R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
@brouhaha CPU vendors don't like exceptions
R. A. Dehi
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𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘦 𝘢 10𝘧𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘐’𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 12𝘧𝘵 𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘳!
Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.
You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter
The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
This site shows you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
@raph Parallel prefix sum with non-commutative monoids is underappreciated.
R. A. Dehi
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Satisfying work for the day. One of the items in the Vello pipeline where profiling revealed performance could be improved was computing the bounding boxes of paths. I was using atomic min/max for each path segment to compute bbox union, and that was expensive (1.3ms for paris-30k on M1 Max).
I figured out a way to do it with monoids instead of atomics, and it's now 400µs. The trick is "segmented reduction" which works amazingly well.
I might blog this, but not sure yet; other things to do.
@raph You mean, if you're doing prefix sum with addition, you have to add the base for the workgroup to all the 256 or however many items are in the workgroup, but in this case the min/max from the previous workgroup only propagates up to the first path end, and ultimately you only care about the values at path ends?
@raph Neat, I never read the whole paper but I might have read that part.
@raph Hmm, but by itself monoid scan (APL scan, right? prefix sum) will give you maxes or mins from before the previous path end. I guess you need a weird max (or min) that takes the path-end bit into account, so that max(End(3), NotEnd(2)) is NotEnd(2), and then any standard prefix sum algorithm gives you the right answer?
A fictional dystopia either dies a dystopia or lives long enough to see others regard it as a utopia.
@SexyCyborg Haha, this is awesome!
@raph This is doing the reduction with min/max in a minimal-depth tree instead of starting from one end?
Doesn't sound too hairy, even though you called the project Vello.
R. A. Dehi
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the problem with "let's just ask the user for permission" is that apps will treat it like a war of attrition
maybe in a better world, notifications would only happen when the app/browser page was open. so if you write a spammy app, you'd end up with almost no screen space for other things
meanwhile well behaved apps, users should be allowed to promote notifications to global ones, be it permanently, or just for a set time, and an app shouldn't be able to tell if that's happening or not
R. A. Dehi
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@michael_nielsen Btw, I consider any type of axiomatic characterization in mathematics as a form of discovery fiction.
For example, Shannon entropy was characterized by Faddeev as the only continuous function from probability distributions to real numbers that satisfies a very natural chain rule.
I first learned about this from a nice paper by Leinster:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06961
R. A. Dehi
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Okay, we know... We made fun of Adobe when its cloud service went down. We've made fun of Corel Painter and Clip Studio. We joined in the protest No AI Generated Images protest. We made our stance on NFT's clear. But this is beyond making fun of. This is EW! EW! EW!
R. A. Dehi
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@krita wow, it's almost like Stallman was right all along, when he warned decades ago, that proprietary software can and will spy on its users.
And everyone were saying "that's crazy talk, why would anyone want to spy on MY stuff???".
R. A. Dehi
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I keep saying journalists should leave Twitter and use Mastodon, which is better for them in every way. At TechDirt I've posted a somewhat lengthy why-and-how: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journalists-and-others-should-leave-twitter-heres-how-they-can-get-started/
R. A. Dehi
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“Not your keys, not your coins” now has legal precedent. The judge in Celsius’ bankruptcy hearing ruled that the deposits in yield-bearing Earn accounts belong to Celsius, not the individual holders of those accounts.
Won’t this cause a run on exchanges?
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/04/celsius-bankruptcy-earn-accounts
@afilina Yeah, is a good point. Think we'll make it in 20 years.
R. A. Dehi
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every website that handles private information should do what Discord does in the javascript console
R. A. Dehi
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I remember how excited I was in the nineties, thinking that a shaggy, open, unpredictable, democratic internet had triumphed over AOL and the other closed commercial networks. Then came surveillence-driven social media.
Could a phoenix be rising from the ashes of Twitter?
R. A. Dehi
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@neauoire i made a PL called rever, and the way division was implemented was by calculating both the dividend (I think that's the name; basically the whole number portion) and the remainder. it was a procedure called divmod, which took the 3 inputs (total, zero, divisor) and returned 3 outputs (remainder, dividend, divisor), the running it backwards would give you multiply-add. that's the only way I could see to implement multiplication and division reversibly.
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
