I have great respect for Terry Tao but let's not forget that while he won the Fields Medal at a relatively young age, he hasn't made any major contribution to math comparable to proving Fermat's Last Theorem (Andrew Wiles did), solving the Poincaré's Conjecture (Grigori Perelman did) or Yitang Zhang's proof progress towards solving the twin prime conjecture.
Perhaps for mathematicians like Terry Tao AI will be a tool they will rely on, but for mathematicians like the aforementioned, a pen, paper and the published research literature will continue to be their main tools!
Think about it. While the national labs use these systems to model serious stuff -such as climate or nuclear weapons- Meta uses them to train LLMs. What a joke, honestly!
On the other hand, Meta just rapidly built two different training networks in existing datacenter buildings, with existing cooling constraints, using mostly commodity components (albeit expensive commodity components) each of which would place at #3 on that top500 list in terms of GPU power. Compare that with how long it took to get any of the other supercomputers from design to being fully commissioned.
I stopped counting the number of times I have watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp4t_5v_y_0 that features him prominently as the scientific director of the Voyager missions.
I can't remember well but I was either in my second or third year of college when I saw this documentary for the first time.
In my view, the lesson of Lynn's life and contributions is twofold:
- California continues to be a necessary place for America and the world. By this I mean not just the geography, but a place that welcomes people from all walks of life seeking new beginnings.
- Never give up. Seriously. She was in her late 30s, early 40s -an age many would have considered "old" in the 1970s- when she made the breakthrough that made her famous.
As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree.
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
Safety is one of Python's greatest advantages over C or C++. Why would anyone use unsafe Python when P0ython doesn't have other features such as type safety and all the debugging tools that have been built for C and C++ over time is beyond me.
Python is a great language, but just as the generation of kids who got out of computer science programs in the 2000s were clueless about anything that wasn't Java, it seems this generation is clueless about anything that isn't Python.
There was life before Python and there will be life after Python!
Seems to me if you could do most of the work in Python and then just make the critical loop unsafe and 100x faster then that would certainly have some appeal.
Or if you’re going to learn another language might as well learn nim. Keep most of the python syntax, ditch the performance and the packaging insanity.
It was explained pretty well in the blog: Installing the OpenCV python package is easy, fast and painless as long as you're happy with the default binary. Building OpenCV from source to get it into a C/C++ program can quickly turn into a multi-hour adventure, if you're not familiar with building sizeable C++ projects.
I don't use Python because of type safety, I use it because it's easy to write. I couldn't give a single fuck about some missed pointers that weren't cleaned up in the 2.5 seconds my program ran. I'm not deploying public code.
I tend to prototype in Python and then just rewrite the whole thing in C with classes if I need the 10000x speedup.
- Amiga E
- Assembler (on Amiga)
- perl
- tcl/tk
- javascript
- vbscript
- java
- vba
- c
- c++
- python
rock. Granted at some of those rocks, I just took a quick peek (more like a glance), but a rock with whitespaces being important was, at that moment, new to me!
Oh cmon, I can still write some z80 assembly from memory and remember the zx spectrum memory layout somewhat, but I check new programming languages now and then :)
I just meant that for someone coming from a language(s) where different kinds of delimiters are used to denote function bodies, a language that puts such a huge emphasis on whitespace was kinda throwing me off to get an error message slapped at me even though I was replicating the example letter by letter (although, obviously, I missed the importance of whitespace).
It's all fuzzy, but I'm sure I knew about the importance of whitespace in python long before I actually tried python.
Even Raymond's article which was one of the first whined about it [1]. I definitely remember reading that one and thinking I have to check out that language later.
Thing about academia (like computer science and the like) is, you need a programming language you can get across easily, quickly and can get people to produce satisfying results in no time.
Back then it might have been java, then python, till the next language comes around.
The java thing was so apparent, that when you looked at c++ code, you were able to spot the former java user pretty easily. :)
About python, sometime ago, I was looking into arudino programming in c and found someone offering a library (I think) in c (or c++, can't remember). What i remember is, that this person stopped working on it, because they got many requests and questions regarding to be able to use their library in python.
The "unsafe" in the title appears to be used in the sense of "exposing memory layout details", but not in the sense of "direct unbounded access to memory". It's probably not the memory safety issue you are thinking of.
You can absolutely get direct unbounded access to memory with ctypes, with all the bugs that come from this. I just think/hope the code I show in TFA happens to have no such bugs.
> Why would anyone use unsafe Python when Python doesn't have other features such as type safety and all the debugging tools that have been built for C and C++ over time is beyond me.
C and C++ 'type safety' is barely there (compared to more sane languages like OCaml or Rust or even Java etc). As to why would anyone do that? The question is 'why not?' It's fun.
while python is eminently criticable, yosef kreinin has designed his own cpu instruction set and gotten it fabbed in a shipping hardware product, and is the author of the c++fqa, which is by far the best-informed criticism of c++; criticizing him with 'this generation is clueless about anything that isn't Python' seems off the mark
Have you identified actual VPN vendors that are affected by this? I won't disclose which ones I use, but I would love to know if they have been affected.
A lot of people, particularly those raised in non democratic countries, or are first generation Americans who grew up in families that came from non democratic countries, have this distorted notion that "democracy" means that every entity in the United States must be governed democratically. They fail to understand that in the United States, "democracy" refers strictly to certain parts of the government. Other entities that exist in society, whether it's for profit companies or non profit entities, can be governed anyway they want as long as they are consistent with government laws -themselves enacted by representatives of the people.
Citizens having a say in deciding who sits at the top of the government is a revolutionary idea. Differentiating government from people is another revolutionary idea. These two ideas triggered America's founding in contraposition to the form of totalitarian governments that had been the norm in Europe until the 1700s.
I fully blame Google for fostering this environment. In fact, Google's two co-founders, particularly Sergey Brin, were very proud of this being in Google's DNA.
Here is the upside. Given Google's power -although its influence to set norms in tech has diminished in recent years- I hope incidents like this set a new normal in which when you go to work for a tech company, you are measured exclusively for your contributions on the technical domain -whether they are technical, sales, or what have you.
I always found the idea of "bringing your whole self to work" complete BS. This example illustrates why.
> I fully blame Google for fostering this environment. In fact, Google's two co-founders, particularly Sergey Brin, were very proud of this being in Google's DNA.
You do know that Brin and Paige both grew up in non-democratic Communist countries, right? Or is this related to your argument?
The Wizard Of Oz is based on a book written in 1900.
There is a long history of embezzlement and snake oil salesmanship in the United States.
The hardest form of embezzlement to put a check on is is things such as when you promise that GPUs, if they are powerful enough, will one day produce AGI by running code because intelligence is a "property of matter". Kind of "if you compute it, it will show up".
Perhaps for mathematicians like Terry Tao AI will be a tool they will rely on, but for mathematicians like the aforementioned, a pen, paper and the published research literature will continue to be their main tools!