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Comment by thesz | Hacker News Reader

I cannot help but refer to this old, old joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights#Etymology

(I used to discern between program stages on 286/386 because sound of power supply was different for different loops)

Well it's true today as well. I know immediately that something's gone wrong if I'm training an ML model and the GPU fan spools down.

Just as electric vehicles can have skeuomorphic “engine” sounds for safety [1] or aesthetics [2], I’d love to see a service that emits “fan” noise to track CPU usage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sound...

[2]: https://electrek.co/2018/03/07/jaguar-i-pace-artificial-moto...

I used to have something like that with an old machine with poor, spluttering cooling. You could really tell every time something processor intensive was running.

It was actually quite useful at times. For example, if some webpage was constantly running some heavy javascript, the fans would soon alert me that something was up.

I have my motherboard set to run the CPU radiator fans a low-moderate speed at ~50 degrees C and below, but ramp up rapidly approaching 55+, with no hysteresis or gradual ease-in. I can absolutely gauge CPU usage on a second-by-second basis by fan noise. Any transient spikes cause an easily perceptible (but not overwhelming) wooshing.

Funny, I once realized my computer was infected with a virus because of the change in sound the HDD would make when launching Windows Commander.

I had AV software running but the virus was new and undetected.

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