svensken's comments

Four Main Roles of Government:

1. Keep a rule of law

2. Maintain a stable & competitive economy

3. Turn taxes into public services (defense, roads, etc)

4. Lie

I got a hold of my old copy of the book and wanted to share an excerpt from the first page:

> Searching memory might be compared to throwing the beam of a strong light, from your hilltop campsite, back over the road you traveled by day. Only a few of the objects you passed are clearly illuminated; countless others are hidden behind them, screened from the rays. There is bound to be some vagueness and distortion in the distance. But memory has advantages that compensate for its failings. By eliminating detail, it clarifies the picture as a whole. Like an artist's brush it finds higher value in life’s essence than in its photographic intricacy.

I can flip to any page and find a sentence or two that I've underlined for being as well written as the page above.

I can think of one great example of this. Charles Lindbergh won the Pulitzer prize in 1954 for his Spirit of St. Louis autobiography. He worked on it for 15 years and refused to use a ghost writer, and the result was a masterpiece. Between his poetic writing style and the mountains of fascinating details leading up to the historic trans-Atlantic flight, I wouldn't hesitate to rank it as the most inspiring book I have ever read.

https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-St-Louis-Charles-Lindbergh/dp/...

When you look back on the history of communism, you sure do see a lot of red flags.

Isn't it just the bloodflow within the brain that we're observing?

We'll never be able to read a mind based on fMRI-style data any more than we'll be able to judge the ongoings of America by the headlights on the highways.

Thanks for the clarification! It's always a pleasure to get a direct response from the first author on something as awesome as this.

I'm definitely subscribing to the llvm-dev list[1] in case any discussion on this continues there. There's also the llvm-commits, clang-dev, and clang-commits lists as well, but llvm-dev kinda seems like the right place for this.

Gpucc in LLVM is definitely a breath of fresh air for all of us nvcc users. To get to see some compiler internals for cuda, it feels like Christmas. A big thanks from me for all the upstreaming effort!

1: http://lists.llvm.org/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

Cool interpretation! I like that concept. But grandparent was definitely trying to deconstruct the word "meaningless", getting a little existential in the process.

Thanks for the link! Pretty exciting stuff.

Can anyone comment on the following quote:

The list below shows some of the more important optimizations for GPUs... A few of them have not been upstreamed due to lack of a customizable target-independent optimization pipeline.

So the LLVM version of gpucc will be incomplete? Will there be a release of the original stand-alone gpucc?

I was wondering about this too, the way they plugged old K80's at the end for non-deep-learning applications. Either they're clever about keeping multiple product lines alive (more profits!) or it's a big cop-out (they're hiding something about P100 that makes it a bad choice for GPGPU - maybe price?)

Only users with enough karma can see downvote buttons. I'm not there yet, either.

I highly doubt that Nvidia dropped the ball this hard with Pascal.

A much more obvious and sensible conclusion is that Nvidia is currently developing their next chip, called Volta. We already know that the Department of Energy contracted Nvidia and IBM (lots and lots of money) to provide a good Volta GPU + POWER9 CPU combo for the new Summit and Sierra supercomputers set for completion in 2017.[1] This means that Nvidia knew since 2014 (at least) that they'd have very little time between their Pascal release and the more pressing Volta release. It's been their roadmap for a while now.

The Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell architectures each had two or three years between them. Pascal and Volta are set to have a year or less.

1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8727/nvidia-ibm-supercomputers

I'd trust McDonald's buns and meat to contain LESS preservatives and other bizarre compounds than a pack of burger bread and patties that I'd pick up at my local grocery store. The main reason is that McDonald's is a well-oiled supply-chain machine with (probably) low storage durations for the various ingredients, whereas consumer grocery products can suffer weeks on a store shelf before purchase. The second reason (also just speculation) is that the intensity of regulatory agencies' scrutiny of McDonald's ingredients (especially with regard to meat) would dwarf that of the small packages I would be able to buy for a barbeque.

I believe in staying away from foods high in lipids in general, but fast food burgers don't scare me. It's fries and pizzas that I abhor.

Humans have arbitrary morals in much the same way that wolves have arbitrary instincts to pack-hunt; many preceding generations have survived thanks to that particular characteristic, so the modern individuals abide by the behavior, not even fully aware that it happens to increase their chances of survival. The mechanism works the same both for adopted social behavior and for evolved instinct.

But I'd like to make the argument that the central moral imperatives put forth by the bible (as well as by many other religions) would exist as moral imperatives even without religion itself; natural selection would popularize them no matter what.

The point you make about hiring ordinary people is an important one. The timeless, old essay "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men"[1] makes a lot of great arguments to this end.

The meat of the essay comes down to this quote:

Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.

Your grandfather-in-law is the perfect example of something I wish we'd see more of today.

1: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_...

This is terribly subjective, but I've always had the impression that the Ancient Greeks had a much higher instance of over-the-top brilliant minds than any of our modern societies could boast (controlling for population and living conditions, etc).

Around 200 BC, Eratosthenes [1] (a regular young Greek poet) calculated the circumference of the Earth just by measuring shadow lengths at high noon, and his guess was pretty much spot on (plus he figured out how far the Moon and the Sun are from the Earth, also very accurately), whereas Robert Hooke complained that too many people believed in a flat Earth in the 1600's [2]. Eratosthenes also invented Geography. Literally.

Pythagoras (~500BC) was a crazy smart guy, too. And then there was Hannibal, who used some insanely clever tactics to defeat a massive Roman army in what's considered the most decisive military victory in history (Hannibal lost 6,000 men, the Romans lost 60,000) (~216BC). [3]

My other favorite instance of mind-blowing genius is the Roman poet Lucretius writing about the time he stared at some dust floating around in a sun beam and deduced the notion of Brownian Motion, where the movement of atoms bouncing off each other on an invisibly small level "gradually emerges to the level of our senses... as bodies in motion." [4]

We have a whole lot of very smart people doing awesome things today, but when you control for population sizes, available knowledge, and living conditions, etc, the intellect of historical populations seems a lot more impressive than ours today.

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1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#High_and_Late_Middle...

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae

4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion#History

I like this idea the best, but I think revision numbers are conventionally prefixed with a dash;

    13.01-24

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:NamingGuidelines#Pac...

(i can never quite distinguish between revisions and releases... when is each used?)