A clock that's 5 seconds, 5 minutes, or 5 hours ahead, or counts an hour as 61 minutes, is still more useful than a clock that does not move it's hands at all.
I am curious how the last algorithm is an order of magnitude faster than the one based on sorting. There is no benchmark data, and ideally there should be data for different mesh sizes, as that affects the timing a lot (cache vs RAM).
I work on https://github.com/elalish/manifold which works with triangular meshes, and one of the slowest operations we currently have is halfedge pairing, I am interested in making it faster.
We are already using parallel merge sort for the stable sort, switching to parallel radix sort which works well on random distribution is not helping and I think we are currently bandwidth bound. If building an edge list for each vertex can improve cache locality and reduce bandwidth, that will be very interesting.
While I think the OP did not mean the compilation process is nondeterministic, I won't be surprised if it is actually non-deterministic.
A lot of algorithms and data structures rely on nondeterminism for performance or security (by default). It is too easy to introduce nondeterminism accidentally, and it is tempting to use that to speed up algorithms.
Also, if it relies on floating point, results on different machines and environments may be different (depending on libm and hardware implementation), which is, in some sense, nondeterministic.
> A lot of algorithms and data structures rely on nondeterminism for performance or security (by default). It is too easy to introduce nondeterminism accidentally.
You don't know what you're talking about - no compiler engineer in their right mind would intentionally use a randomized algorithm in a compiler. It's a bug every single time and it gets squashed immediately.
While it is decidable, people typically never produce optimal programs even for the hot path. It is just intractable and too slow to do right now.
For register allocation and instruction selection, there is hope because it is FPT and there are algorithms to do it optimally in polynomial time, albeit with a large constant factor (FPT), making it impractical to apply to compilers as of today. For instruction scheduling, it is just too hard. If you read literature on scheduling algorithms, it is NP-hard for apparently simple instances, e.g., 2 parallel identical machines with no preemption and bounding completion time (https://www2.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/knust/class/), while actual microarchitecture is much more complicated than this...
Needless to say, these are already the simpler problems. The longer the program or the more profiling data you can optimize for, the more tricks you can throw at it, and most of them are NP-hard to optimize optimally.
Being NP-hard doesn't imply that you can't obtain the optimal result, but compilers that I know of do not implement them, because most users are not willing to wait for days for such a compilation to complete. Ideally, one should make something that can run on clusters of CPUs or GPUs to optimize this, and people having those clusters will typically be willing to do this because they want to optimize the program they later run on the clusters. However, to my knowledge, no one is working on this at the moment.
While you are right that in general it may be very difficult or quasi-impossible to generate optimal programs, there are also plenty of cases where an optimal program is achievable.
The latter happens when there is one dominant bottleneck for the algorithm, which is determined by the hardware, e.g. the maximum throughput of a certain instruction, like multiplication or memory load. When the implemented program reaches a throughput almost equal with that absolute limit, then one can be certain of its optimality.
Matrix multiplies are typically compute bound, but you don't get much option to improve the actual algorithm because Nvidia gives you an accelerator for one and anything else would be slower.
Will they really get paid less? The feeling I have now is that people are paid a lot not because of what they do, but because of the potential damage they can do in case they fucked up. E.g. CEOs, lawyers, etc. Moving some of the work to AI doesn't reduce the risk, so they should have the same pay in my mental model.
Plus C-level executives typically don't lower their pay, and IMO investors apparently don't care that much about their pay, I can't see a reason why their pay will be reduced (significantly).
Not an artist myself. I think some artists may become more like head chefs in some Chinese restaurant, who is more like QA and give direction to cooks to improve their work. I think it is hard to notice the details and give concrete feedback if you are not working on it professionally for a long time.
This is probably true. I've noticed some people have better critical eye with the AI output than others. People with artistic skill can make stuff of much higher quality, it seems. I guess they get immediately bored of the default settings which compose most of the low-quality slop being pushed around.
There are many issues here. The lack of incentives is probably the most important one. For new professors (in research universities), good teaching is usually just a good thing to have, but it is not a deciding factor for their tenure. When they get their tenure, they probably have enough students, and they need to work hard to apply for funding and keep the students paid. Administrators care most about ranking, and teaching isn't really evaluated in the ranking. They just push the professors to do more research and apply for more funding.
It is also hard to evaluate university teaching because there are no benchmarks for that (compared with high school, for example), and it is hard to judge if teaching is good from student feedback. You can only know if someone fucked up or did really well, which are outliers.
There are other issues as well. Professor IMO is a ridiculous job, you are supposed to be an expert in the field, be a researcher, be a manager, be a teacher, be a salesman, all at the same time. There are people who can excel in all these, but these are probably just outliers. It doesn't help when PhD training doesn't train you to be a proper manager and teacher. While there are some teaching training, I think we are not really held to a high enough standard. E.g. One can pass the teaching course if they just show up and spend some time, even though their teaching is horrible.
It probably also means that companies will not do it: It seems impossible to keep the tariff this high for years, and Trump will only stay in office for a few years...
Trump has been replacing anyone who would realistically force him out with flunkies as his first order of business. No one is getting rid of him in a few years.
His term ends in a few years. At that point he’s either replaced, maybe with the same kind of person (the US people have showed their hand with these elections), or he stays in place somehow.
Are you hinting at the second scenario? Then we’ll get to see what US democracy is about, or if those people hoarding guns to fight an undemocratic or abusive government were just overcompensating, as it looks like today.
Trump’s term ends with a high probability of a Democrat being elected to clean up his mess, as happened in 2020 and 2008. He will almost certainly lose congress in the midterm unless he can somehow suspend the election (all bets are off if the constitution falls).
Or his exec order asserting that the 2020 election was stolen and targeting former CISA head Chris Krebs for not lying to that effect in his security evaluations of the voting systems.
I really don't want MAGA people watching who I vote for. I'm sure you see logic in that? Also, I love vote by mail, I appreciate it as much as the residents of red state Utah who also appreciate that.
lol so you are ok with the party you oppose skipping votes for your party because it happened behind closed doors and poll watchers / challengers are not allowed in.
And yet it democratic voting areas it’s democrats who are blocking poll watchers and challengers or are suspect of voter fraud when they don’t close voting or have suitcases randomly show up and quickly shuffled in.
It’s only democratic areas who don’t want voter id.
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