Reminds me of when Amazon came to Sweden and had machine translated product names - including for movies and games.
A friend showed me that the latest game I had worked on was hilariously mistranslated. It's originally "Need For Speed: Payback" but got translated to "behöver du hastighet: återbetalning" which would be more like "do you need speed: reimbursement"
I wasn't expecting the strong CUDA/ML focus. My own work is primarily in graphics and performance in video games; while this is all familiar and useful it feels like a very different view of the hardware than mine.
This feels backwards to me when GPUs were created largely because graphics needed lots of parallel floating point operations, a big chunk of which are matrix multiplications.
When I think of matrix multiplication in graphics I primarily think of transforms between spaces: moving vertices from object space to camera space, transforming from camera space to screen space, ... This is a big part of the math done in regular rendering and needs to be done for every visible vertex in the scene - typically in the millions in modern games.
I suppose the difference here is that DLSS is a case where you primarily do large numbers of consecutive matrix multiplications with little other logic, since it's more ANN code than graphics code.
Of all the things I read at uni UML is the thing I've felt the least use for - even when designing new systems. I've had more use for things I never thought I'd need like Rayleigh scattering and processor design.
I think most software engineers need to draw a class diagram from time to time. Maybe there are a lot of unnecessary details to the UML spec, but it certainly doesn't hurt to agree that a hollow triangle for the arrow head means parent/child while a normal arrow head means composition, with a diamond at the root for ownership.
As the sibling comment says, sequence diagrams are often useful too. I've used them a few times for illustrating messages between threads, and for showing the relationship between async tasks in structured concurrency. Again, maybe there are murky corners to UML sequence diagrams that are rarely needed, but the broad idea is very helpful.
True but I don't bother with a unified system, just a mermaid diagram. I work in web though, so perhaps if I went back to embedded (which I did only a short while) or something else when a project is planned in it entirety rather than growing organically/reacting to customers needs/trends/the whims of management.
I just looked at Mermaid and it seems to as close to UML as I meant by my previous comment. Just look at this class diagram [1]: triangle-ended arrows for parent/child, the classic UML class box of name/attributes/methods, stereotypes in <<double angle brackets>>, etc. The text even mentions UML. I'm not a JS dev so tend to use PlantUML instead - which is also UML based, as the name implies.
I'm not sure what you mean by "unified system". If you mean some sort of giant data store of design/architecture where different diagrams are linked to each other, then I'm certainly NOT advocating that. "Archimate experience" is basically a red flag against both a person and the organisation they work for IMO.
(I once briefly contracted for a large company and bumped into a "software architect" in a kitchenette one day. What's your software development background, I asked him. He said: oh no, I can't code. D-: He spent all day fussing with diagrams that surely would be ignored by anyone doing the actual work.)
The "unified" UML system is referring to things like Rose (also mentioned indirectly several more comments up) where they'd reflect into code and auto-build diagrams and also auto-build/auto-update code from diagrams.
I've been at this 16 years. I've seen one planned project in that 16 years that stuck anywhere near the initial plan. They always grow with the whims of someone.
> I think most software engineers need to draw a class diagram from time to time.
Sounds a lot like RegEx to me: if you use something often then obviously learn it but if you need it maybe a dozen or two dozen times per year, then perhaps there’s less need to do a deep dive outside of personal interest.
no they don't. some people do. Some people think best in sentences, paragraphs, and sections of structured text. Diagrams mean next to nothing to me.
Some graphs, as in representations of actual mathematical graphs, do have meaning though. If a graph is really the best data structure to describe a particular problem space.
on edit: added in "representations of" as I worried people might misunderstand.
FWIW, you're likely right here; not everyone is a visual thinker.
Still, what both you and GP should be able to agree on, is that code - not pseudocode, simplified code, draft code, but actual code of a program - is one of the worst possible representations to be thinking and working in.
It's dumb that we're still stuck with this paradigm; it's a great lead anchor chained to our ankles, preventing us from being able to handle complexity better.
> code - not pseudocode, simplified code, draft code, but actual code of a program - is one of the worst possible representations to be thinking and working in.
