building Pop, the future of voice messaging
Wiltshire
Joined January 2014
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Virtual memory is the greatest piece of computer engineering since the Von Neumann architecture.
Fine-grained multi-threading* on GPUs might be similarly good.
*low-cost context switch on every instruction
Since Turing (2018) and at least RDNA/CDNA (2019/20), AMD and NVidia GPUs are bags of scalar and vector units, a giant register file that your instruction stream gets a slice of and a scheduler that executes one instruction stream that is ready (e.g. its memory read is done) at a time, per something a bit like a "core" (roughly an nvidia SM subpartition or AMD CU), per small N clock cycles.
On AMD it really is like that: your program is real scalar and vector instructions, going to real scalar and vector hardware. NVidia is a little different: the asm is all scalar (implicitly vector) + uniform (really actually scalar for real) instructions, with an independent program counter per *lane*, these are then spread on to the scalar and vector hardware by a scheduler, meaning that individual lanes can often "slip" and make progress even when other lanes are blocked waiting for e.g. a lock or memory. Helps avoid deadlocks between lanes.
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Find me a definition of âartâ that excludes AI-heavy workflows, but includes film direction, photography, conceptual art (e.g. banana taped to a wall) and the classical arts (music, painting etc). Doesnât seem possible.
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Remember all those meeting you had to do, before you had agents doing all the work? Yeah you still need to do most of those meetings.
Iâm in a ârevise our coding practicesâ meeting with Claude and I hate it. But it has to be done.
And donât even get me started about customersâŚ
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Having agents formalise their designs in Lean is worth it even if youâre not using something more end-to-end like Bend.
In the past this wasnât worth it because a) writing the proof was too laborious, b) comparing implementation to proof was too laborious and c) changing proofs was too expensive for relatively small code changes.
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Did you know that @NHS 111 will refuse to advise wrt onward services if you canât provide an exact address, a specific building name - which you must be certain of, âcanât be a guessâ and must be in sight - for your current location?
Not much use for a lot of the land area of the uk. Or if you just donât happen to know & lack mobile data coverage.
Of course one just makes something up to free the operator to help, but itâs depressing to deal with such things.
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John Colvin retweeted
*deep breath*
people think I'm joking when I tell them that to develop taste for software they need to have brunch with their friends, watch old movies and find old records, walk around metropolitan cities and observe how the building styles lend to the personality of the people around them, but I'm so fkin dead serious. where else is this mythical "taste" going to come from? what are you doing to parse the human condition? mf you can barely decide what discomfort you're subjecting yourself to in finding out what you like/dislike, and I'm supposed to trust you to make decisions for millions of people? go do some pottery and come back to me and describe the joy you felt without faffing about curves or whatever, I need you to feel the clay under your fingernails and fall in love with mud. even steve had the decency to drop acid on a sweaty beach in goa to find himself, the least you can do is listen to your friends talk about their lives over a meal without getting distracted by your phone.
*exhale*
Increasingly, making anything - music, art, software, silicon, a house⌠- will become conducting & steering a search of latent space with added elements from outside.
I made this with one prompt using Opus 5.5
I spoke to my computer for 5mins, claude worked for 12 hours, and I woke up to this
full prompt:
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Anyone else getting weird "self-check hypothesis" traces in Union Alpha? Talking about unrelated (other people's?!?!) work.
"That hypothesis concerns a different task; no Sketch document or reference images are involved here."
"That hypothesis names a different repository; I wonât make Rust changes or commit here."
yeah no shit this a repo full of lean.
Noticed with @OpenRouter and @opencode providers.
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deleting because realised the thread in question wasn't actually using opencode zen/go, it was openrouter.
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Gemini 3.8 flash is a complete PITA but itâs great to have a less correlated model to find new angles. Everything else smart gets in the same ruts for me right now, Gemini breaks out.
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