the > > > > > > build takes 30 or 31 seconds, or even 1 minute, but I certainly care > > > > > > whether it takes 30s or 3h. I think this is also what SBUs give you: a > > > > > > rough estimate of which build is longer than the other. I think a > > > > > > simple proportionality relation would work well enough in most common > > > > > > cases. It might be quite off on a super computer, but who cares, > > > > > > really? > > > > What if it takes 3h and the prediction says 2h? > > Those sound about "the same" for any kind of reasonable expectation... > > I would guess you only want the correct order of magnitude... hours, > > minutes, days, weeks, months, years... or maybe quick, fast, slow, > > painful. > > I do this soft of fuzzy estimation all the time when working on > > Reproducible Builds in Debian; look at the past test history to get a > > rough estimate of how long I might expect a build to take. This helps > > me decide if I should start a build and get a $COFFEE, do some > > $SWORDFIGHTING on the $OFFICECHAIRS, or sit and watch the progress bar > > so I don't loose the mental state working on the problem becuase it will > > be done $SOON. > > Make it clear it's an estimate, or maybe even abstract away the time > > units so that there is no expectation of any particular time. > > I know there are people who would love to get a a value that was > > consistently right but to be useful it only needs an estimate to be > > mostly not completely wrong. At least to me. :) > > live well, > > vagrant