It depends on the language. In my experience, well-written Lisp with judicious macros can come close to fitting the way I think of a problem. But some language with tons of boilerplate? No, not at all.
As a die-hard Lisper, I still disagree. Yes, Lisp can go further than anything else to eliminate boilerplate, but you're still locked in a single representation. The moment you switch your task into something else - especially something that actually cares about the boilerplate you hidden, and not the logic you exposed - and now you're fighting an even harder battle.
That's what I mean by Pareto frontier: the choices made by various current-generation languages and coding methodologies (including choices you as a macro author makes, too), are all promoting readability for some tasks, at the expense of readability for other tasks. We're just shifting the difficulty around the time of day, not actually eliminating it.
To break through that and actually make progress, we need to embrace working in different, problem-specific views, instead of on the underlying shared single-source-of-truth plaintext code directly.
IMHO there's usually a lot of necessary complexity that is irrelevant to the actual problem; logging, observability, error handling, authn/authz, secret management, adapting data to interfaces for passing to other services, etc.
Diagrams and pseudocode allow to push those inconveniences into the background and focus on flows that matter.
Precisely that. As you say, this complexity is both necessary and irrelevant to the actual problem.
Now, I claim that the main thing that's stopping advancement in our field is that we're making a choice up front on what is relevant and what's not.
The "actual problem" changes from programmer to programmer, and from hour to the next. In the morning, I might be tweaking the business logic; at noon, I might be debugging some bug across the abstraction layers; in the afternoon, I might be reworking the error handling across the module, and just as I leave for the day, I might need to spend 30 minutes discussing architecture issue with the team. All those things demand completely different perspectives; for each, different things are relevant and different are just noise. But right now, we're stuck looking at the same artifact (the plaintext code base), and trying to make every possible thing readable simultaneously to at least some degree.
I claim this is a wrong approach that's been keeping us stuck for too long now.
I'd love this to be possible. We're analyzing projections from the solution space to the understandability plane when discussing systems - but going the other way, from all existing projections to the solution space, is what we do when we actually build software. If you're saying you want to synthesize systems from projections, LLMs are the closest thing we've got and... it maybe sometimes works.
Yeah, LLMs seem like they'll allow us to side-step the difficult parts by synthesizing projections instead of maintaining them. I.e. instead of having a well-defined way to go back and forth between a specific view and underlying code (e.g. "all the methods in all the classes in this module, as a database", or "this code, but with error handling elided", or "this code, but only with types and error handling", or "how components link together, as a graph", etc.), we can just tell LLMs to synthesize the views, and apply changes we make in them to the underlying code, and expect that to mostly work - even today.
It's just hell of an expensive way to get around doing it. But then maybe at least a real demonstration will convince people of the utility and need of doing it properly.
But then, by that time, LLMs will take over all software development anyway, making this topic moot.
That actually sounds really intuitive to me. If you start with a uniform mass and then redistribute mass symmetrically it makes sense that the change in the two sides would cancel out.
The (Newtonian) Shell Theorem is fairly sensitive to spherical symmetry. In General Relativity one can write down a metric wherein inside any boundary surface there is flat spacetime. It's easiest to do this for a spherical boundary, but one can work out a metric which is axisymmetric (e.g. oblate and spinning or prolate and tidally deformed) and probably all sorts of other weird shapes following ideas from Gauss's Law for Gravitation. Writing down a metric for that is hard though -- really hard if the idea is to make it time-independent, and really really hard if the idea is to make it time-dependent but static (as in a complex Gaussian surface doesn't relax into a more spherical shell). For example, bumps raised on each other by binary black holes will vanish after merger (or if they fly away on hyperbolic trajectories, having "grazed" each other), leaving you with a spherical horizon (if nonspinnning) or an oblate one (if spinning).
Essentially to break spherical symmetry (or axisymmetry where there's spin) and keep it broken you have to introduce something like a dark energy. One can do that outside (retaining flat space inside) or inside (leading to the equivalent direction-dependent attraction of outside objects).
At first I couldn't understand this sentiment; pc speaker always sounded so abrasive to me. Then I followed the link below and a wave of nostalgia washed over me.
