readonlybarbie

if you are targeting more than one specific platform, do you like, include the immintrin.h header and use #ifdef to conditionally use avx512 if it's available on someone's platform?

so then, if i want my code to "explicitly" use avx512, i have to do something like this?

``` void myNotOptimizedThing(my_data* d){ _SPECIAL_CPU_MANUFACTURER_0X3D512(d); } ```

edit: and include some header from the manufacturer most likely?

thanks for that! so it sounds like, if i purchase a chip that supports avx512, and run an operating system and compiler that supports avx512, i can write "plain old c code" with a minimal amount of compiler arguments and compile that code on my machine (aka not just running someone else's binary). and then the full power of avx512 is right there waiting for me? :)

Noob question- must one write avx512 assembly directly by hand, or is this something a c compiler would do for you?

In the event that you don't purchase any physical parts for making controllable robots, you'll find similarities in programming game physics, which really is just a simulation of the world we live in and how to propell an object around that world.

Very interesting perspective, considering that iirc, failure to report the specific crime of child sex trafficking / rape is a crime itself.

I think we've hit the point where trying to point fingers at certain ideologies is yielding, well, absolutely 0 returns.

If someone has no solutions and only excuses, it doesn't really help the situation anymore, and the area will continue to be a less than desirable place to raise children

Attention any quant firms-- I'll do it for 250k, 80 hours a week, 24/7 on call, fire me if I don't deliver satisfactory results.

10 years of experience in Cpp, Java, Javascript, Python, SQL, the last 5 of which as a lead (aka designing the data model and optimizing slow parts of the code base through better ds and algo implementations).

Only catch is I won't show up physically in NY or Philly or Chicago, etc.

While I agree all of these scenarios are good reasons to leave, I have a feeling (based on being an American for all 30 years of my life now), these answers would be classified as "TOO REAL" and as a result you might be filtered for "culture fit" aka manager doesn't think he/she can control you.

What you are describing at the old company is not a failure of old tools, but rather a failure of management/employee self-management at that company.

Any tool can be used to do good or evil. They were using old tools to do evil things-- namely, writing bad code.

The only caveat here is that if I had to maintain bad bash scripts or bad koobieboobie cicd automated shlalala, I'd always choose bad bash scripts, as the blast radius is smaller and easier to reason about.

How can we more effectively show a robot that circular objects with a certain position, scale, rotation, mass, color/pattern, or an arbitrary label ("that thing over there") is what we want? Seems like a fun question to solve.

They've been plugging it elsewhere for quite some time now.

The first interesting thing I'm told is that real biological neurons operate as booleans in the real world, whereas in computer land I'm told it is preferable to use float neurons. I suppose that you could chain biology neurons together in groups to achieve float-like behavior.

So that's just one small example that we don't need AGI to be a model of the real human brain, with synapses and blood-brain barriers and everything. Rather, we just need one system to do n number of tasks at roughly the same level as a human for it to be "general". Maybe it's not AGI, but it also is not a hardcoded robotic arm that can only work with square objects of a certain dimension.

If you had a robot that was pretrained in a virtual world, assembled in the real world, and then it begins testing and observing and resolving its own physical capabilities (moving arms and legs to stand and jump and backflip)... and then it also had a vision system to scan for threats and objectives... and then it also could resolve text and voice prompts to learn its next objective ("go get my favorite beer can from the fridge")... and the robot knows to ask you more questions to learn what your favorite beer is and also it knows how to preserve its own life in case the dog attacks it or the fridge topples over on it... then I think you have an extremely useful tool that will change the world, regardless of if it is labeled as AGI or not.

Totally agree. Better to evaluate something by its array of capabilities, rather than if it fits a label that has a murky definition :)

I think the key word in that quote is "any" intellectual task. I don't think we are far from solving all of the mobility and vision-related tasks.

I am more concerned though if the definition includes things like philosophy and emotion. These things can be quantified, like for example with AI that plays poker and can calculate the aggressiveness (range of potential hands) of the humans at the table rather than just the pure isolated strength of their hand. But it seems like a very hard thing to generally quantify, and as a result a hard thing to measure and program for.

It sounds like different people will just have different definitions of AGI, which is different from "can this thing do the task i need it to do (for profit, for fun, etc)"

Ok, so now we just have to define "AGI" then. A robot, which knows its physical capabilities, which can see the world around it through a frustrum and identifies objects by position, velocity, rotation, which understands the passage of time and can predict future positions for example, which can take text input and translate that into a list of steps it needs to execute, which is functionally equivalent to an Amazon warehouse employee, we are saying is not AGI.

What is an AGI then?

Agreed, but I also wonder if this is a "necessary" requirement. A robot, perhaps pretrained in a highly accurate 3d physics virtual simulation, which has an understanding of how it can move itself and others in the world, and how to accomplish text defined tasks, is already extremely useful and much more general than an image classificiation system. It is so general, in fact, that it would begin reliably replacing jobs.

This is an interesting comment. I agree that I hear the "all we need is 86 billion neurons and we will habe parity with the human brain", and I feel it is dubious to think this way because there is no reason why this arbitrary number must work.

I also think it is a bit strange to use the human brain as an analogy because biological neurons supposedly are booleans and act in groups to achieve float level behavior. For example I can have neurologic pain in my fingers that isn't on off, but rather, has differences in magnitude.

I think we should move away from the biology comparisons and just seek to understand if "more neurons = more better" is true, and if it is, how do we shove more into RAM and handle the exploding compute complexity.

As a professional programmer and a relatively optimistic AGI enthusiast, why would the current ML methods not work, given sufficient CPU/RAM/GPU/latency/bandwidth/storage?

In theory, as long as you can translate your inputs and outputs to an array of floats, a neural network can compute anything. The required number of neurons might not fit into the world's best RAM, and the required number of weights and biases for those neurons might not be quickly calculated by a CPU/GPU however.

Agreed, with the only caveat being, there is a chance that the current favorable market conditions for programmers disappears.

There might come a day where companies believe that the value of slapping a few potentially buggy libraries together is not worth $xxx,xxx per year. I for one kind of hope that companies return to buying/contracting well-defined finish products with small external studios rather than throwing money at W2 developers like us. I think the software quality will be higher, and the risk of our jobs being outsourced lower, wherher rightfully so or not.

I was very confused as to why people had believed that passport control and property registrar records had less weight in an investigation compared to a pizza box.

Which is kind of a shame, to be honest. I would dare say that even x86 assembly is less complicated to understand than many of these libraries, where time is spent trying to memorize their semantics rather than understanding how data is modified and how systems communicate with each other.

It is true that a lot of platform specific nastiness and complicated math occurs in some of these libraries which is not necessary for a user to learn. But for those desiring to learn "what's happening under the hood", the code should not make an effort to needlessly obscure this from them by way of complicated syntax, poor interface design, academic naming practices, and big unwieldy spaghetti classes.