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winwang

900 karma · joined June 17, 2022

Effective efficiency. Building a hardware-accelerated (big) data platform.
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winwang··on The State of Context Engineering
It's because the cache comes from the prefix. `f(f(f(A,B),C),D)` is quite different from `f(f(A,B),D)`.
winwang··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
That may be a not-terrible idea (possibly even great idea), though it's not quite the base language I'm looking for. Maybe I need to just experience it more.
winwang··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I find that frontier AI is very good at understanding new syntax/semantics, for whatever reason. But that's moreso "why is it not just a huge waste immediately".

I want a new language because current GPU (and really, parallel programming) languages are just not it. Also, I think we'd be better off if it weren't just CUDA dominating the developer experience.

Moreover, I feel that we should be embracing advanced type systems with AI. The past couple decades have shown that people do want advanced typing even without AI. And now we have stuff like "Lean is faster than Rust" (https://kim-em.github.io/blog/2026-7-24-why-lean-is-faster-t...).

Programming is hard. Programming when you can't just rely on the classic RAM model is harder. Parallel programming at scale on vector processors with small amounts of cache (and slow cache at that) is even harder. We can do better. Rust has already shown this for normal systems programming.

winwang··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I disagree. There are things which are very annoying outside of core ideas or otherwise take a lot of time. Too much time and energy to justify normally. Personal example: https://github.com/wiwa/gpu-typing

Typechecking with my own algorithm. Simple enough to specify in Python. Annoying with much boilerplate in CUDA. Similarly annoying to test.

winwang··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I've been thinking about building a GPGPU language, but it's definitely going to take a while, even with AI. AI, unfortunately(??), cannot replace taste at the moment, and generally cannot unless it becomes a lot more disagreeable.

Taste is disagreeable.

Maybe Claude should not let me build a two-level type theory with just a "You're absolutely right!". In fact, now it will say "You're absolutely right, and it would be so amazing to use cubical types for blah blah", and adamantly defend it with several paragraphs of vomit.

winwang··on Advanced coding in low-resource programming languages
It's too good.
winwang··on Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
Why would I assume it would be credible? Instead, I simply proposed some designs and had it find out if such hardware existed / was feasible.
winwang··on Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
I remember chatting with about AI a few months ago about the issue of foreign RAM sticks being able to cooperate with websites to serve different files/instructions, undetectably. Scary stuff.
winwang··on Gemini 4 Argon
Lol, this feels like it would otherwise be a good thing, out of context.
winwang··on A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms
It depends on what you're doing to the integers. You still cannot comparison-sort arbitrarily large integers in linear time.

Also, consider this: it would have been trivial to get a so-called "better bound" on FFT if such a "cheat" were what people allowed.

winwang··on A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms
The idea that FFT's decomposition is non-optimal is surprising. What the new bound means is we basically were looking at the problem and its structure incorrectly, and therefore implicates other problems for which we have used recursion to get to our currently-best bounds. Almost no interesting math problems are just sitting there alone in their little corner. Getting a hint like that is a big deal.
winwang··on QGIS bans AI assisted contributions
I find it highly ironic that many people here seem to believe mathematicians should just accept LLM proofs, but software projects shouldn't accept LLM code.
winwang··on Knuth reward check
Why would anybody need more than `268 435 456 ^ 62` KB of RAM?
winwang··on How strong is the strong interaction?
Also, the strong force is extremely repulsive at shorter distances.

The good news is that wikipedia has very good (and simple) figures for the shape of the force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_force

winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
Good point, I think a better way to have said it would be something like: to almost everyone, there's some music or graphic which resonates with them emotionally, and this has been true for thousands of years. There are very few such admirers for code, which has also only existed for a few decades. Perhaps worse is that it is mainly a profession for even most programmers, and not something they automatically see as expression.
winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
"making a butt print in my office chair can be art." -- There were literally butt prints displayed at the Whitney a couple months ago. Just because it's in resin, so what? If I have fun making butt prints on my chair, is that worse because I didn't seal the form?
winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
Yep, and that's fine. I just think that for the people who do treat something as art, that I'd want to respect their opinion and emotions. Photography was not art, and now is.

