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dermesser

107 karma · joined July 22, 2021

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dermesser··on GPU vendor-agnostic fluid dynamics solver in Julia
It turns out that Julia is ~a lisp, just with a weird syntax. If you look at the metaprogramming facilities, all expressions are first turned into s-exprs while parsing. There is no problem having a LISP syntax for Julia, and in fact this has been implemented! (https://github.com/swadey/LispSyntax.jl)

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/

dermesser··on Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers
Yes, I'm not saying it's not possible, but real time abilities were likely one of the least important aspects of Julia's design... So why shoehorn it into something it's not been designed for
dermesser··on Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers
Of course, but other than in C++ you need to use ways and means to achieve this - never hitting u compiled code - that are not very natural to Julia. Yes it may be possible to compile Julia code to binaries, but it obviously is neither straightforward nor widely used.
dermesser··on Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers
This is not true at all! Julia usually being JIT-compiled makes it very unsuitable for real time applications (and there's no reason why it should be great for it). GC is the least issue here, and I say that as a fan and daily user of Julia.
dermesser··on NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company
The idea that news could be "unbiased" is wrong. The fact that this is run by AI and called "unbiased" borders on ridiculous.
dermesser··on How close are we to the holy grail of room-temperature superconductors?
MRIs or anything with very high magnetic field requirements become a lot easier to build once you don't need to cool them down as much. Inversely, Generators etc. would benefit.

Magnetic levitation (Meissner-Ochsenfeld) would also not require such low temperatures.

Even Quantum computing using superconducting qubits might become easier (although there, superconductivity is not the main reason for low temperatures).

"Only" better conductivity is a big deal, after all.

dermesser··on The four-horse race to decarbonise steel
Had they done what you say, by now they still would not have decided on a location. Just look at the delays and cost overruns with Finland's reactor - and that's with popular support.
dermesser··on The four-horse race to decarbonise steel
Yes, the confusing issue is that iron-in-your-house or as a building material generally has a higher carbon content than steel, making the latter more elastic and less brittle (generally).
dermesser··on Switzerland Weighs Full or Partial Credit Suisse Nationalization
This is backwards. The government created the money, it is us who need it (to pay taxes). The government doesn't need taxes, as it is the origin of the money.
dermesser··on Switzerland Weighs Full or Partial Credit Suisse Nationalization
This is false, and doubly so in this case. There is no taxpayer money involved that would go missing elsewhere. Central bank money - which is free - is what props up the deal.
dermesser··on Switzerland Weighs Full or Partial Credit Suisse Nationalization
As criminal as the CS bank(st)ers are, these losses are made up by what is essentially play money (central bank guarantees etc.)...

Again, depositors are saved and stock owners essentially lose all (given the low purchase price). So, whatever, I guess

dermesser··on Analyzing multi-gigabyte JSON files locally
I can recommend Julia for easier parallelization while being reasonably Python-like. It's compiled, too, which helps even with single-threaded throughput.
dermesser··on Viable superconducting material created in Rochester lab
Material stress doesn't work like a soda can. Epitaxial thin films are stressed by an underlying lattice, for example, not by being squeezed in some container. These stresses can be very high (although i don't know the order of magnitude off the top of my head)
dermesser··on Building a new functional programming language
Correctness in a program is a bit like Partition-tolerance in distributed systems, isn't it?

It's not an option to write (too) incorrect software, even if doing so is a lot faster. At the end of the day, the software needs to do its work.

dermesser··on Building a new functional programming language
I agree it lacks all of these things, but in scientific computing - at the current state - it is already ahead of fortran, python, and C++ in terms of convenience. Precompilation doesn't matter as much here, and the packaging and JIT compilation as well as relatively simple FFI are making one's life a lot easier.

And NB, python also doesn't offer many of these features, such as dependency management and simple single-binary builds. Yet it's popular.

dermesser··on Plutonium: The most dangerous substance known to man?
...or strip-mine Africa for Uranium, as France does?

And defining any operators of nuclear plants with serious accidents as low-IQ, as you imply, is very convenient - yet doesn't make any sense.

dermesser··on Ask HN: Plans for Weathering the Tech Recession?
Where does the policy originate? If from e.g. polls, then the policy is directly influenced by opinion which often comes from hearing other opinions.
dermesser··on Ask HN: Plans for Weathering the Tech Recession?
This is untrue, for example for energy or rent: if energy prices or rent increase, almost everything will also suffer from increased prices, as energy and rent go into almost every product of a modern economy.
dermesser··on Ask HN: Plans for Weathering the Tech Recession?
This is very debatable, and easily disproven - the past decade has seen enormous amounts of money printed, especially but not only in Europe, yet inflation has only started once goods and energy have become scarce. The textbook explanation you have in mind is, if not disproven, severely incomplete.
dermesser··on Ask HN: Plans for Weathering the Tech Recession?
It almost feels like: the more you/we talk about a recession, the more likely/grave it will be. It's got a high potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as recessions often are fear-driven.
dermesser··on The infrastructure behind ATMs
Someone has to bring the cash from the business to the machine, put it in, take it away from there again, and bring fresh cash to the store. That's not free at all.
dermesser··on Is Europe just not good at innovating?
Using machines developed and produced in Europe (ASML, for example). Innovation is not defined by who makes your phone
dermesser··on LevelDB-rs: implementation of LevelDB in Rust
Hi - I'm the author and saw in the traffic stats that this was posted here :)

Just to prevent misunderstandings: I am not in the faction of "reimplement everything in Rust"; I purely did this for my own enjoyment and to learn something about databases.

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