Hotels in Dallas for at least 15 years have disuaded people from walking even a few blocks downtown because they equate all the homelessness with crime.
I found this funny because by far the biggest danger I have seen there are endless electric scooters littering the sidewalks.
The blog post is about using an NVIDIA-specific tensor core API that they have built to get good performance.
Modular has been pushing the notion that they are building technology that allows writing HW-vendor neutral solutions so that users can break free of NVIDIA's hold on high performance kernels.
From their own writing:
> We want a unified, programmable system (one small binary!) that can scale across architectures from multiple vendors—while providing industry-leading performance on the most widely used GPUs (and CPUs).
TLDR: In order to get good performance you need to use vendor-specific extensions that result in the same lock-in Modular has been claiming they will enable you to avoid.
The market tends to be pretty efficient for things like these. We’ve seen significant rapid adoption of several different ML solutions over the last decade, yet Mojo languishes. I think that’s a clear sign they aren’t solving the real-world pain points that users are hitting, and are building a rather niche solution that only appeals to a small number of people, no matter how good their execution may be.
Love this paper and read it several times, most recently around 10 years ago when thinking about whether there were looping constructs missing from popular programming languages.
I have made the same point several times online and in person that the famous quote is misunderstood and often suggest people take the time to go back to the source and read it since it’s a wonderful read.
Having had an incentive spirometer prescribed for post-surgical use after being on bypass, my experience was that it seemed boring and like a waste of time, so anything that makes breathing exercises more engaging and feel more worthwhile is a win.
My dad grew up in 1930’s Detroit and would tell us about how when he was five his mother would give him a little money and have him walk a few blocks to the baker to get a loaf of bread.
I grew up in the 70’s where after maybe eight we had pretty much free rein. I rode my bike several blocks away and crossed two busy four lane roads to get candy at 7-11.
The world is no more dangerous now than it was then, and yet here we are, with parents being treated like criminals for letting their kids play in their own front yard.
With that in mind, the article is correct that the vast majority of issues people think might be a compiler bug are in fact user errors and misunderstanding.
My experience actually working with users has been somewhat humorous in the past, including multiple instances of people completely freaking out when they report something that turns out to be a miscompile. I’ve seen people completely freaking out, to the point that they no longer felt that any code could be trusted since it could have been miscompiled in some way.
> But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.
I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.
What they found:
- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.
- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.
- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.
I’m honestly a bit surprised if that’s the first time you’ve seen something like that.
I’ve been working on compilers 30 years, primarily on optimizers (although some frontend work as well). Learned C from Borland C and C++ from…Zortech C++ 1.0, so thank you for that!
Within a few years of working on compilers I came across my first examples of 50k+ line functions. These were often (but not always) the result of source code generators that were translating some kind of problem description to code. It taught me very early on that you really need to focus on scalability and compile time in compilers, whether it’s the amount of code within a function, or across functions (for IPO / LTO).
And yes, working on compilers is never dull. 25 years ago I thought we’d end up in a monolithic world with x86, C++, and Java being the focus of all work. Instead, there’s been an absolute explosion of programming models, languages, and architectures, as well as entirely new problem spaces like graph compilers for ML.
I found this funny because by far the biggest danger I have seen there are endless electric scooters littering the sidewalks.