neerajsi

This is true in experimental sciences, where people who have grants and funding can obtain results using equipment unavailable to others. But their raw data can help much less funded theory groups to formulate new understanding that can lead to new experiments.

As long as the raw proofs, potentially ai generated, are available a lot of less funded mathematicians can still use them to generate understanding and created new programs to be resolved with new ai aided mathematical experiments.

I had a family friend working on diamond semiconductors in the 90s. The application at that time was for sensors located in the hot section of a jet engine.

Only the ia64 version of the jit was based on msvc. And older versions of aot mode. Not the more typical jit targets.

I believe the new enabling technology for better codegen is tiered compilation, which has only been around for a couple years.

No. Genetic diversity and natural selection have created many intricate, beautiful, and useful structures. Unless someone is willing to argue that Darwinian selection is sentient, it's clear that theres at least one non sentient process that is creative.

I agree. I think the problem is shared context. A good human writer estimates their audience's understanding and writes close to their level. The llm doesn't know this for any particular audience and falls back to a static trained baseline or some other incorrect level.

I hope we'll have some kind of good paradigm to do lora style learning or maybe an output subagent or something so we can better calibrate the output style in a fuzzy way. In context learning (instructions, memories) doesn't currently seem that effective.

I was curious about whether one of the count bits instructions can help. Of course I'm lazy now and asked an llm to check... The llm noticed that the articles solution includes a floating point subtract in the end. This is fine since the target is wasm which has fsub/fadd, but was initially odd to see in a floating point emulator.

Apparently a ctz solution is a bit longer, but doesn't cross from the floating to integer domain at all, so might be better in the overall algorithm. There are hidden implicit floating to int convert instructions.

This was a really cool little problem!

That's a more effective strategy in the primaries. It doesn't make much sense in the general. Hopefully your district isn't all that close.

Fwiw on the compiler front, I used to work on the msvc tool chain. It has been doing lto (aka ltcg) for a very long time at reasonably good throughput. That tool chain also has done incremental compilation on a per function basis for about 7 years. Sharing header parsing across translation units has been possible through PCH for decades. Even without PCH, inline header functions only get codegened once in ltcg mode (not counting inline expansion).

In a large multi-dll build like Windows or Office, the import/export information across modules is computed without doing codegen, so ltcg codegen can be done in parallel regardless of the module dependency graph.

I never worked deeply in the build systems for Linux based OSes or other unixes, but I gather that some symbol visibility choices make the build situation worse in Unix systems than Windows.

We call those doctors with less medical school and training ARNPs. I've seen several and they seem to do well for basic needs.

Not to mention if you have kids there are more limited options for their schooling and extracurriculars in a rural area.

It seemed to be ai assisted writing, but it was still interesting to me.

This is surprisingly apt to me. Fertilizer is apparently one of the fundamental geopolitical dependencies on capital and access to petrochemicals. Solving fertilizer would unlock a huge amount of human potential in the Global South.

Disallowing smc is a significant perf/power win. For cpus that run a large variety of large code (e.g. a web browser or ux stack), being able to cache a large instruction footprint and fetch/decode it quickly is important. Having to have the icache snoop data writes and entangle the i-fetch with the store buffer machinery would be a huge penalty to pay for a niche use case. Unlike loads, which are a small fraction of instructions to disambiguate with stores, you'd have to disambiguate every single instruction.

JIT is important to Apple platforms, and they seem to manage to make it work well enough even with the need for explicit invalidation.

I agree with what you're saying. It's called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_slicing. Clearly a footgun in c++. You have to return a pointer to something that is not locally allocated.

Yes, I think it's a problem for society. Death in old age frees up social, economic, physical, and political resources for the next generation of the living. If the rich and powerful escape death, because after all they will the people with the resources to do so, society will lose the adaptability and natural change that comes from new generations taking the reins.

I think macro economics has provided significant value to society even if the model isn't precise with perfect predictions. We do have worthwhile models that the government can use to avoid making serious monetary mistakes in the face of the real business cycle. We are unlikely to trigger the awful depths of the great depression again.

The main problem I see with public economists is Goodharts law: When the predictive model becomes visible to the agents in the economy, there are stable strategies to counteract those models. So if economists want to remain good predictors of real outcomes, they have to collect massive amounts of data to feed the model but then remain mostly invisible afterward, so that the agents being analyzed don't change behavior too much.

In some sense, a known bad model that is used to set central policy may be good because the rest of the economic agents can work on a diversity of better models without correlating as much with each other and the known central model.

I don't get why the sleep deprivation continues. Seems like eliminating that would make a big difference. I have a six year old son, and since he was four it was perfectly fine for him to do his own thing for a little while if I needed a bit of extra sleep. I could see why you'd resent kids if they were constantly needy, didn't sleep, and you didn't actually enjoy their company. But for kids with typical development, this resentment maybe means that the parents aren't setting the right boundaries past age 3.

I initially agreed with your idea, but realized the problem.

At the bus/inter agent communication level, the CPU has sent a read request and is expecting a response. These protocols are usually synchronous with no clear cancellation semantics. There are probably core resources tracking then expected response and if you just freed one of those up and ended the instruction with an exception, you could later have what appears to be an unsolicited response.

