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jeanl's comments

jeanl | 2 years ago | on: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

I tried a few of the servers, the pages load very quickly, search is fast etc. But when I click on the play arrow, a long time elapsed before the video starts. Is this expected? (is this because ads are being skipped in the background)?

jeanl | 5 years ago | on: Things I Was Wrong About: Types

One good reason for not caring about types: prototype code. I do a lot of prototyping (trying ideas quickly, not for production). I typically do that in python. In that case, I don't think types would be helping me at all, I can get run-time errors, but I don't really mind, it's an easy fix. I used to have to prototype in C++, definitely not the type of language that's fit for that (if only because it's compiled). Prototyping is best done with an interpreted, untyped language in my humble opinion...

jeanl | 5 years ago | on: JuliaCon2020: Julia Is Production Ready

Do you guys know if it's possible to generate self-standing C++ code from Julia code? (i.e., code that you can then compile into another project, and will not require any interpreter to run or anything like that)? And if it's possible do you know how good the generated code is (in terms of speed)?

jeanl | 6 years ago | on: Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity (1976) [pdf]

I have a problem with how we use the word "thinking", usually implying something somewhat magical, or at least something more than the type of computations done in an algorithm or in a DNN. My belief is what we call "thinking" is nothing more than a (vastly more) complicated system doing the same kind of elementary calculation that are done in a neural net. There's nothing magical in our brain, it's entirely mechanical (chemical really), what we do when we "think" is, I think, comparable to what happen in a DNN (if not in scale at least in nature). Consciousness and thinking are illusions created by our "mechanical" brains. People who say machines will never "think" the way we do are, I believe, mistaken.

jeanl | 6 years ago | on: Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster

I am as outraged at Boeing's ineptitude as anybody with a rational mind, but I can't read this kind of article without cringing. Sentences like "about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death" should raise alarm bells in any reader's mind. This is probably a writer who knows nothing about aviation and/or software engineering yet feels very comfortable calling a system "unthinkably stupid". This smacks of oversimplification and just plain sloppiness. There are many articles on the entire debacle that are a lot more measured, and smart about their analysis, including quite a few great reads that were mentioned here in HN.

jeanl | 6 years ago | on: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

I've been boycotting amazon for a long time. Waiting for "democracy" to solve the problems of unabated exploitative capitalism is a cop out. I put my money where my mouth is. I pay more, wait longer, but shop at places where I know people are treated at least decently.

jeanl | 7 years ago | on: Pythran as a bridge between fast prototyping and code deployment

You're absolutely right: you don't necessarily need to be within 10% of pure C++ if algo development is made far easier by using python/numpy. But it would be good to have a hand-written C++ baseline to determine where the cost/benefit point is (at least for this example).

jeanl | 7 years ago | on: Pythran as a bridge between fast prototyping and code deployment

For me, the biggest shortcoming: Cython does not create independent C++ code (independent of the python interpreter that is) that can be used in a separate C++ code base. My main point is that pythran makes it possible to deploy python/numpy code as C++ code.
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