Comment by almostgotcaught | Hacker News Reader

Comment by almostgotcaught | Hacker News Reader

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almostgotcaught

> It quickly seems that the low level C/Cpp is becoming obsolete, and it's hard to squeeze performance unless you're doing something truly green field / new. Otherwise someone has already optimized the hell out of it.

I hear and see both of these sentiments frequently from the internet crowd (on-lookers). It's both wrong and humorously arrogant. I'll repeat what I said to someone on reddit yesterday: there are thousands (maybe 10s?) scattered around the FAANGs, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, accelerator startups, boutiques, etc. whose day to day is both C/C++ and squeezing perf out of kernels and getting many points (sometimes 10s) improvement. Certainly the wins aren't daily but I'm saying they do steadily find room for improvement. How is that possible? I'll give you a hint: platforms, demands, hardware, use-cases all change essentially on a quarterly basis.

So before you proclaim victory on behalf of whatever high-level framework, ask yourself if you're really familiar with the production and business environment for this kind of code.

As a learner and self proclaimed amateur, I assume the vitriolic tone is directed elsewhere. Without that, you're saying that performant pipelines are definitely in demand and optimization is still a full time job. That's good! I'd like to get better at that.

>I assume the vitriolic tone is directed elsewhere

I'm always really shocked on hn when people getting called out for arrogance respond with accusations (of vitriol). What day job do you have where you can make proclamations like "It quickly seems that the low level C/Cpp is becoming obsolete" while simultaneously admitting being an amateur and not get checked. Must be very different from my day job where being precise and accurate and conservative is paramount. Moreover what kind of habit of thought are you in that being called out for that is read as vitriol?

Oh my god, calm down. Jesus christ.

Same thing applies here: I'm not the one the one that's not calm. I very calmly pointed out that op is wrong. That's it. You painting that as "not calm" is the only abnormal thing going on here.

You can interpret text as being uncalm, but there's always room for misunderstanding, esp in a forum/thread. Nobody is actually upset I think, just using direct language.

Calm or not, when you called their behavior "humorously arrogant" it set the tone of the rest of your comment to condescension. It distracts from the on-topic discussion, despite any informative value contained in your comment.

When people post like this it's hard to tell if they are trying to have a conversation in good faith, or they are seeking pleasure in the form of belittling someone.

> "humorously arrogant" it set the tone of the rest of your comment to condescension

it was as condescending as the original comment was arrogant. what exactly is the confusion here? if you want to a community where people are allowed to make bold claims without doing sufficient research (hn) then you should also allow for those people to treated as such.

> Moreover what kind of habit of thought are you in that being called out for that is read as vitriol?

That’s as much a matter of personal identity as a ‘habit of thought’, friend. Otherwise, we could we comment on the basis of _your_ perspective as some mutable affectation, no?

You see, we are shadows of ourselves. An inquisitive play, or let’s say a “judgment” about Cuda economics: aspirational, errant? Then, the linguistic phalanx: honed no doubt by long running needs to be heard and seen and listened to.

"it seems" combined with "I'm learning" was meant to convey ignorance not arrogance. I think I'm just being misread and that's probably my fault. It wouldn't be the first time - so I'm sorry if you found it off-putting

My day job is optimization for logistics and multi-agent systems on edge deployments. We vary between heterogenous compute environment on-platform and occasional connections to cloud-like servers, but only occasionally. The system has a lot to do and we're pushing what it can do for itself.

I like these problems and am always trying to find new ways to solve them. That's really it, I'm wondering if it's best to focus on learning to work the hardware as is, or learning to twist existing libraries into new problems.

For example if you look at this: https://weightythoughts.com/p/cuda-is-still-a-giant-moat-for...

It actually denigrates anyone who would consider starting at low level CUDA kernels. I liked your message though, you had a great point: what do I imagine all those CUDA programmers do if not write CUDA?

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