librasteve

very Rendezvous with Rama

fwiw I recently tried this with ChatGPT. The result (https://bil-lang.org) came after I dumped the LLM as a name suggester. As a checker and idea source it was fine. The language name space is quite crowded!

I have come slowly to the view that LLMs are very good at this kind of thing and we can use them very productively. I’m tempted to say that this is optimal human+LLM collaboration.

TTL4?

even when the underlying language is widely used (in this case, Rust) I think there is a case to coin a new language when (i) there is a bunch of new stuff, (ii) it ain’t gonna be adopted wholesale by the core team and (iii) it has a coherent toolchain and (iv) it makes promises to coders that are stable over time. Disclosure, I am the author of https://bil-lang.org that pulls the same trick as an extension / transpiler targeting golang

As the video points out, there is a hardware/software feedback loop at play here. Since the hardware is deeply pipelined SIMD FPU datapath, the software is hand tuned machine coded transformations. In addition to limiting flexibility (every variation has to be ground out in CUDA), this prevents sparse matrix type optimisations. I predict that a set of general purpose CPUs - non shared memory at this scale - would be a much better use of transistor/power. And you can code that at high level give a CSP style approach such as https://bil-lang.org

Inspired by the recent post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49856988#49862080

I really enjoyed this article, highly recommended.

It inspired me to create a similar post for the Bil concurrency model: https://bil-lang.org/bil-concurrency-distilled/

kudos for going open source … good business decision too

human brains are soon to be overtaken

coors light

the demand for bandwidth is infinite… this used to mean copper -> fibre, but it’s that squared for orbital bandwidth, as they lower and close up the sat formation, the antenna gets smaller and the data rate gets faster … I think Musk killing all terrestrial telcos is quite likely

haha … this is precisely the kind of project that https://bil-lang.org is aimed at: Go for parallel (ie in this case pipeline processing).

don’t get too excited until we get the TinyGo backend built though ;-)

ok … I’ll play ball. I really like your idea and the demo is very convincing. I already use Apple Notes as my daily driver over Obsidian, Bear and the others because I do not want to pay $$ per month just to sync notes between iPhone and Mac. However, I would much prefer a native md option over whatever proprietary rtf stuff that Notes does. So I am your perfect target user.

Show me a well designed md centric notes taker that uses my own drive, syncs between Apple devices, has no subscription and I am listening.

So I scrolled (and scrolled) through your website to find the pricing section, and finally unearthed your very cryptic note about paying for the power option that allows me to sync. This raises three red flags to me:

  1. it is hidden and is similar to typical trick clauses that many software products vendors play … you reserve the right to hold back a key feature and make it payable

  2. it is cryptic - as you say your product is free on my devices and on web and it is shareable … maybe I can use dropbox to sync, but maybe not … now I have to invest effort to test the limits

  3. nothing prevents you from drawing the line quite high for now, but then playing more and more stuff behind your paywall over time, forgive me but (1) has already lowered my trust in you

Now - thank you for offering me a free subscription for one year … but I don’t want to strand a years’ worth of my notes behind a proprietary paywall. This tells me that (i) your intent is to take my money and (ii) you don’t understand my objection. So no thanks for the free puppy.

So here now, I am out. To get me in, you need to win back my trust. Not easy. But your product is very cool. So I make you a counter offer:

  1. make your product free for ever including synching across the Apple ecosystem to all personal users

  2. look at a product like BBEdit and adopt their freemium model where business users must pay a fair fee and it is enforced via a self declaration or maybe where folk want to collaborate with 3+ colleagues or something (I want you to make money, but I will not pay a subscription for device synching a text editor)

  3. open source your code so I can fork and build myself if you go under a bus

  4. make your policy clear and upfront (a pricing section with free vs paid comparison would be good)

hmmm … I so want to use this … but the webpage buries this

  Is it really free?
  Yes. The editor and local files stay free, with no account   
  required. Beauty Maximus is an optional subscription for 
  keeping a library current across Apple devices and for meeting
  notes that transcribe and summarize on device.

so not free as in open source, nor free as in beer either

I agree when it comes to multicore machines. But going further to perform parallel computing across processors with no shared memory is not well supported in naive Go.

https://bil-lang.org aims to address this gap … I wrote a post about Bil’s adjustments to Go here https://bil-lang.org/blog/rethinking-classical-concurrency-p...

back in the day, i worked for Energis (#3 wholesale telco in the UK) … we had about 2.2m active subscribers and ran a fibre backbone.

one day the backbone (E1 bidirectional ring iirc) was broken north of london … my boss drove out to find that travellers had entered the field, opened the inspection cover in the ground, stood a pole for their clothes line and filled with cement

very savvy, he didn’t let on that we had about £1m revenue per day close to collapse and convinced them to hang their clothes somewhere else (perhaps a few quid changed hands)

NATS is the main UK air traffic control service

ah yes, I stand corrected

the 1064 was the vanilla IEEE P754 64-bit pipeline and the 1067 added Intel bus interface

at Weitek, we built the 1167 at about the same time as the 80287, we lined up compiler guys such as Green Hills to support our alternative coprocessor ASM (the instruction bus was memory mapped in the 80286 address space IIRC) … several folks would hand code inner loops eg for LINPACK, but already by this time the compiler tech was important to fully use the pipeline … loop unrolling, dead code elimination and so on.

nope

Please ban chess playing computers. -signed members of the chess federation

oh, so that’s where all the aliens are … up and cruising around at .99g

I recall that most Tory voters in the 1980s were "sold" on the idea of privatisation (and had real horror stories in relation to eg phone line installation delays).

One of the ideas was to widen share ownership to the average bloke. Sure - that never happened (although many average pensioners maybe hold Macquarie via an investment fund).

This "class" actually, in general, are very angry about regulatory capture and we blame the class of woke bien pensant "leaders" who back scratch and go in and out of the media, the lobby, the civil service, NGOs and the privatised utilities scratching each others' backs and telling us all we are idiots. [Rory Stewart being their patron saint]

I hate how the UK sewage system has failed. I agree that a good share of the blame lies with the for profit asset stripping owners. But just blaming 1980s Thatcher privatisation lets the government off the hook. The regulators (Ofwat and the Environment Agency) have watched this happen from the sidelines and failed to apply the law. Every “non exceptional” spill is a criminal offence with potential jail term, including actions of corporate conspiracy. The are 10,000s river and sea spills per year. Where is the punitive action? Why are the perps walking free? This is the soft corruption of the lobby and revolving door appointments (head of a water company one year, boss of the EA the next). Sure the only way to fix it now is (uncompensated) nationalisation, but the regulators have failed to anpply the regulations and are as much to blame.

AI jokes would be funnier methinks

yes, I’m so delighted by this quality content I want to up my licence fee

I fancy making a custom ARM or RISC-V chip design, is AI any good for that?

we visited old friends a couple of years ago (we lived in SF in the late 80s) … knowing the city quite well we decided to take BART from SFO downtown. our first notable experience of the decline was a drug user injecting on the BART station platform as our train pulled in. not sure I would point a finger at the removal of cars!

and Aristotle