Anyone know when Rust's std::autodiff will become stable? Assuming this Rust support expands to other GPU vendors, autograd will probably be the only reason to use Slang instead of Rust anymore.
I was told in the 2025 LLVM dev meeting that it will always stay in nightly because it's not practical for them to provide long-term stability guarantees that is expected of stable Rust.
Probably because living in PNG sucks and they would rather risk their lives at a chance of improving their condition. Same reason immigrants came from Germany to the US to live in mud dugout houses in the plains. Or immigrants go anywhere really.
I learnt that I must be good at computers when in 4th grade, despite never having touched a PC before, I not only managed to ace my Logo class but was asked by my teacher to help out other struggling students (I am just realising that essentially made me a TA in our class). I still remember trying to understand the Pen Up and Pen Down commands from a book with no immediate access to a PC to try them on.
Maybe that's why they include some sort of screen protector with the device? At least they did with the X4 Pro, did you get that with the X3 as well, and were you using it while it cracked if so?
I've been having mine in a beach bag I'm not too careful with, for about two months, which goes out with me when I swim in the sea, without using the included screen protector, and still no scratches or cracks in mine.
As a non-musician non-Western programmer, the only music book that is making sense to me (still reading) is Robert Snyder's Music and Memory[1]. It's the first book that doesn't trick me by trying to pass cultural artefacts (notes, scales, raga, etc.) as some universal truth, or douse me in medieval pseudo-science (Pythagorean small ratios, etc.)
I am not an expert, so maybe this book has its own shortcomings which I am being blind to. But this is the first book on music I have been able to read this far without having to fight the urge to fling it against a wall.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 are intervals which sound pleasant to the human ear. [1]
Once that is established, as per the linked article, 12-tone equal temperament makes a lot of sense (but isn’t universal, obviously) because it’s resulting tuning gives us a really close 3/2 and 4/3, and having a simple 12-tone scale reasonably in tune everyone can agree on makes sense.
We can then explain that 5/4 and 6/5 are a bit off in 12-tone, but are “good enough” that we tolerate them being slightly out of tune when using equal temperament. Once we accept that 12-tone has imperfect thirds, we can then look at the I IV V chord progression (I IV V comes from 3/2, 5/4, and 4/3 sounding pleasant to the human ear), and explain why that chord progression is so common in western popular music.
These aren’t universal truths—12-tone equal temperament is a compromise, but, as per the linked article, a reasonable one. Just intonation is, of course, another possible compromise.
[1] 2/1: Octave; 3/2: Perfect fifth; 4/3: Perfect fourth; 5/4: Major third; 6/5: Minor third
And in many cases we don't need to tolerate this because most instruments barring guitar and piano allow musicians to tune chords to just temperament, and players will do this automatically and completely subconsciously.
I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone equal temperament has.
The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.
I'm not saying a real, recorded trumpet doesn't make an appreciable sonic difference, but if it were a sampled trumpet "Safe and Sound" would most likely still be a hit.
Attributing it's hit status to the perfect intervals is ignoring all of the other choices (and supporting infrastructure) that go into making a hit. It's like saying that the Dodge Charger was a successful car because the windshield wipers are of a certain make.
“"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying”
>>>The trumpet line in ‘Safe and Sound’, for example, didn’t appear in the production until nine versions into the song. The final version, on a whim, we decided to try using a trumpet, a live trumpet, to play that line and it stuck. We ended up actually using the trumpet a lot throughout the album after we included it in ‘Safe and Sound’.
"It was trial and error, right? We felt like that line was an epic line and we thought about different instruments that sounded epic, and the trumpet is obviously one of them,<<<
The thing about trumpets is this: Their fifth is a little “sharp” because it’s a perfect just intonated fifth (i.e. a perfect 3/2 ratio).
West Asian maqam has 24 notes, Indian classical has 22 notes, Indonesian gamelan has 5 or 7 notes. What would be the ratios that sound pleasurable now?
What is or isn't pleasurable is a matter of cultural training, and treating them as absolute facts is what I found frustrating in the books that I was complaining about.
Indeed. Bobby McFerrin has a demonstration where, regardless of culture, the pentatonic scale is universal. For the record, a just major pentatonic scale is the notes with the intervals (from the root note) 1, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2, and 5/3.
If you like that book, you might also enjoy David Huron's books on voice leading and anticipation. I have not read the book you referenced, but from the description it seems like a similar approach.
