bertr4nd

8 ms·

1.
by bertr4nd 3y ago
I’ve never really thought of my procrastination as coming from perfectionism as applied to the work I’m producing, but on reflection, I realized it often comes from self-disappointment (which is perhaps a form of perfectionism). Eg, I proc
2.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Shortly after joining the PyTorch compiler team, I was part of a team that decided that we should build our own tensor-expression compiler for PyTorch (called NNC, although it wasn’t well-publicized) instead of using an existing one like Ha
3.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
By “fully fused” do you mean no function call boundaries? (“Fused” is such an overloaded term)
4.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Are you me? This is precisely what my life feels like. Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels bas
5.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Honestly I’ve been longing for a linear workday. Before kids, and before the pandemic, I used to work 9-6 and I had the most fantastic work life balance. Distance running, rock climbing, etc. Now I have “flexible” work hours, and it’s all
6.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
So I’m one of those people who doesn’t know how to fix anything; I wish I did! I’ll tell you what holds me back: I didn’t grow up around anyone particularly handy, so I don’t know what I don’t know. Simple example: I was trying to hang som
7.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
For what it’s worth, I’m not saying that confidence (even hubris!) is bad! Without his confidence, said senior engineer probably wouldn’t have built his successful project. If I had any literary skill, I’d write a tragedy in which the hero
8.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
I was struck by this bit in the passage about hubris: “The STEM student is taught that hubris is a useful vocational skill.” I recently asked a successful senior engineer how he was able to start an influential project, and the answer came
9.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Re: maps. Eh. Some people tend to romanticize the pre-GPS era with stories of serendipitous adventures, but that doesn’t match my experience at all. My recollection is that wandering around lost was time-wasting, frustrating, and sometimes
10.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
> I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato ... about as much as garlic bread See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself: If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happ
11.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Totally hear you. We just added kids 3 & 4 in the fall (twins! Yay!) and so far I’m on paternity leave and just managing a bit of a workout (push-ups, squats, etc) but I have this feeling it’s going to be really hard to balance almost
12.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Seems appropriate to quote Bertrand Russell here: “Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexand
13.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Ah, I overlooked this explanation at first: https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md Thanks for the great write up as well as mold itself!
14.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Could you comment on which data structures are most critical to mold’s performance, and what makes them so fast?
15.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
I also found this disappointing. There’s supposedly a 100x speed up to be had going from something in pandas to something using plain python lists but I have no real idea what it is or why it might have produced a speed up. I can guess, b
16.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
But what’s the back pressure to this advice? If I need to multiply matrices should I write my own to avoid including MKL BLAS? What’s the heuristic that determines when a dependency is worthwhile?
17.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
I’ve always considered taking a lecturer position as a sort of second career if I ever want something different from Big Tech. It’s kind of a shame the health insurance offering is mediocre, which probably rules this out, at Berkeley at le
18.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
My pet peeve is `XXX:`, which I see with distressing regularity in the codebase I work in. It’s non-specific, but vaguely ominous. Is it a TODO? A warning? A bug? An incantation to ward off evil spirits? Tell me!
19.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
I love Daniel’s vectorized string processing posts. There’s always some clever trickery that’s hard for a guy like me (who mostly uses vector extensions for ML kernels) to get quickly. I found myself wondering if one could create a domain-
20.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
I was thinking this would be cool as a tree map ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping ) since that allows for nicely visualizing hierarchical categories.
21.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Thanks!
22.
by bertr4nd 4y ago
Are there libraries/tools that people use to do Remez/Chebyshev/etc. function expansions? I can do a basic Taylor series expansion by hand but I’m out of my depth with more sophisticated techniques.
23.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
> how much better it is when you have actual control over which parts of your program are JITed Can you elaborate? What’s the advantage of controlling which parts are jitted?
24.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
Possibly the concern with sharing answers is that students could memorize the form of likely exam questions without deeply understanding the material? But that risk exists simply by sharing the questions so I’m not sure I find that argumen
25.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
As someone with small children, I found myself wondering whether the parents of these Brooklyn writers have actually done their children a service or disservice by funding a financially impossible career. While there is something to be said
26.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
This isn’t exactly the same as a deathbed experience, but about two years ago I had a devastating lumbar disc hernia that landed me in the ER with such pain that I couldn’t stand, or even roll over. I remember thinking that my biggest regre
27.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
I had a related experience with an MVP gone awry. We were building a product that had an entrenched competitor (let’s set aside whether that was a good idea in itself). We decided to build the core technology and go after some very easy wi
28.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
I have not, but I will certainly consider doing so!
29.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
I’m extremely sympathetic to this viewpoint. I spent the last couple years building a JIT compiler for PyTorch, and a constant battle was that people want to write “normal” idiomatic Python, but those idioms work to defeat optimizations, u
30.
by bertr4nd 5y ago
This makes a huge amount of sense. I hadn’t considered how high level managers really can’t afford to project their stress publicly (bad for morale!) so I’m probably seeing an extremely airbrushed picture of their lives.

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