hpcjoe

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
2,200
Submissions
579
Member since
Dec 8
Recovering theoretical/computational physicist, closet math guy, foodie, San dan in Isshinryu, and power-lifter.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
Look for llmfit on github. This will help with that analysis. I've found it reasonably accurate. If you have Ollama already installed, it can download the relevant models directly.
Comment · 10 months ago
Thoughts on disabling ad blockers, subscription requests for sites, and the economic model underlying much of the internet these days.
Comment · 11 months ago
Teams regularly fails at video conferencing. It complains of low network bandwidth at random times, and I check my firewall (OpnSense with fq_codel enabled and reasonable bandwidth limits) to note that it under very light load.

I am not sure if this is a server side thing at Microsoft, or a problem with the application itself. True under Windows, Linux, via local app, and via the web app.

For larger meetings (> 50 people), we use zoom. Unlike teams, zoom generally just works. Quite well in fact.

Teams is simply crap software, forced upon us. If we could jettison that and Outlook, I would be grateful. Though our IT looks at us in an unblinking stare, if we ask them to allow us to use any of the better clients on mobile, laptop, desktop, windows or linux. Its almost as if our third eye in the middle of our forehead opened up.

Comment · 1 year ago
I noticed the comments pointing out that TDP is a marketing number, and max power draw for this part can be higher. The cooling seems to have been inadequate.

A rule of thumb I use for cooling is, you can rarely have too much. You should over-engineer that aspect of your systems. That and the power supply.

I have a 7950x, with a water block capable of sinking up to 300W. Under heavy load, I hear the radiator fans spinning up, and I see the cpu temp hover around 90-93 C. That is ok, though cooler would be better. My next build (this one is 2 years old) will also use a water block, but with a higher flow rate, and a better radiator system. I like silent systems, though I don't like the magic smoke being released from components.

Comment · 1 year ago
As will Python and many others.
Comment · 1 year ago
I recall that while I was at SGI. Many of us within SGI were strongly against the move to sell this off to Sun. We blamed Bo Ewald for the disaster to SGI that this was, the lack of strategic vision on his part. We also blamed the idiots in SGI management for thinking that only MIPS and Irix would be what we would be delivering.

Years later, Ewald and others had a hand in destroying the Beast and Alien CPUs in favor of the good ship Itanic (for reasons).

IMO, Ewald went from company to company, leaving behind a strategic ruin or failure. Cray to SGI to Linux Networx to ...

Comment · 2 years ago
Same in Julia, but no need to "import math", its already built in :D

    joe@zap:~ $ julia
                   _
       _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org    
      (_)     | (_) (_)    |
       _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
      | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
      | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.10.5 (2024-08-27)
     _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |
    |__/                   |

    julia> z=1+2*im
    1 + 2im

    julia> z*conj(z)
    5 + 0im

    julia> sqrt(z*conj(z))
    2.23606797749979 + 0.0im

    julia> abs(z)
    2.23606797749979
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
I have perl code I wrote in 1992 that still works properly, without changes. The binary executables have changed ISA from MIPS 4 to x86_64, and are compiled fortran (gfortran). There's even a switch I use to be able to read the large endian binary files in gfortran.

My c code from 1996 requires rework. My C++ code from 2014 requires rework (I had to do this with others code as well to use a std capability). Python code rarely survives 3.6 -> 3.12 never mind 2.7 to 3.x. I worked at a company that had (very unwisely) written a massive part of its infrastructure in Py2.7, and was using it a decade past its expiration date.

Perl just works.

Comment · 2 years ago
At a previous job, I regularly worked with dfs of millions to hundreds of millions of rows, and many columns. It was not uncommon for the objects I was working with to use 100+ GB ram. I coded initially in Python, but moved to Julia when the performance issues became to painful (10+ minute operations in Python that took < 10s in Julia).

DataFrames.jl, DataFramesMeta.jl, and the rest of the ecosystem are outstanding. Very similar to pandas, and much ... much faster. If you are dealing with small (obviously subjective as to the definition of small) dfs of around 1000-10000 rows, sticking with pandas and python is fine. If you are dealing with large amounts of real world time series data, with missing values, with a need for data cleanup as well as analytics, it is very hard to beat Julia.

FWIW, I'm amazed by DuckDB, and have played with it. The DuckDB Julia connector gives you the best of both worlds. I don't need DuckDB at the moment (though I can see this changing), and use Julia for my large scale analytics. Python's regex support is fairly crappy, so my data extraction is done using Perl. Python is left for small scripts that don't need to process lots of information, and can fit within a single terminal window (due to its semantic space handicap).

Comment · 2 years ago
A friend sent me the image from page 9. The email signature. It is mine, from when I ran my company. Mid 2010s.

I'm not much worried about this specific example of information exfiltration, though I have significant concerns over how one may debug something like this for applications working with potentially more sensitive data than email signatures. Put another way, I think we are well within the infancy of this technology, and there is far more work needed before we have actually useful applications that have a concept of information security relative to their training data sets.

Comment · 3 years ago
1: Yes. Has happened 3 times in my career, most recently this past May.

2: Minimally. I was asked for the reason for my departure, and I was transparent as I could be, indicating what I knew and the circumstances. People were curious about it, but then again, its not relevant to finding new work. I will say that I found that multiple potential employers concluded successful interviews with unrelated programming tests. It felt like a set of coffin problems[1], that older folks like me, not trained in CS, but writing code for 40+ years, would not do well on.

This is a huge red flag. I actually had someone tell me that I 'needed to know how to program' to do the job I'd applied for, even though I have a public documented history of programming and software development/engineering, have developed and shipped code for decades, for research, products, patches, ...

That impacted search a bit.

3: There's not much of a stigma these days. Your self worth is not tied up in your job. Your value isn't either. You can take time to decompress, retool, think, train, research.

Put another way, if an employer thinks its a problem, you might want to steer clear of that employer. Bring the conversation quickly to a close, amicably, so you don't waste time and create bad feelings.

On jobs in general, employers generally are their to please and profit their owners. Understanding all their actions in terms of this (HR is there to protect the employer, etc.) can help you separate your sense of self worth from the position or company.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/gxpoyo/soviet_coffin_...

Comment · 3 years ago
This is my current pain with Julia. It makes deploying code require the entire environment, or a PackageCompiler built sys-image. I've played with static compiler, and other techniques. They are sadly quite brittle for my previous use cases. Lack of ability to use threads in a static compiler built binary was a deal killer for me.

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