This dynamic probably repeats between the core and the pci root complex and then again between the root complex and the device implementing the mmio. Severing the request from the response is probably too complicated for such an unusual case.

I was curious about what Tiger Beetle does. It has two phase transfers, which appears tailor built to handle this case. But maybe Tiger Beetle isn't the right database to track all your product stocks.

It's probably a "bottom half", which is tightly bound to the CPU where the interrupt landed. And probably the memcg iteration uses a spin lock, which disables bottom half execution.

On NT, this style of problem would be slightly less likely. The job object, which is NT's memcg equivalent, is a handle based object that naturally goes away when the owning process dies.

I also bet systemd would have native mechanisms to clean this memcg state up if it was used for this purpose. Seems like a bug in the AWS ecs code.

I think your comment is describing something slightly different from incentives: the criteria for granting power and control to some individuals rather than others. There may be incentives to do what's necessary to fulfill those criteria, but it's a different axis from the incentives themselves.

Responding to the actual article: it seems like the author simply has a different set of values than what is assumed by the conventional incentives that he sees around him. If you choose your values then you can also choose your incentives.

Clearly this is for high concurrency cases where there are many people racing to get all the available items. It's not clear that it's in shopifys or the sellers interest to let items get sequestered in people's shopping carts, which is a spot where there isn't a strong commitment to complete the purchase. At payment time, you can be more assured that the item will actually be purchased.

Still I think their solution is a bit weird. I'd want to commit the reservation transaction with inventory decrement along with a payment key and then use a different transaction to drop the reservation when the transaction completes. If the transaction does not complete in a timely manner you probably need to query external systems anyway to resolve whether the payment actually occurred or not.

They talk about lock contention in this case, but I also wonder about latch contention since these rows are adjacent. If it's a small transaction that's not interactive, does mysql resolve it with just the latches on the needed tables?

In my recent experience it seems to be a contextual issue. Llms are constantly being dropped into new situations where they have to rediscover high level and cross cutting information about the system they're working on from contextual clues.

The internal representations of this state and its projection back out to human language wouldn't be as concise as that of a practitioner or team that develop their own verbiage and ontology over time molded to their system.

This verbosity might get better as we figure out better ways for agents to learn long term and use that knowledge to adapt to the users and projects over time.

There might also be some good harness improvements we could consider like forked output streams or multiple long lived filter subagents to ensure that output appropriate for thinking is separate from code output and separate from output given to the user driving the session.

I feel like I learned something from this about the high level need and attributes of the schmitt trigger design. But I'm sure I'd need to read the actual my sources to realize the physical design.

However the general idea of using hysteresis for signal conditioning seems transferrable to other non physical control systems. I suspect that people who think about what the article is saying rather than reflexively declaring it to be slop could learn something useful.

I've been a systems dev for a long time and have debugged many such tricky issues before. Even on teams of experts, this type of issue would take someone really capable weeks to track down, especially because the repro environment is hard to obtain. And the opportunity cost of doing this type of work for a rare bug is high, since you may never get to an answer and have burned a lot of time. So in practice I solved most of this type of issue early in my career before I had a family and before I had higher level work to do.

The ai doesn't have the same incentives as a human. It can also be applied to the repro where it exists.

Your mechanic analogy is a bit inapt. Sure they're experts and can replace your engine much better than you can. But tracking down a non obvious system level bug like this one is much less repeatable and much harder because the problem has already been filtered through a lot of reviews and testing. As a system becomes mature, the bugs become harder and harder individually to track down.

The other part is that almost no one would have the energy to spend hours instrumenting and rebuilding musl, reading the kernel mm code, and thinking hard about how they might interact.

Claude is probably not right about the root cause here and is probably bsing, I agree. But it's collected enough raw data to point some expert humans at the right interaction. I'd take this bs bug report and start asking Claude some questions that would guide it to a more plausible actual answer, but that requires a little more experience in kernel development.

I was arguing with a friend about this point today. I'd posit that our economy has been growing in a way where goods that require more human time and natural resources to produce are giving way to goods that are intangible.

Once we've met our basic material needs, we're tending to consume things that are replicable with low marginal costs, and which do not interfere with the production of other goods. So maybe we can actually support a continually growing digital and entertainment economy, at least for a few more generations.

Maybe these mathematical contributions will also impact the efficiency and capabilities of our material production systems as well, which is another way to keep the economy growing.

I'm optimistic that we'll do more with our resources rather than trying to optimize for doing the same more efficiently with less resources.

I work on systems code that is tricky to write, but with a good test harness. Being able to leave the agent unattended to try several paths when I'm generating the first draft of some code is very helpful.

Of course beating the code into shape for submission requires more manual work. But the draft stage is valuable to find unexpected friction points.

I wonder if it's the same behavior as copilot cli. I dug into it when I got annoyed and found that there's a fundamental tension between rendering the cell based UI and supporting the terminal's native copy paste. At least on copilot cli there were extra zero width characters being copied.

I disagree. For example, the Wright brothers did air foil engineering empirically without full knowledge of the underlying fluid mechanics. Early and innovative engineering will often be less based on existing scientific or mathematical knowledge, while still using some of the methods. It's still absolutely defined as engineering.