swerner

It may look like that from the inside. From the outside, as a user, it looks like Meta only wants to connect customers with advertisers.

I’ve worked gate for years, so I’ve seen plenty of RVs and camper trailers from the inside, and you do get an impression of the people that travel in them. Everyone’s there - be it tie die and patchouli hippies, be it hunting gear and MRE preppers, college party kids or mom and pop coming because it was on some travel destination list.

Camp with hippies, and you’ll be at a hippie festival. Camp with ravers, you’ll be at a rave. You can camp with a church group there, with philosophers (we had them as neighbors one year), with families with small kids, or with (disarmed) 2A gun nuts.

It’s what seven days of sleep deprivation, dehydration and probably substance abuse do to you.

The kinds of drugs people at burning man prefer to take are not very likely to lead to death from overdose.

Really? My takeaway is “there’s a reason we keep motor vehicles out of pedestrian zones”. A surprisingly high number of vehicle related incidents for a 5mph zone.

Given that firearms are prohibited and motor vehicle traffic is limited to 5mph, that alone would take out two unnatural causes of death. Also, drowning is a lot less likely to occur in the desert.

Proximity to borders leaves the government the possibility that if it really, really wanted to search a property, they'd just have to cede some land in a 100mile radius to a foreign country and instantly create an international border wherever they need one.

If your stack is open source, why not? I’ve had good results with pointing an LLM to a debug build of the GPU compiler when I saw it crash. It just seems you need to periodically remind them that gdb exists to prevent it from littering your drivers with printfs.

Wait, I have an idea: What is your qualification for talking about graphics programming? If you cannot provide credentials, I will have no other choice than to claim you don’t know what you’re talking about, based on the criteria by which you judged my comments so far.

Not everything is AI and dot products of massive vectors, there are still applications that do other maths on GPUs

My thinking was rather that most of our current programming languages put memory layout fully into the programmer’s responsibility - I can think off hand of a language where the compiler makes performance decisions like whether your structure are SoA, AoS or SoAoS, what alignment, padding, strides and float types to use.

Automatic decisions about when to use cooperative loads through shared local mem versus gathers from global mem and hardware caches are also something that such a hypothetical compiler would have to make.

Vulkan compute is not really designed or intended to be a CUDA competitor, its feature set is much more restricted, and Vulkan host side code is much more verbose than CUDA. OpenCL or SYCL are much closer in features to CUDA. I found that when using SYCL on Nvidia, debugging symbols etc can be passed through and you can use tools like NSight Compute to profile it as if it were CUDA.

For a performant portable language, we’d have to go to a higher level where you describe what to do and leave the how to do to the compiler. It would then need to be able to adjust memory layout, access patterns, data type choice to the underlying hardware. I’m not sure if this is possible to do reliably - the closest we have right now may in fact be highly detailed plain English descriptions of the algorithms fed to an LLM prompted to produce assembly.

Yes, unfortunately. Otherwise we could just implement all of SYCL and OpenCL on top of Vulkan and live happily ever after.