brooksbp

Was a fun read until the end where the author made damn sure that history records who drew the blueprint.

Is there a resource for what to do before an event like this?

Also agree that asking for academic papers seems to increase the potential for hallucination. But, I don't know if I am prompting it the best way in these scenarios..

Are you really high performance if you can assess the situation but elect to quit instead of influence it?

Do you use it to project manage Dart itself?

I'm still waiting for the day Google Assistant can answer "what time does Home Depot open in the morning?"

GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?"

Me: "The closest one"

GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?"

...

I would like to think that integrating reconfigurable logic into chips will help. But, no idea if the economics makes sense. And, the ecosystem around managing that pretty much does not exist.

How much better do you think a new codec needs to be to make it all the way to mainstream? 2x? 10x?

Why are there so many Mini SMP (?) connectors on the board? (video time 1:21)

super wide AXI-Stream busses?

I can already see the "Avoid bumpy roads" option right next to the "Avoid tolls", "Avoid ferries", ...

It's not almost always bullshit. People just can't grok that their management does not agree that they're performing as stellar as they think.

You burnt out because you ate too much free food?

Wow. That was hilarious to read.

Sometimes I read text like this and really enjoy the deep insights and arguments once I filter out the emotion, attitude, or tone. And I wonder if the core of what they're trying to communicate would be better or more efficiently received if the text was more neutral or positive. E.g. you can be 'bearish' on something and point out 'limitations', or you can say 'this is where I think we are' and 'this is how I think we can improve', but your insights and arguments about the thing can more or less be the same in either form of delivery.

Make Unreal Tournament great again!

Tuning Tx/Rx for NRZ can be challenging. PAM4 is going to be fun.

Ah, so if the model is just converting input text into output text, it can really learn how to do just about anything? But, there may be certain aspects of model design that make it better at some types of conversions ("tasks") than others? And there may be certain data sets that you want to train a base model on to get base learning of such as general language comprehension, and then build on top of that for your specific use case?

Thank you for sharing this! I am currently studying NLP..

Along the way, I've been struggling with a question and I hope someone can help me understand how to go about this: how would you build a model that does more than one NLP task? For a simple classifier like input: text (a tweet) and output: text (an emotion), you can fine-tune an existing classifier on such a data set. But, how would you build a model that does NER and sentiment analysis? E.g. input: text (a Yelp review of a restaurant) and output: list of (entity, sentiment) tuples (e.g. [("tacos", "good"), ("margaritas", "good"), ("salsa", "bad")]). If you have a data set structured this way, and want to fine-tune a model, how does that model know how to make use of a Python list of tuples?

> I'm personally not a fan of such a situation but it's a reasonable one in today's world.

Not a fan even in today's world. Example:

The house next to mine sold for $300k 2y ago. Those owners put about $50k into renovations and sold 1y later for $450k. The current owner did nothing (didn't even mow the lawn!) and 6m later decided to pack up and move across country for a job. He put the house on the market for $650k. It's beyond insulting. That house is going to sit on the market for a long time unless he is willing to make no money or even lose money on the overall transaction.

I suspect you're talking about the case where the peripheral issues a memory read request and you want the coherence protocol to return the value from CPU cache via snoop instead of having that value already been evicted from CPU cache and having to go to DRAM (off-chip memory) for the value?

If the peripheral issues a memory write, that location in the CPU cache must be invalidated so a CPU memory read of the location does not return an old/stale value.

In my own experimentation (non real-world use case) on a very specific system, I was surprised by the rate of peripheral read requests that resulted in snoop hits where the value would be returned from CPU cache (instead of from DDR PHY controller). The base case was surprisingly low. Modifying the experiment to have the CPU continuously access the memory (read accesses) while the CPU-peripheral interaction was taking place resulted in much much higher snoop hit rates. The overall performance difference between the two cases was not as big as I would have hoped at all. Perhaps the value being returned from DDR PHY controller was not as slow as I would have expected (some unknown/unexpected behavior caching/bypassing in the DDR controller?)--again, this was not a use case that had real-world memory accesses...

A language keyword for "please don't take it from cache" is tricky because it would be an incredibly low low low level specifier intended to be used for performance reasons in a system that is very complex to reason about performance. Maybe having more knobs could help (much easier to use this language specifier rather than having to write code to have the CPU continuously access the memory hoping that will keep it in cache), but I think this could get into the realm that people get distracted by performance and just start doing things in the name of performance without having proper controls and measurements in place for assisting in understanding what may be happening in the system.

Instructions related to the memory model exist for correctness. Memory prefetch instructions are just suggestions for an already sophisticated memory unit. Memory QoS can be thought of as having an impact on performance, but it is a much higher level solution aimed at partitioning of resources.

> everyone in the biz was super secretive [..] even stuff that I would take from [..] (which were public knowledge)

It's not just Finance but other industries have this culture as well. I suspect it manifests in an environment that is perceived to be hyper competitive--any perceived advantage regardless of where it came from or how differentiated it is, is held closely and over-weighed if proper metrics aren't in place to continue pushing for improvement.

Performance is a shiny toy that attracts and distracts many from understanding the fundamentals. Interestingly, understanding fundamentals is a pre-requisite to understanding performance!

The author starts with the premise that all abstractions are leaky and then proceeds to show this in the context of using Tailwind. OK..

This is one of the things I enjoy most about learning things in different domains. Most of the time it looks so foreign because of.. language. But often the concepts and ideas are not as intimidating or complex as they seem once you get past the language barrier and are able to distill things down to a simpler understanding.

The section on memory management describes a lot of work the runtime has to do to track ownership and copy memory around. Would shared virtual memory greatly simplify this?

> but that only makes memory-fences (load-acquire, store-release) even more important.

I would say that the importance is in the correctness of the algorithm that implements the shared memory synchronization.

Lowering the algorithm/code to architecture instructions that enforce memory ordering is trivial at that point. So what if it means a fence instruction isn't needed on x86 but it is on arm64 at some particular point in the code.

> Where Have I Been? 2012 to 2022 around the world in a small boat. Worked full time at AWS. Only in North America 3 to 4 times/year. Great to be back!

WFH is over folks.

Joking aside, that's awesome, and I hope some flexibility remains for all. Especially for those with little kids and two working parents.

Quake III Arena / QuakeLive training for mind warp speed and hand/eye coord.

You have to find something you love more than drinking. Something to choose over drinking.

I used to love drinking. I still do, and probably always will. It may break your heart and drive you crazy to kill something you love. But reconciling the cognitive dissonance is worth it. Have honest conversations with yourself, for however long it takes..

For me, I love my kids my wife and physical training more than drinking. So I don't buy alcohol anymore when grocery shopping and I recognize and avoid social situations that are primarily centered around drinking--there are plenty of other opportunities to connect with people that do not involve drinking. I am also OK with knowing that some people simply do not understand this--it's all good, and I don't care.