Whatever moves people, however people wish to express themselves, whatever people find beautiful, all that is "art" to me. There's much which is art to others, perhaps, that I would not understand as art for myself.

winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
I disagree. It's not just a logic puzzle. If I haven't communicated that to you, that's also my failure. I've written stories short and long as well. It's a different kind of art.

"Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc." I apologize if my emotions and aesthetics are not communicated, but I can only say that they were there. As for societal norms, I doubt that "embedding digital logic in types" is a "norm" of the programming society.

And though it's an appeal to patterns, I will have to bring up the general repeated failure of humanity to recognize art.

winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
Hmm. I had an issue once with numpy shape mismatch errors appearing after 18+ hours of computation. Frustrating, because it could be caught at compile time.

Later, I learned some typelevel programming (in Scala), and by encoding a digital (binary) adder and multiplier at the type level, I showed -- at least to myself -- it was possible to compute and check linear algebra shapes at compile time (without a compiler plugin). It was rather magical and funny to think that I just embedded basic digital logic in such a higher-abstraction world.

It was slow for the inputs I cared about, so I added some optimizations, like an if-statement at the type level, for example, so that it bit-shift for multiplying powers of 2 (multiplication for tensor products). The compile time difference being palpable was a testament to how "some 'ideas' are surprisingly close to others" (err, 'ideas' ~ 'numbers' in this case). There is a connection to the p-adic numbers here, courtesy of dyadics, and some connection to the more-natural "last-mile" problem.

It's not REST, maybe. But I felt it was magical.

winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
Why? Is it because most programmers can get paid from a company and not most drawers or musicians? Is it that programmers don't give enough free code on Github, or that their PRs don't wax and wane about how beautiful they found their specific bugfix to be?
winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
I am a programmer who likes aesthetics. I think about how aesthetic it is to not have to deal with certain production incidents for certain blocks of code because the typelevel computation tells me it would be a compiler bug if it screwed up. I like the feeling of realizing those 100 LOC could just be 10.

I sometimes tell people of when I came down from Mt. Fuji, there were wispy clouds and grand nature below me, picturesque like a painting. At that time, I likened it to the beauty I felt when I was first learning Haskell. But I say it because I expect it to be a rare kind of sentiment.

The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate, and the appreciation grows deeper with more consideration. I love reading the placards in museums and attempting to understand why the artist did what they did, I like it more than even looking at the piece itself.

Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.

winwang··on Programming Isn't Special
Strange. That's like saying no one cares about the technicals of art, just how they feel about looking at an image.

As a consumer of graphics and music, let me "agree" for just a moment. I might not care how the music or image came to me. I just care that I like the final product. Which is why most paintings are trash, because I prefer highly saturated colors.

...I suppose this is somewhat true of many people already.

winwang··on Claude Haiku 5.5
*For now. If a company were to degrade something, it shouldn't be so obvious that the "goodwill" was just a reallocation. Just a good strategy. For example, it allows them to claim that they're "just going from 150% to 125% usage allowance, which is still more than 100%".
winwang··on Benchmark in Milliseconds
It seems normal to talk about 4% perf increases for compiler releases.
winwang··on Benchmark in Milliseconds
Love it. Unfortunately, for some benchmarks, it can be bit difficult to get representative inputs which take hundreds of milliseconds. I'm curious as to why the author doesn't loop 1-10ms inputs to deal with variance? Which also deals with startup costs. Rust microbench harnesses were already good at this stuff-out of-the-box (run-to-run variance, etc) several years ago.
winwang··on Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget
Depends on what you're doing. For example, I'm having one chat extend/optimize a (mildly-novel) CUDA program. Opus 5.5 (high/xhigh) is very efficient, but a single thread would still cost me the Pro plan usage in ~2 days (less if I were just running it unattended). This is one mostly-bounded program, and it's not even that large. In fact, before 5.5, I would have just used Fable instead.
winwang··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
I find it much stranger to believe that having/not-having the code would mean anything about consciousness.
winwang··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
While this is an interesting point, I'd say that this is also true of a human brain.
winwang··on Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl
99% of my music consumption is through offline playback of mp3's or youtube content. I don't use playlists nor shuffles, just repeat.
winwang··on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?
I'm not sure I'm arguing what you think I'm arguing. I'm not arguing against measurements. I'm saying that it's relevant to recall that honeymoon phases exist in the general human behavior, whether it applies here or not.
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