I'm a huge fan of Feynman and his autobiographies - some of my favorite books. There are a number of YouTube videos that purport to be Feynman's audio lectures, but they're actually AI generated readings of his script. Against my better instincts I listened to a couple and it was surreal experience.
On one hand, they were actually pretty decent simulacra and I loved hearing Feynman's voice and mannerisms; but on the other hand, they... weren't... real. What am I even listening to?
I agree that something like *lisp would be a welcome relief from the hairball that is CUDA. while the lisp part was actually compiled, the parallel part reduced pretty 1:1 onto Paris, (the 'assembly language' designed by Steele). that was was basically a jump table into the microcode, which was just a big control word issued by (what I remember vaguely was being an amd 2900 bit slice) sequencer.
today I guess you'd translate those vector instruction into MLIR and hope for some layout and fusion.
but absolutely, you can just use tensors like normal variables. what a awful regression
I'm a huge fan of Feynman and his autobiographies - some of my favorite books. There are a number of YouTube videos that purport to be Feynman's audio lectures, but they're actually AI generated readings of his script. Against my better instincts I listened to a couple and it was surreal experience.
On one hand, they were actually pretty decent simulacra and I loved hearing Feynman's voice and mannerisms; but on the other hand, they... weren't... real. What am I even listening to?
We are in for a weird future.
Angela Collier's video about Feynman completely changed my view of him.
I generally agree with that video. But did she really need to take three hours to make her point?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915709 one of the Connection Machines is in Jurassic Park. Really neat article!
Danny Hillis was an MIT colleague of a friend of mine. Didn't know until now that Connection Machine had Darpa funding.
banging on the door like a madman where's the clock? where's the clock we all donated money for? tell us about the clock you cowards!
Yeah.... that was a cool idea. Too bad it'll never be built.
(Supposedly they're building it in West Texas - last update in 2024)
Should be here about now-ish.
Star Lisp would be great for the modern heterogeneous computing landscape, and being compiled.
Can you explain this as Richard would have?
I agree that something like *lisp would be a welcome relief from the hairball that is CUDA. while the lisp part was actually compiled, the parallel part reduced pretty 1:1 onto Paris, (the 'assembly language' designed by Steele). that was was basically a jump table into the microcode, which was just a big control word issued by (what I remember vaguely was being an amd 2900 bit slice) sequencer.
today I guess you'd translate those vector instruction into MLIR and hope for some layout and fusion.
but absolutely, you can just use tensors like normal variables. what a awful regression
Written in 2017, but always a good read.