Probably because it was dormant for a long time. And then when it was brought back, it was brought back by people who have no clue what made Star Trek good so it has largely sucked.
With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say that impression is more because every series is very different. TOS and TAS may have been similar to TNG seasons 1 and 2, but TNG got more thoughtful as it went on; DS9 was a very different show to both TOS and TNG, with long-term continuity and changes (beyond casting) that stuck, and far more shades of grey and where outright evil came with a smile and a charismatic speech rather than being a puddle of psychic oil; VOY had almost no continuity, making it the polar opposite of DS9, but most of the characters were interesting enough for a space soap opera; ENT was derided by many when it came out, because all the main plot arcs made no sense and they kept introducing old fan favourites that didn't make sense contextually because series set in the show's future had yet to meet the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. And while I've never seen Prodigy, I'm aware that was trying for a very different approach to exploring the cannon and had its own story to tell.
And famously, only the even-numbered films are any good (which doesn't mean all even films are good, e.g. Nemesis).
In this light: DIS throwing away an interesting premise and then going nuts; PIC being three seasons of "why did the scriptwriters put the Borg everywhere, when the main story is androids vs. Romulans, Q, and warcrimes(*?) against changelings leading to changeling terrorism?"; and the very much more pew-pew-lasers action films of Kelvin**… none of this is particularly shocking.
What's nice (for people like me) is that SNW and LD are both well-written and thoughtful — but again, very different shows.
SNW feels like it is trying to be the best of TOS, TNG, and DS9, even if it does have a bit of fan service with insufficiently justified presence of Kirk (James, the other one is fine).
LD is very very silly, but it works for me — not as a canonical set of events (Mariner is even less suitable a personality for a ship officer than is Burnham, and in the same way I can head-cannon all Q episodes as "Q is actually Barclay on the holodeck having a power fantasy", most of the main four cast feel to me like students LARPing trek on a holodeck), but rather I like it because the tries to "yes, and…" the show's existing cannon in ways that mostly work and the characters are fundamentally decent to each other 95% of the time (and when not, justified).
* Perhaps "crimes against humanity" would be a closer take, or whatever the term should be in a not-just-humans universe
** and Section 31 whose critical response is so low that I forgot it existed rather than watch it, and only remembered the existence of when looking at Wikipedia to check if Nemesis was even or odd
I think that while each show was different, all the Star Trek shows from TOS to VOY had a certain feel to them that made them feel consistent. Yes TOS was more swashbuckling and DS9 was more interested in continuity and shades of grey, but they all were similar in that they were thoughtful shows where teams of competent professionals solved problems in the context of a generally positive vision for humanity, all while trying to offer moral dilemmas for the viewer to wrestle with.
But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution.
It is a very damning statement that the best (and for a while, only) modern show to live up to Star Trek is The Orville, which isn't even a Star Trek show! But say what you will about him, Seth MacFarlane gets Star Trek and he loves it (unlike Alex Kurtzman, may he never get another TV series). So he made something which (comedy tone aside) could easily be a successor to the Star Trek shows of old.
The only exception to the dismal trend is SNW, at least the first season. I haven't gotten around to watching more yet, but that show was what CBS should've been making all along instead of the garbage that was DIS and PIC. Suddenly we are explorers in the positive future, we are competent professionals again... it's actually a worthy Star Trek for once. I would say I think that some of the casting choices aren't always great (their Kirk is... not suited to the role), and I would enjoy if they could move further away from the action show tropes and have more thoughtful writing (though not preachy please, I'll take dumb action over the writers preaching to me). That is why I said Star Trek has largely sucked, because SNW is an exception. But in general I have felt like the current creative staff doesn't understand Star Trek at all and can't make a good show to save their lives.
> But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution.
I've not noticed a difference in the preaching, TBH, but otherwise yes.
And also that PIC took many interesting side characters from TNG, and used them as redshirts. Maddox, Hugh, Icheb, Shelby… and both Picard and Data in season 1 — and worse for both. Data because Data was (a) brought back the wrong way (should've been him in B4's body properly and not the simulation), and (b) that version of him wasn't given an appropriate reason for seeking his own death, and they really could've done it quite easily by writing that Data to have a plot point of ~ "I don't want my friends to die, I will choose death again to save them". Picard because it was such a missed opportunity, not only to give Patrick Stewart the same makeup that Brent Spiner had had for all those years, but also because Q said he still had a synthetic body in season 2 and yet they had him getting a "neural stabiliser" for "his brain".
> Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world.
This is really the main thing wrong with almost all modern entertainment - writers won't let you analyze anything themselves for fear that you will come to the "wrong" conclusions.
I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot.
Yes, a bunch of nerds (10k?, 20k?) worldwide forced someone's PC used as a server to crash. Their views surely represent the views of a country with ~~50M population, right?
Very big in Germany imo. I came back from school and always watched back to back TNG and MacGyver. TNG and DS9 were big and aired nationally. My father grew up with Kirk & Spock and most people who were children in that generation and had access to a TV know the show, because there was not much else on TV. He's not a nerd at all :)
I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.
From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat bigger there.
There's a Swedish Star Trek-themed band that has been continually active since 1988 and are popular enough that they still do festivals in Sweden, Germany and other European countries every year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.P.O.C.K
Adding to the comments: Not an American, but like others here watched TNG every day after school, and TOS before that. Many other people my age did, for example my wife.
BTW, we have watched with our sons all of TNG and DS9 for the last 3 years, and our eldest is now deeply familiar with Star Trek as a result. Very few of his peers are familiar with it, though.
Really? I must have grown up in an alternative universe. Star Trek TOS and TNG were aired on our local TV station in the 80s and 90s, IIRC even in the afternoon. I would be extremely surprised if I'd meet a 30+ person who grew up here (European country) and didn't know Star Trek.
I haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds like a (good) summary of exactly what the article is saying. It makes me wonder what, if anything, you feel is different from the way you put it and the way it is explained in the article? As a layman they seem the same to me.
I meant that the parent comment to mine was a good summary of the article.
However, the comment was worded as if it meant to highlight some difference between how the article summarized the paper and what the paper is actually saying. Since I couldn't see a difference between the above poster's summary and that in the article, I was curious what I was missing.
On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right.
Instead of a guard there's a scanner by the exit gate where you scan your ticket. In my case just a small stub since the actual ticket is sent digitally.
I think it works so smoothly, much better than before this system was introduced. My recent experience buying groceries in Belgium was very similar.
Here in sweden it is not "the norm" by any definition of "norm". Also it's incredibly slower and not "one blip away".
And the scanner to exit is terrible for fire safety and accessibility. Also I've seen it break with the result that you had to trigger the alarm to leave.
It does not work smoothly at all, but perhaps you live in a different sweden than I.
In sweden you have to unpack and re-pack at the checkout. And if you have a backpack you can't place stuff inside it. No. You have to unpack, place everything on a scale and then place everything in your backpack again.
And for items like bread or so you need to navigate a number of menus to find it.
And of course you are asked if you are a member, if you'd like to become a member, if you want to do a donation, and a number of other useless questions.
That's just self checkout. Some places, like Ica, have self scanning which works so much better. You just scan the bar code as you pick things up - which is just in one motion as you put things in your bag. No need to unpack as you pay.
Yes you do need to be a member to use the system, but that's a very small price to pay for the convenience and speed of avoiding all lines and stress of the regular checkout.
Sweden is a big country so I could definitely be wrong about how things look across it. However, in the greater Gothenburg area every Ica I've visited has it - that includes everything from big ones in the city and shopping malls to small ones in the suburbs 30km outside the city (where I live).
British supermarkets mostly require the use of their app to self-scan. You need to either use your phone or use your app to start the scanner. Once you have done that it works OK. A bit error prone.
The other problem is that, like self checkout, it often requires human intervention (buying alcohol or high value items, for examples) still requires human intervention. This can require a long wait at the end. I once got so sick of waiting that I left my shopping and walked away and went somewhere else.
A friend showed me that the latest game I had worked on was hilariously mistranslated. It's originally "Need For Speed: Payback" but got translated to "behöver du hastighet: återbetalning" which would be more like "do you need speed: reimbursement"
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