Even ignoring Hansson's racism and general assholery, can Linux users please start treating OSes like infrastructure and not like costumes? Just use Mint (or Fedora if feeling adventurous) on PCs and Debian on servers. Nobody can build anything if the ground keeps shifting.
I don't treat OSes like costumes, but I don't see the problem with people doing it? Many times it feels like it's people being enthusiastic about Linux, jumping from one distro to the other, and commenting on which one they prefer. Reminds me of how I was "tuning" my Windows when I was a teenager, installing all kinds of addons that made it "look cool".
> Nobody can build anything if the ground keeps shifting.
I don't see the ground shifting. Most distros are just a skin on top of a mainstream distro (Omarchy is apparently just Arch).
Of course there are many things in the Linux world: people use a variety init systems (systemd, openrc, runit, s6, ...), libc (glibc, musl, ...), userlands (gnu, busybox, ...), display servers (x11, wayland), window managers (gnome, kde, cinnamon, xfce, sway, i3, ...), display managers, sound servers, package managers, file systems, bootloaders, shells, ...
That's just part of being Linux, and people having the freedom to use whatever they want. Sure, most people are not technically capable of building their distro of choice, so they jump between existing wrapper-distros like Omarchy. And that's part of the deal as well.
And who will fix the slop? Not Silicon Valley programs being paid $200K or whatever. We stand on the verge of a golden age of outsourcing in software which will make all previous phases of outsourcing look like trial runs.
I live in what's probably the outsourcing capital of the world (though I thankfully don't work in those body shops).
I don't think there's going to be a rush to outsource. In fact, I suspect that it's quite the opposite scenario going to play out.
Primarily because now that the cost to produce the boring/mundane stuff that is the stuff of outsourcing (internal tooling, dashboards, ERP, integrations, QA etc.), it will likely be much more cost effective to hire 3 devs in the US and give them hefty token budgets and have much easier coordination and communication loops than outsourcing to a Bangalore body shop that will try and bill you 15 engineers for the same work.
In fact, word on the street here is that there's a significant correction in the Bangalore realty market for the first time in history thanks to the IT salaries drying up. [1]
I suspect LLMs are going to have a global worldwide deflationary effect what with white collar salaries at risk. The only counter acting force might be the distortions caused by recent wars and tariff shenanigans of the US government.
But even having said all of that I am hopeful for the eventual benefits human beings can reap from the advent of LLMS. The only thing that keeps me up at night is my lack of faith in the aging gerontocracy (worldwode phenomenon) that all our futures are in the hands of that seems to be ill equipped to handle this period of what is most likely massive upheaval and uncertainty.
I come to conclusion that software source code will be kind of ephemeral output, like binaries are today. If you are not happy about slop accumulation, you take still valid functional requirements, docs, API contracts, test cases, some selection of still valid prompt history, and let better agent rewrite everything from scratch. Even if the session costs $200K one time - that is very cheap even for SMEs.
I really worry about "regressions" in that model. If you regenerate everything all the time. Do you keep issues fixed or constantly end up introducing new issues. Well it might work with absolute total test coverage. Which seems to be very high bar to reach.
Won't this mean that a lot of developers in Silicon Valley will find themselves out of a job? If the competition (AI operators) can sit 8000 miles away and be paid peanuts.
The whole point is that we’re TikToking the software industry and no one will know what to tell the ai to get the software written in a way that works. It’s in principle the same as idiocracy where no one knows how to make burrito covers anymore because shit won’t grow
Probably the other way around. The idea behind outsourcing is that you move the generic labor abroad and keep coordination and control onshore. AI can now do the generic labor for even less, so you'll likely see small onshore teams using AI instead.
AI won't end silicon valley, but could still shrink it significantly.
Unless, of course, new opportunities arise and the economy grows. This is not even unlikely as we've seen amazing growth the last 25 years, even.
In which case your sentiment is probably correct. And now that I think of it, this is potentially very bad news for the outsourcing companies in countries like India. They also have less money to spend on tokens.
it does not have to be patching over the existing system. Of course you need someone experience in the loop, but it is not that someone needs to manually refactor everything by typing every line. One approach that works quite well is like this.
"give me all the specs in a list" -> "which architectural changes would simplify the implementation based of these specs" -> delete everything -> "implement the new specs"
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