oddity

9 ms·

1.
by oddity 2y ago
It's a fun observation, but the causality in this feels off. There are tons of esoteric programming languages that are difficult to write in and no one talks about because they have no other value. BF is not very useful for writing thi
2.
by oddity 3y ago
I think, maybe, the stronger argument is that the area of Generative Programming (which covers just about anything that generates another program) itself is too broad to properly address in a semester course. This course is particularly foc
3.
by oddity 4y ago
There are different forms of argumentation and they have a different tone that maybe doesn't come through so well on the internet without context. I dislike the debate club mentality where arguments are more like a spectator sport tha
4.
by oddity 4y ago
You're not wrong. You can think of internet arguments as a method of developing a thought and collecting counterarguments in a real environment to refine it. The choice of forum affects the quality of the counterargument though, and
5.
by oddity 4y ago
I was fortunate to learn this from pointless internet flamewars early in my life. Understand why you're in an argument and what you hope to accomplish by being in an argument. On the internet, it is usually very clear that you will a
6.
by oddity 4y ago
Parallelization and GPUs were the hot story 10-5 years ago, and require(d) a pretty substantial shift in the software stack for less-general gains. You're still hoping the cost-per-transistor goes down. I think recent 400W+ GPUs have
7.
by oddity 4y ago
I want to believe that there's some world where developers start putting actual craftsmanship into their software (again?), but I think this will only be true for SaaS or related environments where the developer is also the one spendin
8.
by oddity 4y ago
I don't usually respond to old comments, so I don't know if you'll read this, but I hope I can encourage you to think more broadly about what "differentiable programming" means. Different fields have a different per
9.
by oddity 4y ago
There's no contradiction: autodiff is a method of implementing differentiable programming. In this example, it is implemented as a type that handles a trace of a program, but everything else is left to the programmer. This is a probl
10.
by oddity 4y ago
This "discretizes then differentiates" to borrow terminology from [1] which is one of the more accessible presentations and papers. The program might evaluate correctly, but equational reasoning (like you might want for any kind
11.
by oddity 4y ago
The existence of a different kind of CPU isn't a meaningful distinction at the level of discussing paradigms. The semantics are different, so the abstract machine is different. The fact that I need a different set of atoms in my desk
12.
by oddity 4y ago
I don't need OOP to do a hash table lookup and then an indirect function call with the receiver as the first argument either but that ignores that there's more to a paradigm than the algorithm I use for facilitating it. You can e
13.
by oddity 4y ago
Autodiff does not work with for loops or if statements. The current solutions effectively pick a few promising traces through the program and then assume that nothing else exists. To handle it more elegantly (for things like preserving eq
14.
by oddity 4y ago
Object oriented programming, for example, doesn't let me have a variable hold half of one object and half of another or let the language derive the code that gave me that object at runtime, but object oriented + differentiable programm
15.
by oddity 4y ago
At the time the comment was made the link was https://harvard-iacs.github.io/2019-CS109A/pages/materials.h... where neural networks were mentioned. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295656
16.
by oddity 4y ago
The average consumer is more willing to pay for hardware than software, even if all the value is created by the software. It's the reason why Apple no longer charges for OS updates. Nvidia has essentially the same business model. It&#
17.
by oddity 4y ago
Apple's ethos of giving more to creators was because they were focused on the niche markets that would spend good money for good products. By the late 90s, creators were their primary users so the survival of Apple meant catering to t
18.
by oddity 4y ago
The difference is much more nuanced than this. A modern GPU can (and probably does) do most of what you've listed for a CPU. Speculative execution and branch prediction are a bit less likely to be invested in (because they don't
19.
by oddity 4y ago
Most people just want an allocator that works reasonably well, and maintaining that expectation means not exposing too many details that you might be held accountable to. If you care deeply, there are usually alternatives. There's not
20.
by oddity 4y ago
Depends on how you define innovation. The hard truth is that there is no free lunch. We like to pretend we're using a Turing machine, but the moment you start caring about performance or memory limits, the abstraction breaks down and
21.
by oddity 4y ago
C and C++ are some of the few languages where the spec goes out of its way to not depend on an allocator, for good reason, and this is well after you've accounted for the majority of the code that, hopefully, doesn't need to do me
22.
by oddity 4y ago
It's unreasonable to assume that an stdlib must be designed around performance to any capacity. For most software, the priorities for the stdlib are 1) existing, 2) being bug/vulnerability free, and likely, in the Windows case gi
23.
by oddity 4y ago
This misses the point of my comment. When you put faith in malloc, you're putting hope in a lot of heuristics that may or may not degenerate for your particular workload. Windows is an outlier with how bad it is, but that should larg
24.
by oddity 4y ago
If you're depending on the performance of malloc, you're either using the language incorrectly or using the wrong language. There is no such thing as a general purpose anything when you care about performance, there's only
25.
by oddity 4y ago
The semiconductor world is very small by tech standards, and so there are correspondingly many fewer people at the management or upper IC levels that can coordinate large, consequential decisions and even fewer that become well known. Even
26.
by oddity 4y ago
The mobile phone market wouldn't have saved them. Qualcomm killed off everyone who wasn't Apple with their licensing schemes. The CPU tech was largely irrelevant because what really mattered was the wireless patents. Being acqu
27.
by oddity 4y ago
Considering this is explicitly part 8 of a series, I would recommend starting with part 1, where this is explained. https://medium.com/@mario.arias.c/comparing-kotlin-and-golan... The language website is here: https:&
28.
by oddity 4y ago
The PR is undeniably silly, but it's totally plausible that some people just have bad ideas and not bad intent. The situation doesn't need any more escalation beyond fixing the underlying vector for spam.
29.
by oddity 4y ago
Every large org I've ever been at has had someone reply-all to a company-wide mailing list and then promptly spawn a flood of more company-wide reply-alls. Slack's @channel/@here has made this even worse. On a good day, peo
30.
by oddity 4y ago
There's an endless stream of monad tutorials and I think they (almost) all misunderstand the point of confusion. No one gives a f*** about monads, they care about state. If you've internalized reasoning about a program's exe

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